Better segmentation and an improved martech stack is helping Destination XL (DXL) boost engagement with retail customers in-store and online.

DXL is a specialty retailer of men’s big and tall apparel. The chain has 300 stores around the country, and five million names in its CRM database, which is split 75 percent male, 25 percent female. The retailer has about five million transactions annually, and shoppers are automatically enrolled in its loyalty program both in-store and online. About 33 percent of the loyalty customers are the most active segment of DXL’s customer file.

Traditionally, the brand has been very reliant on promotions, and sales are heavily influenced by seasonality, with holidays such as Father’s Day accounting for a high percentage of sales.

DXL manufacturers and sells its own branded products, and is the exclusive retailer for big and tall sizes for brands like Brooks Brothers and Vineyard Vines. The company’s shopping experience is specifically tailored to feel one on one.

“We know how men shop. Most men shop because they need something,” rather than just for fun, says Laura Cicchelli, vp, CRM and analytics, Destination XL Group. “It’s all about engaging the customer.”

The company wanted to improve the way the store experience translates to online shopping. The approach between online and offline had become too siloed, and there was a need to improve interactions across various touchpoints. “There was a tremendous amount of opportunity in this space for us to differentiate,” says Cicchelli, speaking at MarTech East in Boston recently.

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In the past, DXL struggled with multiple data sources that were feeding into multiple systems, which were being used by multiple departments. A complicated martech stack didn’t make matters any easier (“We had a lot of tech investments that we weren’t using—the money was going out the window”), nor did the extremely manual, literally hands-on process by which the loyalty program was managed.

“Our marketing calendar was laid out with black boards and stickies, and [spread across] 5,000 spreadsheets,” she says. “When I started here, I asked how the loyalty program was managed and the answer was ‘Rita.’ I said I had never heard of that [solution], and they said ‘Oh, Rita sits over there.”

There was also increasing competition to contend with, as brands like JCPenney and Kohl’s began adding big and tall to their product assortment. “That gave us a lot of momentum to get our act together,” Cicchelli notes.

There were a lot of steps to go through. Pouring over the overwhelming number of solutions on the market was daunting. DXL brought in HGS Digital (then Element Solutions) to identify which might be the best for the retailer.

“We needed to get our arms around what we wanted,” she says. “We wanted to be more efficient marketers, because our budget wasn’t going up, and we wanted reporting and dashboards. And we needed to look at our capabilities and data hygiene to determine our needs.”

After a thorough assessment, DXL choose Infor as its CRM solution, CrowdTwist to help manage its loyalty program and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to manage analytics and email.

Working with Three Deep Marketing, it created a segmentation strategy to help focus on five core behavior segments for the brand:

• Actives, who have shopped within one to nine months
• Lapsed, who have not shopped in nine months
• Women and people who have purchased gift cards for others
• Email subscribers who have shared their address, but not made a purchase
• Lost, who have not shopped in 13 months

Lapsed shoppers were important to understand, because actives can regularly fall off by 50 percent. The email segment was also particularly ripe with potential, says Cicchelli: DXL had 400,000 email addresses they had never marketed to because those individuals had yet to make a purchase.

The first part of the journey was making data accessible, and the second was gaining insight, says Venu Gooty, director, strategy services at HGS Digital. To help visualize data, two teams of analysts looked at DXL’s data to find conflicting data points, looking at everything from single store sales to the impact of weather on sales to how predictive analytics could be used to identify churn.

“It was important to start win-back programs and use predictive analytics to identify cohorts and work through retention models, and look at customer lifetime value and identify churn,” says Cicchelli. ‘It’s not just one single thing, there are different parameters.”

The post Big Martech Changes Help DXL Engage Shoppers appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Here’s five guidelines to help B2B companies make ecommerce the new corner stone of an old-fashioned growth model: more relationship + higher-quality = revenue.

1. Enrich the commercial process.
For B2C businesses, ecommerce often starts with the addition of an online shopping cart. For most B2B businesses, however, doing business is a matter of personal involvement, and not just adapting to marketing automation. Large product catalogs, product configuration needs, unique terms of purchase, custom pricing, and higher price points equate to a lot of personal attention—something a B2C shopping cart alone can not replace.

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But much of this personal involvement is dedicated to menial tasks —from handling nitty-gritty customer service-type details to researching detailed account history — these tasks are those that can and should be automated. By expanding upon the traditional shopping cart approach, B2B ecommerce solutions consider speed and quality throughout the end-to-end commercial process, allowing businesses to reduce the amount of time spent on menial tasks, and offer customers information in a more convenient and comprehensive way.

