Inside Sales And Telemarketing Help Boost B2B Brands: Really?

February 1, 2010 — Laura Ramos

First of all, I’d like to extend a big “Thank You” to my readers and followers who responded to an invitation last month to participate in the 2010 B2B Marketing Budgets and Mix survey that Forrester fielded together with MarketingProfs.  Without your responses, the research would not be as broad or relevant — so thank you again! 

After closing the survey and digesting some of the results, I was really surprised by one finding. After reviewing our process and validating the data, my researcher, Zack Reiss-Davis, and I believe that the result is not a technical problem with the survey instrument nor its execution. I decided to share what we found and get your thoughts on why B2B marketers may have answered the question as they did. 

In January 2010, we found that 65% of the 249 B2B marketers we surveyed at firms with 50 or more employees use inside sales/telesales as part of the marketing mix. This percentage is slightly greater, but not dissimilar, to what we found in early 2009 (62% said they use inside sales).

Of the 65% who use inside sales, 34% said they found it “highly effective” for driving brand awareness.   Brand awareness?   Really?!?  That’s on par with webcasts/webinars and the company Web site for effectively building brand, according to the same survey respondents.

I act incredulous because in prior years, many fewer marketers rated inside sales as highly effective for building brand.  In 2009, for example, only 21% (of the 62% who said they use inside sales) rated it highly effective for building brand.  They did rate it very effective for generating leads — which makes sense since inside sales is one of the “moments of truth” when buyers and sellers engage person to person. And personal selling is essential in B2B marketing.

But for building brand?  How does that work?

So I decided I should run this mystery by my readers/followers and hear what you think.  Which of the following possibilities would you pick as the most likely explanation for this result?:

1) It’s an anomaly. Either the respondents didn’t understand the question or interpreted it in some unexpected way and their answers are not consistent with actual practice.

2) It’s the economy.  Many firms slashed marketing program budgets last year.  To try to compensate, firms turned their inside sales teams into outbound, cold-calling machines tasked with reaching out to buyers to chat about products and services. Remarkably some buyers paid attention.

3) Inside sales begins to play a bigger role in lead incubation.  Respondents are starting to see inside sales/telemarketing play a larger role in educating, building relationships, and “keeping in touch” with prospects than simply just dialing for dollars.  New sales enablement tools help telesales see what “leads” look at when visiting the site, and can better inform subsequent conversations when used properly. Personally, I would call this “lead generation” but — because the activity may not produce qualified leads this quarter — marketers may see telesales helping to create a positive brand experience beyond building pipeline.

As I ponder this result, I have to admit that I’m favoring explanation #3 right now.  However, what I really wonder is “Am I missing something?”  Is there some new way — that I have yet to run across — where companies use inside sales to create awareness, answer buyer questions, or do something other than advance deals to close this quarter?

Let me know what you think.  Best answers get credit in my upcoming report.

If you would like to preview the results of our B2B marketing mix and budgets survey– and see where your B2B peers are heading in 2010 — please join me Tuesday, February 9, 2010 (11 am Eastern, 8 am Pacific) for my Forrester Teleconference where I will talk about our findings prior to the report publication.  Hope you can join me then!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 3 Comments »

Pump Up Your Pipeline With Lead Management Automation

January 29, 2010 — Laura Ramos

 Will 2010 be the year the lead management automation market takes off? Early indications show that the automation market ended on a high note in Q4 2009 as marketers turned to technology to help generate and manage demand more effectively. While technology alone does not guarantee healthy pipelines, automation can help most firms hand better qualified leads over to sales. So when Silverpop engaged Forrester last year to research the top issues marketers face when generating demand and which approaches deliver the best results, I quickly agreed to take the lead on this project.

Lead Management Automation Helps To Plug Leaky Funnels

In the spirit of full disclosure, let me give a little background about the project. Silverpop hired Forrester to conduct research and write a whitepaper independently on the results. Forrester follows strict guidelines to ensure objectivity as a neutral third-party advisor. As a matter of policy, we don’t write whitepapers for hire, and the few we do must meet specific requirements, include primary research, and educate the market on a topic of broad  interest — regardless of the sponsor’s intent.  For example, we interviewed 15 Directors, VPs, or SVPs of marketing in midmarket firms of 100 to 5000 employees for the report. Some were Silverpop customers but the majority were not and Forrester made the call about who to include to achieve a full range of perspectives.  However, my company does not employ a team of consultants separate from the analyst ranks and, when a project like this comes along, analysts who cover the market or technology play a major role conducting the surveys and writing the report.

