B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos

The Summit on Customer Engagement continues Tuesday, October 21.  From yesterday’s session, here are my takeaways from the panel discussion where Jeff Tinker, SVP Wholesale Product and Market Strategy, Wells Fargo, Asim Zaheer, VP Global Product and Competitive Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems and John Pasquarette, VP of Product Marketing for Software, National Instruments talked about their current, direct experience with customer programs. Bill Lee moderated and took questions from the audience.

What do your customer programs look like and what are the best practices that you see work?

Wells Fargo started by focusing customer engagement programs at the B2B user level, but has shifted more dollars and attention on the decision maker level .  They have built online community destinations that successfully attract users (of small business banking products, for example), but now face the challenge of involving large business decision makers and creating deeper relationships with them online. Right now, customer engagement with decision makers happen offline.  To ensure maximum value for participants, they interview advisory board members before each meeting, synthesize what members want to hear from bank and each other, and facilitate this discussion.

Wells launched user community 2 years ago as a separate site with separate registration.  Flat growth in community membership resulted. Recently, they integrated the community into the main Wells Fargo portal to make the community more accessible.  The Wachovia acquisition, and increased interest in industry-specific topics, led to a doubling in their advisory board numbers. To meet this increased demand, Wells is looking at how to do customer advisory meetings virtually.

Jeff sees written case studies get less interest than in the past; current clients want to interact and ask questions of each other — whether about Wells products, how the merger is going, or a host of other topics.

National Instruments –  which John describes as “the Home Depot for engineers” – produces tools that engineers use to develop and test products. Like Wells, customer engagement with end users is going very well.  Unlike Wells, NI needs to help their salesforce, who are all degreed engineers, to have higher-valued, business-level discussion. NI sees community tools and technology as a way to help resolve this.

John says NI executives, marketing, product managers, etc. spend a lot of time with their key customers. For example, an NI team just spent 2 days onsite with Harris learning how Harris uses their tools to reduce cycle  and test time.  Adoption is critical – once engineers move onto the NI platform, they don’t move off. So references — and demonstrating a vibrant community of like-minded engineers to new prospects —  is key to getting them to become customers in the first place. Customer references and case studies help to build that community identity and following. 

Hitachi Data Systems sells storage solutions to large enterprises, deals topping hundreds of thousands of dollars on average. Asim is accelerating their customer engagement activities to learn about – and adapt to — what customers face in this changing economy. HDS customer advisory boards are high-touch, but now HDS needs to move this activity down stream and engage the midmarket. They are working with TechValidate to see how automation can help them to reach into the midmarket further.

So far, HDS has created about ½ a dozen communities on LinkedIn and is currently montioring how prospects and customers use this social network to share successes and horror stories on a community-by-community basis. Community members know HDS sponsors the LinkedIn groups, but HDS actsl simply as an observer and moderator; they do not actively “participate” on these community pages. Currently, the LinkedIn experiment is not connected to customer reference activity.  Beyond this, HDS hosts gated, online communities. Keys to success with these private communities are: 1) Give the participants something of value that they can’t get elsewhere, 2) keep participation volume high– get more than 2-3 folks talking, and 3) make the feedback mechanism direct to HDS short and uncomplicated. HDS finds good customer references actively come from this community.

What do you do about customers/prospects who complain or make disparaging comments in communities?

Jeff talked about how the principles of good customer support/relationship building applies in the online world just as well as the offline.  You have to talk to the people with complaints or gripes; you can’t ignore them.  Don’t defend, but don’t justify either.  Jeff says, “If we are wrong, we admit it. We respond within 24 hours.” At first Wells’ legal department put together 7 pages of guidelines about how to interact in the community – but the executive sponsor stepped in and said “I want simple terms and conditions; we don’t want to stifle dialog”.

John says NI welcomes disparaging comments. Many times a customer, not an NI employee, jumps in to respond.  NI has changed a policy – or said why they can’t – when the customers bring up issues on the community. We regularly survey our customers on satisfaction, which is the final scoreboard for this activity.  John said, “The community provides one avenue of input to our strategy and direction, but we don’t knee-jerk react to all of it.”

Asim advises “don’t get into arguments with them.” Listen, address the issue, admit mistakes when you make them, and let other customers chime in.

How do you concisely explain the ROI of this activity to your executives and board? Especially when putting forth a budget?

Asim explained that justification is not that big a problem at HDS because HDS executives on down all agree they need and want to talk to customers. Customers are HDS’s biggest asset and customer engagment programs help them grow this investment.  But they do look at both hard-dollar and soft-impacts. For example, when some customers had trouble traveling to executive briefing centers to spend time with HDS engineers and execs, HDS looked at the numbers and found they could afford to take the program on the road.  Visiting a dozen cities for in-depth customer meetings is not cheap, but HDS track deal flow and revenue impacted by these events and has seen a very positive impact.  So much so that they plan to expand the executive briefing center roadshow to more cities in 2010.

Jeff said that Wells definitely increased its level of investment and involvement in customer engagement in 2009. To demonstrate the payoff, they highlight the role customers play in the development of products and how much customer interaction help them reduce time to market for new products. Customers cut the guesswork out of the development process.

Following this panel, Bill Lee hosted a “fireside chat” with Dan Crain, former CTO, Brocade and Tim Thorsteinson, Harris Broadcasting, on the topic of “What do Decision Makers Want from the B2B Relationship?”

Bottomline: Decision makers want trustworthy relationships and relevant discussion about industry topics.  They don’t want to engage in customer programs that are product or transactional in focus.

Dan Crain has bought a lot of IT equipment in his career, and gets invited to customer programs all the time. If sales sponsors them, he’s not interested. If the program is run by product marketing or the technical people, he finds much more value.  The most attractive programs center on discussion around industry-level issues.

Regarding social activity
Dan: “Social media is not good for putting out managed information or messages about your company. It’s more about getting closer to customers.”  Communities are not a new thing: the techn industry has had bulletin boards and forums for a long time.  They are a great way for users to interact, although it is debateable whether the new host of social software tools really enhances this.  Microsoft is a great example of how to use forums to interact with users well. In contrast, Dell putting out coupon codes for refurbished equipment on Twitter is not about getting closer to customers. But listening to customer suggestions and request on Dell IdeaStorm is.

Tim said Harris has used social media to automate getting feedback on products or specific ideas.  He feels it social media is better used for automating a focus group than blasting out messages to the community on social channels.

Tim and Dan agree: Buyers who select a vendor to work with want that vendor to be successful. So executives and decision makers will take time to provide references or to participate in customer advisory.