For example, say a company offers a wide range of products used a large B2B audience, such as  teachers and educators. They use online configuration to allow customers to explore possibilities in self-service mode. This results in more informed customers, who feel comfortable finalizing orders when speaking with sales representatives. In this way, ecommerce doesn’t replace the personal touch that comes with helping and assuring customers; it simply enriches it.

2.  Enable interactions first; transactions second.
Even the most complex B2C purchases, such as automobiles and major appliances, are usually handled by only one or two people and, at most, require a couple of face-to-face meetings. But most consumer purchases are far less involved.

In a B2B context, the term “interaction” describes a more complex sequence of steps than a transaction. Enabling an interaction produces value that enabling a transaction cannot. Identifying the right product specifications and commercial components for a customer, for instance, requires consultation beyond what’s found in a standard FAQ section or within user reviews.

When a provider of construction equipment sells to a construction company through a dealer, for instance, multiple parties are involved in a series of conversations necessary to specify the applicable maintenance contracts. A shared online hub for presenting the options and recording decisions facilitates the interactions among these parties. Success in these interactions is required to complete these multi-party deals.

3. Reducing complexity is more important than gathering information.
For B2C businesses, ecommerce represents an opportunity to gather information that informs decisions on product features, pricing and promotion. The opportunity to gather data is also available to B2B businesses, but in a relationship-centric world, the first objective is to increase value to customers.

When it comes to making a decision between collecting data about customers and keeping it simple for them, B2B businesses must choose in favor of keeping simplicity first and gathering information second. This decision manifests in the real world often when it comes to offering customers and prospects gated content in exchange for contact information.

One such example is a B2B high-tech supplier that, as one part of their ecommerce solution, required prospective customers to provide information before ordering a trial of their product. By limiting the required information to a short form rather than a longer questionnaire, the company achieved more trial customers (as compared to previous attempts with a longer form) and provided a far more favorable overall experience to prospects. For this company, reducing complexity first resulted in the ability to identify a larger number of prospects.

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4. Differentiate by providing information resources to partners and customers.
In B2C businesses, customers have access to information about products, their personal information on file, their order history, and other related information. That’s a great start, but many B2B businesses have the opportunity to deliver more value by providing more information such as maintenance and service records, contract and correspondence history, information about customer installations, product roadmaps, and lead time.

In some cases, such as installation maintenance locations, customers may get value from maintaining the information themselves. B2B businesses can use these information resources to efficiently differentiate and personalize their customers’ experience.

As an example, a recreational equipment company will provide information to its dealers about that dealers’ history which personalizes the experience. In addition this company will also differentiate by sharing information about the aggregate volumes it does with all dealers to support dealer purchase decision making.

5. Evolve your offering to engage the market in ways you previously could not.
In a B2C businesses, once an ecommerce solution is in operation, self-service ordering on line allows customers over an endless geography to place orders with little marginal cost to the B2C provider.

In a B2B setting, similar benefits can be achieved by making a simple portion of the overall offering available as a “starter” or “entry level offer” for prospective customers. Current customers may value an option of buying simple product extensions or contract renewals online. The efficiency of these simple on line transactions is a benefit to both the B2B business and to its customers.

As an example of selling extensions online, a software provider supports purchase of incremental units of complex software via on-line digital signature. Many customers use this online option as the most efficient way to expand their installation.

Malcolm Bliss is the director of strategic programs at Level Solar.

*This article was originally published in 2012 and is frequently updated.

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The post 5 Strategies for Better B2B Ecommerce appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Moreover, according to Statista, nearly half of the marketers surveyed maintained their trade show budgets from 2016 to 2017, and approximately 29 percent actually increased their budgets. The question that remains is this: With such a significant amount of money being allocated toward trade shows, how can marketers effectively incorporate these events into their more cost-effective digital marketing campaigns to improve their overall ROI?

Here are four tips for a successful transition, from the moment you scan a live lead at a trade show to that lead’s conversion into a sales opportunity:

Prioritize booth leads

Don’t wait until after the trade show to architect your lead routing strategy. Based on your ideal customer profile and marketing persona research, your on-site booth team should be able to flag your most qualified, sales-ready leads immediately. One proven engagement tactic for these leads is to provide a reward for scheduling a demo or sales call, either there on site or the following week back in the office. If that’s not an option, these leads should immediately be assigned to a sales rep so they can be contacted personally.