So what did we learn?  Well there are several ways you can find out. First, you can go to Silverpop’s Web site and register for a copy.  On January 26, Silverpop CEO, Bill Nussey, invited me to join him on a webinar to talk about the report findings and to offer a few case studies illustrating the tangible benefits of lead management automation. In addition, Amanda Ferrante, with DemandGen Report, wrote a very thorough and thoughtful review of the paper earlier this week and details many of the findings.

In summary, here’s what we found:

1) Mature lead management pays off in measurable impact on pipelines, marketing efficiency, and accountability. On average, one-half or more of the marketers we spoke with cite healthier pipelines, increased marketing proficiency, and more efficient resource/budget use as key outcomes when investing in lead management process and technology change.

2) Process development and sales collaboration are essential first steps. More than selecting the most innovative or feature-rich technology, top firms succeed when they approach lead management as a process change that requires close and continuous interaction with sales.

3) Four practices shorten the time from implementation to value. Lead management experts focus on customer profiling, lead scoring, content design, and nurturing to accelerate investment returns.

4) Successful lead management improves marketing’s standing and stature. Marketers that follow lead management best practices increase marketing execution efficiency, help sales optimize deal-closing activity, and turn customer relationships into valuable corporate assets.

5) Ability to share and instill best practices is key to selecting the right technology partner. Long term success depends on trading off flashy features, promised ease of use, and low price tags for proven expertise, a track-record of successful implementations, and a growing, vibrant community of like-minded users.

Bottomline: Lead management automation works and helps markters to close up leaky marketing funnels, put better qualified opportunities in front of sales, and help drive stronger topline revenue.  If you have had similar success, or suffered a few failures, with marketing automation, feel free to chime in her with your experiences.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Best Practices For Marketing To Buyers “In The Cloud”

January 27, 2010 — Laura Ramos

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject to much debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include: lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike. While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud. 

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not.  Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization. Cloud computing can give marketers ready access to technology and services that can drive demand and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs without the burden of traditional technology implementation and management.

Cloud computing will also transform the way marketing gets done. In this Web 2.0 world, buyers spend more of time online searching for information, interacting with like-minded colleagues, and comparing offerings long before the first sales call occurs. Cloud-optimized marketing strategies such as social media, paid search, search results optimization, content syndication, and engaging with buyers on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter deliver brand building and customer engagement results.

To futher explore how social media marketing in the cloud can help to build deeper — and eventually more profitable — customer relationships, I joined Jon Miller (VP of Maketing at automation rising-star Marketo) and David Alston (social media guru who heads up both community and marketing at Radian6) on a webinar, which you can access here.  During the event, we looked at a number of different cloud-related topics including:

1) How to use Forrester’s Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

2)Forrester’s P-O-S-T methodology – Why starting with People, Objectives and Strategy first, then moving to Tactics and Technology is the best way to ensure success when using social media to engage with prospects and customers in the cloud.

3) How to use social media monitoring to engage prospects, build communities, service customers, uncover influencers, and listen for the point of need.

Over the next few months, I will join the the Marketing Cloud conversation to continue to explore how cloud-centric service and technology providers may be in a better position to serve the modern needs of B2B marketers who see social media not simply as a way to reach new audiences. More importantly, these marketers see social media as a tool to help them build communities of like-minded customers; customers who will remain loyal, buy more over time, and advocate to others on the marketer’s behalf to influence the standing and reputation his/her firm in a transparent, community-centric manner.  The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners in the B2B marketing categories demonstrate where this trend is heading.  But I would love to hear from you with examples of companies that you feel are doing an exceptional job of using social media to connect with business buyers who purchase high consideration products for on behalf of their firms.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

B2B Marketing Mix and Budget Trends Survey: Please Participate!

January 13, 2010 — Laura Ramos

For the third year, MarketingProfs and Forrester teamed up to author and field a survey that looks at business-to-business marketing mix and budget trends. With many parts of North America and Europe (my home state of California for one) still feeling the effects of last year’s economic downturn, I believe that this year’s survey will show some marked changes on which tactics marketers choose to spend their limited budget dollars.