Immediately follow up with all leads

Within 24 hours of the individual visiting your booth, you should send a short, non-sales-focused email that reminds your lead who you are (remember, he or she likely spoke to hundreds of people that day) and what value you bring. This follow-up email should contain the following:

• No more than four to five sentences, max. This is not the time to share your mission, vision and values. This is a no-scroll zone.
• Gratitude. Thank your booth visitors for the time they spent with your team.
• A photo. Again, since they have been inundated with sales messages, remind these people who you are by including a picture of your team at the booth so they recall how much they liked you.
• A call-to-action. Give your leads something to do. I recommend either a simple button for them to opt in for a grand prize drawing or an offer of educational value with a free piece of premium content that they will appreciate. Either way, get them to click so you can begin tracking their engagement on your website.

Nurture your trade show leads (uniquely)

It’s very common for marketers to dump a spreadsheet of hundreds of trade show leads into their CRM or their marketing automation platform and treat those event leads like any other. Avoid this mistake by suppressing these trade show leads from your standard nurture sequences and enrolling them in a more personalized, event-specific workflow (at least to start your relationship with them). The benefit of trade show leads is that you know much more about them than you probably realize, and that information can help you support them on their buyer’s journey. For example:

• They have a budget for professional development. This is a great sign. Professional development is, unfortunately, one of the first line items cut in a company’s budget. If a company is investing in its people, it’s more likely that the company is experiencing financial health.
• The theme/purpose of the conference has resonated with them. This sounds simple but is easily overlooked. The theme of the conference itself should help guide your future communications with these event leads.
• Find out what their favorite sessions were at the conference. This will provide further insight into their pain points and will arm your sales team with highly relevant references.

Implement Facebook Custom Audiences to retarget leads

Email is not your only marketing channel to engage trade show leads after the event has passed. With a tool like Facebook’s Custom Audiences, you can import your trade show lead list into Facebook and serve only those individuals with ads that remind them of your value and speak to the pain they are experiencing.

The greatest mistake we make as marketers is investing heavily in pre-event and on-site trade show planning, then too easily washing our hands of the event once it’s over and the leads are in our system. Until those leads are qualified or disqualified, and those qualified leads convert to a sales opportunity, our work is not yet done.

Jen Spencer is vice president of sales and marketing for SmartBug Media. 

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Inspiration can come from the strangest places. Sometimes we see it in nature. Other times, we find it in conversation, in books or in art. Curiously, I recently found inspiration for my company, and companies like mine, during my annual family vacation.

Sure, the sunshine and relaxation contributed to my renewed perspective on business, but I’m still surprised to say that it was something else that set my mental gears in motion: our hotel, namely, The Four Seasons’ incredible focus on delivering a top-quality customer experiences.

It was also the sheer business savvy –– and focus on the customer –– that I saw at work throughout the entire process of learning about the resort, booking my stay there, taking advantage of the accommodations, and smoothly heading out into my next adventure. At every step of my vacation, or what marketers would call my customer journey with The Four Seasons, I felt like they were a partner to me, genuinely interested not just in giving my family a place to stay but also in making memorable experiences.

This got me thinking: These same ideas can be applied to software companies, which similarly attempt to position themselves as partners genuinely invested in the success and satisfaction  of their customers. Here’s what your company can learn from the Four Seasons.

Know Your Customer to Craft a Great “Onboarding Experience”

It isn’t necessarily the physical characteristics of The Four Seasons hotel that set it apart. After all, most hotels –– particularly in the luxury space –– share a number of key elements in common. For software companies, the same can be said for innovation and product features,  necessary for success—but the secret is in how it is used to solve customer problems.

Instead, what separates The Four Seasons from much of its competition is the hotel chain’s genuine commitment to building positive experiences for their customers that are likely to make a lasting impression. From search, to discovery, to arrival and well beyond, The Four Seasons kept my family’s priorities in mind and regularly sought to provide us with options that would enhance the experience we’d come to have.

Software companies can take this lesson and apply it to the discovery, pre-sales and onboarding process: Know what your customers needs and what they are trying to solve. Then make sure  to address those customer needs. Simply put, don’t push the steak to a vegetarian.

Design for Curiosity and Discovery

The staff at the Four Seasons could not have managed this without doing what I think every good business should do: Ask questions and practice real curiosity about their guests. Rather than letting us book the room and leaving us to our devices with no further intervention, the staff at The Four Seasons asked as early as the first call what brought us to their hotel. In this case: a birthday and a relaxing annual family vacation. Having captured that information, the staff developed itineraries likely to please our family and, one night, even brought a compliment treat of milk and cookies to our suite to help us celebrate my son’s birthday. That’s white glove service. And it’s just common sense—we weren’t interested in a spring break bash-styled party.

Did the employees at The Four Seasons just so happen to like me and my family more than anybody else? Maybe, but it seems more likely to me that these employees took ownership of the experience they were developing for me. That ownership enabled by The Four Seasons empowered them to make choices, starting with their inquiry after the nature of my trip. The ownership manifested itself time and time again, as employees took what they knew about our priorities and guided us from one family-friendly, memorable experience to the next.

Tech companies should take note: it’s not just the immediate solutions you offer that help you to make sales and retain customers in the long term. It’s also your genuine curiosity and concern about the customer’s needs, wants and pain points. When you keep aware of such things and work to address them without being prompted by the customer, you’re essentially saying, “I am a real partner to you. I’m here to help you, every step of the way.”

Build Loyalty With a Structure that Empowers your Employees

In a world where loyalty marketing continues to be ubiquitous, it might come as a surprise to some readers that that The Four Seasons notably lacks a loyalty program of any kind. While it might seem to some that the resort chain is, like other big brands (McDonald’s strangely comes to mind), waiting the loyalty game out to find what works best, I think there’s something more to this business decision.

Think about this: if The Four Seasons brand is built on forging strong, customer experience focused relationships with its broad clientele, and if they practice segmentation through organic, curiosity-based interactions that take place between their staff and clients, then what need do they have for a loyalty program? Customers don’t have to add up perks as an incentive to return to The Four Seasons’ many hotels. Their incentive is that they know they’ll be given the VIP treatment –– whatever that means to them –– every time they visit.

Even better, this is true for every customer, not just a segmented few.

Software companies can take a similar approach in building relationships with their customers, both individually and at large. The ones that want long-term successful and happy customers need to build a structure that supports such success. Structure supports the employee so they can do their very best work, and makes it possible to scale and train employees in times of growth. Structure helps employees discover what is important to customers and allows them to deliver to the customers –– genuinely committing themselves as partners to the success of the customer.

Emotional connections are among the most important factors for long-term satisfaction with a brand throughout the customer lifecycle, and your company can create such connections by personalizing sales, service and marketing events with a humanizing touch. While a client might not always remember the way you helped them in exact terms, they’ll always recall how you made them feel. Make them feel good.

Creating True Customer Advocates

How did I end up choosing The Four Seasons over other accommodations? Well, someone the brand clearly impressed –– who I knew and trusted –– recommended their hotel to me.

Imagine the power of treating every customer so well that they themselves become brand ambassadors and advocates.  Some call it Flipping the Funnel – having customers market for you and your brand. These ambassadors feel compelled to speak in laudatory terms about the location, the service, the amenities –– giving a trusted word-of-mouth testimony to people over which they have some influence as friends, family or colleagues. This sort of testimony is more impactful than any ad or loyalty gimmick The Four Seasons could ever come up with, because people trust their friends more than ads. Inevitably, The Four Seasons can attract more customers through word-of-mouth marketing –– like yours truly.

Building a customer-obsessed organization and successful customer lifecycle is no small feat.  It’s an ongoing process that requires coordination from every department. I think that technology firms in particular can benefit from thinking about customer loyalty in the same way as The Four Seasons. Whether you’re sending a sales email, following up with a lead, or checking in with an old customer, offering real value in every interaction is critical to customer retention. And offering real value means understanding the customer and their needs.

When you offer real value to your customers time and time again, you build a relationship with them that will keep them coming back more than any gimmick you can imagine. And when you consistently impress your audience over the course of the customer lifecycle you can guarantee that their friends and colleagues are going to hear about it.

Kevin Bobowski is the senior vice president of marketing at BrightEdge.

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The post What Your Customer Lifecycle Should Have in Common with the Four Seasons appeared first on Chief Marketer.

In Houston, according to GeekWire, major cloud providers like IBM have data centers in the impacted area. Internet backbone company Level 3 also is home to a facility there. Then there are some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. There are data center operators, like Equinix (also with three facilities in the Miami area) and Data Foundry, co-location providers, and, of course, any other kind of business you can imagine in a large metropolitan area—from healthcare organizations to financial institutions to manufacturers.

Natural disasters are always a wake-up call for business. Today we’re talking hurricanes. In another news cycle it could be fires or earthquakes on the West Coast, or tornados in the Midwest. How prepared are you to help your customers should a natural disaster befall them? Have you thought about how reliably you can step up and respond?

Back in 2013, a story came out about a company called BridgeNet Technology Consultants, which protects clients’ IT networks from cyber threats and data disasters. An insulation products manufacturer reached out to them for help in restoring files only backed up by tape. One night they got a page from the customer letting them know their building had caught fire and consumed the main office and all its equipment—computers, servers, the entire on-premise IT network. Because BridgeNet had insisted that the company use a cloud backup service, Bridgenet was able to restore their data. In less than 24 hours from the time the fire broke out, the company’s accounting system was up and running and processing transactions.