Would you like to help me find out?  If so, please click here to take the survey.  The survey should take you approximately 15 minutes to complete, and I will share a copy of the report — due sometime in March — with those of you who complete the survey.

Taking a closer look at B2B marketing budgets in our 2008/2009 survey, we found:

1) Digital spending moved ahead but failed to shake up the status quo. While B2B marketers wrestle with a more complex marketing mix, digital channels have finally gained much needed mindshare. Web sites and email topped the list of the most popular marketing tactics, and search marketing moved up six percentage points since our last report. However, conventional approaches like trade shows, PR, direct mail, print advertising, sponsorships, and executive events still dominated the marketing mix in 2008. Will 2009 show even more dramatic changes? Tell us in the survey and find out.

2) Traditional tactics commanded the lion’s share of B2B budgets. Conventional marketing tactics continued to capture big chunks of B2B marketer budgets. In fact, traditional tactics had a tight grip on the five top spots in our list of the most expensive B2B tactics. Coming in sixth, the company Web site was the only digital tactic to scrape together a double-digit percentage of the budget.

3) Social media managed to make only a few budget inroads in 2008/early 09. Virtual trade shows, community sites, rich media (video, podcasts, etc.), blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools like RSS subscriptions, mashups, and widgets got the B2B budget scraps. Yet, while marketers try to work out social media’s place in the marketing mix, we were pleased to see, when taken together, these tactics accrued more than 10% of the marketing budget. I expect this year’s survey may show some surprising changes in this category.

I can hypothesize on my blog all day about how marketing tactic choices and budgets changed in 2009 relative to 2008 — and where B2B marketers expect them to go in 2010 — but the survey results will provide the real facts, not conjecture.  Please join me and take 15 minutes now to let me, and your B2B marketing colleagues, how your 2010 budget plans are shaping up.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments »

DMA Webinar: Tracking Online Buyer Behavior in B2B

January 8, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Next week I have the pleasure of speaking to several affiliate groups of the Direct Marketing Association about demand management. Please join me Wednesday, January 13, 2010, for a webinar-based panel discusison about: How to Track a Buyer’s Online Purchase Research Behavior: and then send appropriate messages to influence that buyer’s purchase.

As we see it, the Internet empowers buyers to research products and services long before engaging in a formal sales process — leaving marketers to guess when and how to engage with prospects. This almost guarantees that marketing messages will be sent to the wrong people at the wrong time — filling sales funnels with unqualified leads — a poor formula for permission marketing.

Smart marketers are harnessing digital technology to monitor and track buyer research behavior long before the formal sales process begins — to estimate buying stage — to predict buying intent — to evaluate buying influence — to send appropriate marketing messages to the right people at the right time — and to more accurately score leads for sales funnels. This yields a better formula for permission marketing.

The DMA invited two top industry experts (and yours truly) to help B2B marketers clearly understand how they can improve demand generation process by identifying, monitoring, and evaluating the online research behavior of prospective buyers.

Joining me are:

Steve Woods – Eloqua – Chief Technology Officer / Co-Founder. Author – Digital Body Language.

Debbie Qaqish – The Pedowitz Group – Chief Revenue Officer. Demand Generation Agency – Digital Buyer Behavior applications.

I hope you will visit the DMA Northern California site and join us for this educational, lively discussion!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Customer Engagement: Deepen Relationships with Community Marketing

December 22, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last week, Forrester published my research about how to deepen engagement engagement with programs focused on your best, most active customers. I think social software and activity will play a huge role here in 2010.  Why?  Because engaging business customers requires contact. To date, these connections revolve around reference programs, advisory boards, executive meetings, and user conferences. As social activity between B2B buyers and sellers evolves, the need to transform online interactions from transactional to relational increases, particularly as marketers recognize that digital approaches can reinforce the intimacy and influence essential to building strong customer bonds. I see the shortest path to successful B2B community building starting with existing customers and focusing on community, not corporate, objectives.

To build upon this idea — and add some perspective on the research — I conducted an “email” interview with Bill Lee, President of the Customer Strategy Group.  Here is what we discussed:

Q. Forrester is showing increasing interest in community marketing, so let’s start with a definition: how do you define community marketing and how do you see the concept evolving?