In the midst and aftermath of Hurricane Irma, Miami-based Ryder System Inc. has divided its 400-member IT team in two with half in Miami working remotely and the other half in Michigan, Texas, and other states to help the business continue to serve customers should there be an outage, according to The Wall Street Journal. As a partner to food and beverage companies, auto-parts makers, retailers, and others, Ryder developed an app to monitor news and weather in real time and were able to reroute drivers around disaster areas so deliveries could still be made. Now, that’s a great partner.

Could you do that for a customer? Companies like Microsoft have disaster response systems with their partners. And they collaborate across the IT industry to help deliver connectivity, networking, devices, information management, and communications tools. Purify Water Treatment and Poolsure in Houston both were able to overcome Hurricane Harvey flooding and continue making deliveries to water treatment plants using telematics systems from Telogis, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Businesses are always being urged to do effective disaster planning. And regulated industries are, of course, mandated to have disaster plans in place. But how can vendors help corporate customers when a natural disaster strikes? How can you be the partner who steps up?

Have the conversation: Customers worried about supply chain, IT, data, and platforms should conduct due diligence before selecting a vendor. They need to ask questions like, “do you have a business continuity plan and how does it work?” But sometimes they don’t ask the right questions or engage in validation or testing to ensure it performs. As a partner, you should engage your customer in that conversation from the beginning to establish a plan should a natural disaster strike. Every piece—from network and business data security, re-routing capabilities, cloud backups, and work-around procedures—should be in place to ensure business continuity.

Offer temporary work quarters and equipment: Can you offer temporary facilities for customers whose workers can’t work from home or in their office in an emergency? Be the one who makes it possible for the customer to keep their business operating as best as possible.

Collaborate with other customer vendors: If you have a good relationship with your customer, make it a goal to develop a team relationship with their other vendors to create a multi-disciplinary emergency network that can keep a network up, a supply chain operating, or data secure.

Help them find assistance: Just because the issue they’re facing doesn’t fall within your purview doesn’t mean you can’t help. Create a list of vendors you can recommend who can help your customer address specific problems they face. It could be rentable computers or other devices, a cloud backup service, or even a remediation company that can help with mold or soot.

Make sure your own emergency plan is in place: Like the flight attendant who instructs you to get your oxygen mask on before helping your child, make sure you have your own preparations and recovery plan solidly in place and tested before you offer to help your customers. If you aren’t ready for a natural disaster, you can only make empty promises to customers when they need your help.

As the recent storms have demonstrated in real time, natural disasters can clobber not just neighborhoods but economies. There’s no getting around degrees of loss, but good foresight and planning can lessen the pain and keep a business operating. Under the best of circumstances you want your customers to be able to keep going and not miss a beat. If that’s not possible, you want them to be able to rebound as quickly as possible.

As a smart vendor who has developed a strong partnership with your customer, your team should make it a priority to collaborate with them on a strategy in advance to help them should disaster strike. With the nation focused on Texas and Florida—and their recovery—now is the best time to initiate that conversation and establish an effective, tested plan.

Sharon Gillenwater is the founder and editor-in-chief of Boardroom Insiders.

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Unless you’re actually in the White House, most of us have little insight into the inner workings of the federal government and what politicians are up against. But you don’t need to be a senator or a lobbyist on K Street in Washington, D.C. to understand politics is a people business. Accomplishing meaningful policy changes demands solid relationships and trust. To activate true change, politicians must market their ideas and initiatives to constituents and other decision-makers in government who need to “buy-in,” just as business buyers do when considering a major technology purchase.

Here are three marketing strategies that can be just as effective for politicians chasing ambitious agendas as they are for B2B marketers chasing buyers.

1. Build trust in key relationships

Committees drive B2B buying decisions. While B2B impulse buys are virtually unheard of, emotion still plays a role. How can buyers trust you have their best interests at heart? They need to know you’re about more than a payday.

B2B marketers know this and will take their time building trust with key customers by developing personalized experiences and engaging in meaning conversations that go beyond their product or service. This shows marketers are listening instead of selling. The difference is crucial: Listening shows empathy and a willingness to serve customers’ individual needs. In marketing, we know B2B buyers must trust your ability to serve their needs before considering your product. This trust is built over time through a number of positive experiences with your brand, but it can be lost in a matter of seconds if marketers don’t deliver on their promises.

The government takeaway: Every politician faces this same set of challenges when “selling” their initiatives to key constituents. Trust is the most basic requirement, which is often built by meeting constituents face to face and really listening to them. But as a federal official, how do you make time for that? It’s not as scalable for federal officials to meet a mass number of constituents as it is for local representatives to meet a much smaller number of local constituents.

Instead, similar to what B2B marketers do, federal leaders should focus on creating trust online by cultivating two-way dialogue with constituents through social media channels and online communities. It’s a more effective—and scalable—approach. But to create and maintain trust online, you must be transparent about how, and when, you’ll deliver on your promises. Thanks to the inherently open nature of the Internet, constituents will always remind you of those promises if you don’t follow through. And you’ll quickly lose the trust you earned.

2. Break down all the silos

Think about the last time you called a helpline. How often did the service rep you talked to transfer you to someone else, only to have you repeat the problem you called about in the first place? When B2B companies treat their customers this way, it’s often due to silos between departments such as marketing, sales, support, finance, and more.

When these silos exist, they create another common scenario: when sales reps pitch a new product feature to customers only to learn from the support team frustrated users are calling because the feature doesn’t work as advertised.

Every one of these walls prevents healthy communication from flowing throughout the business and can quickly lead to negative perceptions of your brand. This happens far more often than many would like to admit, but in B2B marketing, we understand you have to act quickly on this knowledge and break down the silos to maintain trust and improve results.

The government takeaway: Today’s world of extremely polarized politics and few Congressional accomplishments demonstrates the need for federal agencies to collaborate more effectively. In some cases, agencies focused on similar goals could combine to better serve the nation, while in other cases a void could be filled. Such was the case after Sept. 11, 2001, when then-President George W. Bush created the Office of Homeland Security to ensure the nation’s military and intelligence agencies worked together more seamlessly. This type of collaboration will not only help the government provide more quality service, but will also create a better experience for constituents who often perceive federal agencies as inefficient and ineffective. By putting constituents’ needs first and making tough decisions as you break down silos, you can begin to improve the perception of government agencies and more successfully drive your initiatives.

3. Don’t spread the message too far and wide

Mass awareness drives consumer brands. From TV ads to guerrilla marketing campaigns, it’s crucial for consumer brands to find their way into the minds of buyers. B2B marketing doesn’t work that way. No matter what B2B industry you’re in, it’s a naturally limited market, and there are typically a finite number of accounts that fit your target profile. The only way to reach them is to understand their needs backwards and forwards — and then create personalized experiences for them at every touchpoint to help build brand affinity. Because in a limited market, customers pay attention to not only what they’re buying, but who they’re buying from.

The government takeaway: At first glance, politics may seem like a consumer-marketing exercise, but politicians will have more success driving their agendas if they apply the rules of account-based marketing in B2B when dealing with colleagues in rival branches of government: listen carefully, know your audience, speak to a specific need, and keep interactions personal. While the executive branch must tailor its message across the entire country, Congress and other governmental leaders must nurture relationships from within the White House to build consensus. And they need to know whom to go to at the right moment with the right message.

As legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill would say: “all politics are local.” So is all B2B marketing. Those that recognize this can change their fortunes — or, in the case of the federal government, the country. Those who don’t risk being left in history’s dustbin.

Sanjay Castelino is vice president of marketing at Spiceworks.

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At the ANA’s Masters of B2B Marketing Conference today, Mike O’Toole, president and partner, PJA Advertising + Marketing, noted that according to Deloitte research, when organizations define their success through the eyes of their customers, stakeholders or society, people come alive—and they engage with your brand.

“There are people out there who share stakes or an agenda with you, but aren’t your advocates today,” said O’Toole. “If you get them off the sidelines, you have activated an army that can help you win.”

Marketers typically want to tell their stories from their own perspective, but a more powerful tactic, said Matt Preschern, CMO of global IT company HCL America, is telling your B2B story through the lens of your customers.

“At the end of the day, people like to do business with people they trust and like,” Preschern said at ANA, noting that to help achieve this, HCL has empowered employees to make decisions. “They’re the ones who will deliver better value to your customers. Don’t underestimate that.”

In the post Brexit and Trump era, trust for media and marketing is at an all time low—and communicators need to be aware of that, Preschern added. “All of our roles are now not only infinitely more complicated, they’re happening at a higher scale and much faster—we used to have 24 hour news cycles. Now, we have 24 one-hour news cycles.”

In today’s world, companies need to have human relationships with customers, noted Mark Bonchek, chief epiphany officer, Shift Thinking. For example, consider customer loyalty programs. Companies always think about how these schemes can make customers more loyal to them. But, are they also thinking about how they can be more loyal to the customer? In human relationships, loyalty goes both ways.