A.  We see community marketing as the next frontier for B2B marketers to cross as we move from marketing practices focused mainly on broadcast messaging – a practice founded on years of outbound advertising and promotional activity — to a blend of traditional and digital, individual and group, prospect and customer marketing approaches.  Community marketing is about using marketing to engage prospects, current customers, industry insiders, and partners in dialog that transparently and collectively improves the probability of creating effective solutions to the most pressing business problems. It’s about bringing technology and services suppliers into customers’ adoption activities in support of better business outcomes. It’s how Web 2.0 technologies enable new ways to innovate, collaborate, and partner that create more productive business operations.

Q. What role do you see reference programs playing in Community Marketing efforts?

A. Customer references validate product claims and streamline the sales process, both vital activities in B2B marketing.  Reference programs play a vital role in Community Marketing because the community of a supplier’s current customers – not individual accounts — becomes the focal point for revenue generation activity.  In the near future, the customer community helps to attract, engage, persuade, support, and retain future buyers of a supplier’s products and services.  As business buyers embrace the social Web, reference management can play a breakout role in the transition from collecting testimony to building community adoption.

Q. Can reference programs add to the value that businesses must provide to attract customers into their community marketing efforts? If so, how?

A. Customer reference programs can play a vital role in executing a community-centered marketing strategy that not only attracts new customers, but also turns your best customers into advocates within the community. These programs transition from sales support to community build in 3 important ways:

1) Reference customers make community activity intimate and influential, not just interactive.  Involving references in online, social activities — like peer discussions, rating and voting on products, content contribution, and so on —helps create positive product experiences and increases the likelihood that buyers will, in turn, advocate to others.

2) Social referencing involves your best customers in community building. Tapping reference customers predisposed to sharing experiences and speaking on your firm’s behalf is the best way to attract a community following. In B2B marketing, social media value will come from using Web 2.0 tools  to deepen customer relationships after deals close and implementation challenges begin.

3) References deliver content that creates conversation — and value for — buyers. Success stories and insight are the currency needed to sustain ongoing community activity. Because they participate readily, reference customers double their value when they energize community activity and discuss best practices.

Q. You’ve attended a couple of our conferences. What do you see customer reference programs doing that is exciting? What can or should they do to get better, and play a more important role in their businesses?

A. Today, I think the most exciting achievements happen when marketers give back real value to reference customers. The biggest benefit of advocating on behalf of a vendor should be membership in an exclusive community of like-minded participants where interacting with each other, as well as prospects and the public, is part of the draw and reward.  To play a bigger role in business, customer reference managers need to take advantage of emerging social business behavior more. They need to move beyond the physical, group setting and let references engage outside the boundaries of the formal program. Less than 30% of respondents to our earlier survey of customer reference professionals enabled their references to build profile pages, guest blog, rate community-contributed content, or author wikis, activities that permit customers to strut their stuff in the online, virtual world and create broader connections without having to trip through the legal, communications, or approval cycles that plague the production of more formal testimonial or case studies.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »

Sales Enablement Tools: All The Rage In 2009

December 11, 2009 — Laura Ramos

While attending Dreamforce last month, I took a walk around the show floor to see which firms were exhibiting. It wasn’t surprising to see a raft of new companies talking about sales-support additions to the AppExchange family with lead generation and pipeline health hot issues in this economy. I caught up with eTrigue, whom had briefed me October as they ramped up for the announcement of eTrigue SalesPro, still another sales enablement tool.  I have covered eTrigue in the Lead Management Automation market for a couple of years now.  In my market overview, I highlighted how they have a robust, continuous lead scoring and segmentation/list building capability, presented in an easy-to-use interface with a relatively low price. 

eTrigue SalesPro Lead Alert Provides Clean UI and Quick Overview

SalesPro takes this ability and translates it into a sales enablement tool that, unlike some of the competition, presents a fairly detailed view of potential leads that can result when prospects take multiple actions that increase their lead score and qualify them for a sales touch.

Rather than simply capturing Web site visitors, performing a reverse-IP look up, and passing this information onto sales, eTrigue SalesPro puts marketing at the head of this process. Sales and marketing agree on lead qualification and scoring criteria which SalesPro reflects in which alert messages sales reps receive through email. 

The key here: reps don’t get an email everytime a lead visits your Web site, but only when those leads meet a minimum threshold that you determine.  SalesPro presents the scores –  and the reasons behind the scores — along with account and buyer activity in an easy-to-read but information-rich format (see the Figure to check it out). 