To help remember what you’re trying to accomplish think about creating a B2B customer orbit. What does that mean? Bonchek says think of this acronym for ORBIT: ongoing relationship beyond individual transactions. In this particular solar social system, a shared purpose is created between employees, customers, partners and influencers.

When done right, this kind of thinking can have tremendous influence, he said. “You don’t buy an Android or an Apple phone based on their camera specs. You buy based on whose orbit you want to be in.”

To start reshaping our brand orbit, go back to the beginning, said Bonchek. “What was your founder’s original vision and value? Find new ways of expressing that in the world.”

To elevate HCL as a global brand and draw more customers into their orbit, HCL has turned to sports partnerships. The company is the digital transformation partner for the Manchester United football club, creating presence with the team’s 659 million fans across the globe. It is also the official technology partner for the Volvo Ocean Race. “You’d be surprised how many key decision makers are sailors,” Preschern noted.

ANA Masters of B2B Marketing continues through Friday in Chicago.

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The post Customers Should Be the Focus of Your B2B Story appeared first on Chief Marketer.

In B2B, we need to balance two demands: those of a business as well as those of individual consumers, and these are sometimes in conflict. Fortunately, however, these opposing priorities can be reconciled—the tools to win the loyalty of an individual consumer and the tools to gain the commitment of an entire organization can be the same. The difference is their function, and it is our task to step up and develop the “intelligence” needed to perform both of those functions.

It is a daunting mission, but the good news is that there is no shortage of resources out there. Business-to-consumer loyalty marketers such as Starbucks and Amazon.com have on hand some of the most sophisticated marketing tools available for reaching customers, building brand relationships and developing customer intimacy in a multi-channel, data-rich world.

Compared with these consumer loyalty marketers, B2B marketers that rely on the old standards for relationship building, such as networking and sales calls, might think they have it rough. This is understandable because impractical campaign management systems and a lack of data can result in undue reliance on the back of the sales team.

However, the truth is that  there is no barrier keeping B2B loyalty programs from accessing the consumer marketers’ relationship-building resources and then adjusting their functions for increased loyalty. These tools are proven, so why not use them? At the end of the day, sales—even for B2B companies—come from customers, and when any company understands how to realize the potential of the customer asset, sales will follow.

A B2B loyalty program is, after all, built on the same foundation of using data to enrich the customer experience in order to build long-term relationships. While B2B marketers don’t have the same creative license and their business communications are more formal, they have a much greater opportunity for customer intimacy. For one thing, B2B marketers have a much smaller base of customers, and generally know a lot more about them. They take them to ball games, know the names of their children, meet them at industry events, and get a table at their fundraisers—but that doesn’t mean they are using the data critical for deepening the relationship.

So, while B2C and B2B programs are alike in that both are designed to build sustainable financial performance through customer engagement, the mechanism for a B2B program is decidedly different.

While loyalty programs are prevalent in the retail, airline and credit-card sectors, a business marketer doesn’t necessarily need reward points to engage business customers. However, relying purely on phone calls or business lunches won’t do the job either. Building a good B2B loyalty program starts with a customer mandate–a blueprint of how to use customer information in a way that transforms the client relationship and that is uniquely designed to support a business’s specific goals. There are six steps to building this mandate, and the result is a clear diagram for business success based on the distinct needs and wants of today’s high-value customers and prospects. The first three steps are standard operating practice for any marketer. The last three require heavy lifting, but the extra effort will deliver the sustainable financial performance that most marketers expect from their best customers.

How can you make this happen?

1. Identify your key companies/customers and prospects.
2. Track client interactions to develop a view of activity over time.
3. Create a scoring mechanism to rank the most desired customers for your program, product, and services.
4. Define the strategic role of your customer touch points in creating relevance, and then build a feedback mechanism.
5. Identify the relevant triggers or incentives to achieve your mutual goal.
6. Implement a measurement plan to ensure you are hitting that goal.

 Excerpted from The Loyalty Leap for B2B: Turning Customer Information Into Customer Intimacy. Published by Portfolio/Penguin. Copyright (c) Bryan Pearson. (This article was originally published in 2012 and is frequently updated.)

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The post Building a B2B Loyalty Program With B2C Tactics appeared first on Chief Marketer.

It’s not unusual to read about customer churn in areas like telecommunications and media, but for SaaS companies, minimizing your churn rate is critical, given the recurring revenue model and how much time, money, and energy it takes to acquire and onboard customers in the first place. The longer they stay, the more profitable your business is, which is why “customer success” (or making sure your customers have success as a direct result of using your product) is such a hot topic these days.