Sales reps can quickly scan the information and, if they choose to pursue the lead, click into eTrigue to continue the conversation using email templates that nurture and track the activity. It’s a compact package that, for firms not yet ready to take the full lead management automation plunge, can create more alignment between marketing and sales efforts. 

The sales alerts provide a concise summary of lead potential that can help sales determine which opportunities to pursue while keeping marketing in the loop — an activity, in my mind, that requires some form of automation to achieve successfully, but for which automation alone is never  a complete solution. For firms without sophisticated lead management processes, eTrigue SalesPro can help you get started maturing those processes with an investment that can slide in under the CFO’s radar.

Take a look for yourself and let me know if you’ve used eTrigue, if you find it a low-effort, easy-entry to lead management automation, and how you would compare it to other sales enablement tools.  Feel free to let me know what you think, what I missed, and whether you see things similarly.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

Taking B2B Marketing to the “Next Level” in 2010

November 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Thanksgiving is next week, and it marks the start of the mad dash to the end of the year. As I look towards 2010, I see B2B marketers, in the tech industry and elsewhere, face increasing pressure to reach decision-makers, justify spending, and deliver high-quality leads to an increasingly dissatisfied sales organization. Compounding these demands is a lingering recession and increasing pressure from product commoditization, new business models, functional outsourcing, and a social groundswell where buyers turn to peers to validate purchase decisions.

To turn these changes to marketing’s advantage, 2010 will be the year where B2B marketers must expand their focus from the intake of the pipeline to a broader range of activities that flow across the entire customer life cycle. This requires fundamental changes in people, process, and technology to stem marketing’s slide into mere makeup and wardrobe responsibilities. Next year, socially savvy B2B marketers must:

1) Move out of the corporate ivory tower. Globalization, Social Computing, and buyer control make community marketing essential. Our interactions with buyers must become more inclusive as internal subject matter experts, engineers, and external voices will participate more often in the formerly exclusive realm of polished marketing communication. To adapt, we must adopt community management roles and evolve our companies’ communication style to become more open, transparent, and focused on relationship building — not just offer promotion.

2) Use communities to combine the best of user conferences and support forums. B2B buyers are a busy, overburdened crowd. If you want them to join your communities, you had better make it worth their while. Expect membership in business communities to be comparatively shorter-lived — and more episodic — than consumer counterparts. Marketers must accommodate this “sometimes active but mostly passive” pace by merging online events — like virtual trade shows run on software platforms from ON24 and Unisfair — with collaborative, conversational capabilities from social software firms like Communispace, HiveLive, Jive Software, and Lithium.

3) Use technology to enable digital selling with a personal feel. Prospect databases and lead management automation let marketers create personalized online experiences that replace traditional first and second sales calls. Customer-generated video, print on demand, and microsites that deliver one-to-one content replace four-color brochures as core marketing tools. Where will you be in this transition come 2010?

If you would like to hear about the 5 ways to take your business marketing efforts to the next level in 2010, check out my December 1 teleconference. During the presentation, I will take a closer look at the forces tech marketers must be able to overcome and why becoming customer centric, adopting integrated marketing, better managing demand, upgrading measurement, and embracing social is key to your ongoing success.

There is a charge for non-clients to attend, but if you reply to this post, I will put you in touch with the right folks can help you qualify for a reduced rate. (Yep, gotta talk to one of my salespeople.) Hope you will listen in or join the conversation on Twitter at #B2B2010. Happy Thanksgiving and see you December 1.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 3 Comments »

New Research Details 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards Winners

November 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

In my last post, I talked about the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners. I would like to echo Josh Bernoff’s recent blog observation that anyone can do a successful social application, (and from my perspective) especially those in industries that sell primarily to other businesses. In research published earlier today, I explain how the winners and finalists — and the activities I follow at other top firms — show that more companies are taking steps to enter the social world. To keep create successful social discourse with customers that drives real business returns, B2B marketers should:

1) Pick an audience, listen to them, and then join the conversation. B2B marketers keen to get involved in this groundswell of social activity should start with a specific group of customers or target buyers in mind. Actively listen to this audience in the venues they visit. Interact by tracking which topics they discuss and how frequently they discuss them. Engage in active social listening, summarize your findings, and present your experiences to your marketing, support, and sales teams.