And yet, sometimes customers leave—without warning, even without complaint. We tend to focus on the squeaky wheels, as we naturally fear that the complainers will be the first to bolt. But VC, author and SaaS expert Jason Lemkin claims that complaining customers are actually less likely to leave. At least, he says, complainers are engaged. The customers you should pay closest attention to, he says, are the ones you don’t hear from.

“Some of your highest-utilization, least-complaining, never-raised-an-issue, maybe even gave-you-a-testimonial customers…will leave,” he writes. “Seemingly out of the blue. Maybe your competitor sold over your champion’s head. Maybe there was an RFP you never even were a part of. Maybe change came from the CFOs office, or the CIOs office, or the GCs office, or somewhere you don’t have great ties.  You turn around, and your reasonably — or even super happy — customer is gone.”

Oy! We’ve certainly all been there and have lost sleep over what we could have done to prevent losing a customer.

Lemkin notes that “we generally, naturally, misunderstand why we lose customers, and where to spend our time.” You can use software tools to measure where customer engagement is falling off—and proactively get them to reengage. He even suggests getting on a plane and going to see these customers in person, claiming, “I never lost a customer I actually visited.”

You should also be building deep relationships across the organization, he adds, including in the C-suite. Don’t give your competitors an opportunity to sell over you. CXOs are often the decision makers, and always important influencers. Get to know them. Engage them early and often. And those RFPs he references? Your goal should always be to “get ahead of the RFP” by keeping tabs on what is happening with your customer’s business. Are they going through a merger? Consolidating vendors? Entering new markets? Digitizing their business? These are just some of the most common initiatives we see companies focusing on; there are many more that can impact what they are going to buy and whom they are going to buy it from. Are you in the know? And do you have a plan to help them?

It’s nice to have happy customers, but an absence of complaints or feedback of any kind could be a sign that you have failed to engage them. Customer retention must be earned; show them you deserve a seat at their table by demonstrating early and often to the key decision makers how you can directly support specific business objectives.

Sharon Gillenwater is the founder and editor-in-chief of Boardroom Insiders.

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The post The Mysteries of No Complaints and Customer Retention appeared first on Chief Marketer.

All companies face four critical issues addressable through top quality and accessible data:

1. Without the fundamentals, cross-functional teams incur a huge development tax to get baseline work involving data completed. Data lives in multiple locations and it is not clear which source is accurate.

2. We are often forced to pull from precious resource pools to support project execution (e.g., product management, data engineering, data architecture).

3. Building marketing programs assumes considerable risk because we aren’t yet in a position to monitor data quality, manage communications to dependency teams and resolve issues in a timely manner. The obvious assumed pitfall is program failure but the more common risk is around programs firing errantly.

4. We risk building into systems that might not be set up for us in the long haul.

While the work involved to unlock and centralize data can be significant, it’s worthwhile to take the time to evaluate and come to consensus to avoid these internal risks.

Use the following eight-step checklist to determine data value, usefulness and limitations, and build a clear data strategy.

• Check #1: Defined data. Is the data defined in a way that everyone understands and uses consistently?
• Check #2: Consistency. Do you have a repeatable process to produce data?
• Check #3: Hygiene, Accuracy. Is your data clean and of reasonably good quality?
• Check #4: Timeliness. Is your data relevant when it’s used for the purpose it’s being used?
• Check #5: Relevancy. Are you gathering data that drives business value or merely satisfies a curiosity?
• Check #6: Comprehensive. Are you actively anticipating what could come up later and incorporating the building blocks of what would be needed to expand in these ways in the future?
• Check #7: Precision. Does the information come in a format/structure that aligns with other information available to you?
• Check #8: Compliance. Are you only able to use the data under special circumstances?

As marketers, we want to create a culture in which others can quickly acquire enough data analysis know-how to offer their unique contributions. Trust must exist at multiple levels in the process—in the data itself, in how it’s labeled and in how it’s structured. Without trust, an incorrectly informed analyst can easily mistake one data point for another with potentially disastrous consequences.

Ease of accessibility and use is another factor in the mix. Information must be accessible in ways that are acceptable for their use and meaningful in their purpose. For example, a call list might display records to an agent based on time zones available for calling only so that the outreach is compliant and appropriate.

The follow-on actions become increasingly more powerful to the business when data is positioned as a foundation of strategy and planning, and when process has been created to allow access and visibility. Ultimately, it’s the overall impact of data that unlocks the potential of marketing activities.

Elizabeth Dobbin is senior director of relationship marketing at Eventbrite. Curtis Thornhill is CEO of Apt Marketing Solutions. For an expanded version of this checklist, click here.

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