2) Make specific business outcomes the goal of social activity. Cut the social goal-setting process short by convening five, 2-hour executive meetings that tackle, in turn, audience profiles, business objectives, measures/outcomes, resources, and responsibilities. Share the outcomes of this discussion with the primary teams who need to implement the chosen objectives for the chosen audience.

3) Rationalize your public social presence with your Web site. Most B2B Web sites focus too much on the company and not enough on what buyers want. Put your Web site at the center of your social media plans. Inventory official and semi-official presences on public social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and look at what you find when you put audience and objectives first. Chances are, it won’t be pretty.

4) Organize for social success. My former colleague, Jeremiah Owyang, recommends adopting a hub-and-spoke model for social organization, and I agree.  Hub-and-spoke supports a central, cross-functional group that facilitates resource-sharing and cross-team communications with those in distributed product groups, divisions, or geographies closer to strategy execution. It also gives business units flexibility while providing a central authority that enables your organization to act efficiently and to account for the impact of social activity.

Take a look at the winners, finalists, and other examples of social application excellence in the report and let me know what other examples you have seen that equal these accomplishments in innovation and business value.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 5 Comments »

B2B Marketers: 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award Winners Offer Great Examples

October 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Moments ago, Josh Bernoff posted this year’s winners of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell awards on the Groundswell blog. If you scroll down to the middle of the post (be forewarned; it’s a long one) you will see the winners and finalists in the B2B category winners. The images are great to look at as well.

In my research, I see marketers approach social media with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. Most want to know which firms execute social pursuits well and what tangible outcomes occur. Take a look and I think you will agree that these winners show how B2B firms can lead the way in achieving real business results.

As social activity expands – and business people seek out peers online to exchange ideas and validate their purchase decisions – these award winners and finalists demonstrate 6 types of objectives B2B marketers can use to connect – and ultimately change their relationship – with customers. Briefly, here’s what those 6 objectives are and why our winners took home the prize:

1) Listen to what customers talk about.  Listening to prospects and buyers may seem boring, so B2B markers tend to overlook this objective as an important start to setting social strategy. Yet, researching and analyzing what customers talk about pays off in deeper insight that leads to measurable benefits. CDW teamed with Communispace to listen to customers who participate in its community and apply those lessons to their sales interactions. As a result CDW increased the average of their total customer purchase revenue by 17% when comparing June 2009 to June 2008.

2) Talk with your customers (not at them): Successful marketers turn online activity and content into rich conversations. Eloqua’s self-guided sales tool, called the Conversation, treats users to an interactive discussion that hones in on their most pressing marketing problems using a combination of tongue-in-cheek humor and straight talk. Between 18 and 20% of buyers who engaged with an integrated campaign featuring this tool became prospects for Eloqua’s solutions.

3) Energize your best customers to talk about you. In B2B, using social media to energize customers around user meetings and conferences is a great example of making social media produce results. Depite restrictions on travel due to the economy, Sonic Foundry boosted Unleash 2009 attendance by 15%, and created a healthy pipeline of opportunity riding in on the coattails of this event.

4) Help your customers support each other. Social tools will accelerate the transformation of support forums from simple question/answer tools to communities where business-minded individuals network, share best practices, and seek business-oriented advice. In EDR’s case, commonground — a communityfor environmental professionals – resulted in over 90% of its customers giving EDR’s service a big thumbs up.

5) Encourage your customers spread success. In B2B, community succeeds when participation gets customers in a market — or users within buying organizations — to help others to adopt a product or service. ComplianceOnline, which I have written about previously, demonstrates this very well by attracting 500,000 subscribers, allowing members to share/purchase each other’s services, and generating approximately 30% of MetricStream’s leads.

6) Embrace customer ideas and suggestions. Ask customers for their opinions and ideas, and you will likely be overwhelmed with a huge number of responses. This was a hard category to judge because most of the submissions seemed to prove this conventional wisdom. Archer Technologies stood apart because, in their entry, they talked about how 2400 members contributed 1529 ideas resulting in new mobile and continuity products. That’s how to use the social power of your customers to drive business.

Will you join me in congratulating our new, B2B Groundswell Award winners?  And thank all of those who participated, especially after I badgered — uh, “reminded” you to do so . . .

And let me know about other B2B examples you find winning in the groundswell; I’d love to hear — and share — more.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »
« Older posts