Why do we need a single customer view?

The idea of a single customer view (SCV) has been around for many years, born out of the need for businesses to understand how customers are interacting with their brand, and to obtain a complete view of customer interactions and purchases.

Understanding engagement at the customer or prospect level (and not just campaign by campaign) can drive more in-depth campaign analysis, resulting in more informed business decisions and demonstrating return on marketing investment — something that’s high on every marketer’s agenda, especially in the current economic environment.

Historically consumer focused, the fairly straightforward idea of having one single record that delivers a summarised view can be applied in so many areas – not least in B2B lead generation and prospecting programmes.

What are the key benefits of a single customer view?

I would summarise the main benefits as follows:

1. Improved productivity and efficiency from lead generation activity
2. Increased likelihood of conversion – the more we know about a prospect’s engagement, the more influence we can have over the prospect journey to increase the likelihood of conversion
3. Better budget allocation on higher value prospects through smarter segmentation of data
4. Creation of bespoke contact strategies using analysis and insight to identify the best mix of communication channels
5. Greater depth of understanding through tailored data collection, analysis and output – allowing more relevant communication with prospects
6. Improved forecasting control – a SCV can support data insights to measure the potential of the prospect universe
7. Cross-selling opportunities to current customers where the SCV integrates customers and prospects
8. Informed acquisition of new customers based on insight derived from current customers

How difficult is it to achieve, and is it worth it?

A true SCV is deemed the ‘holy grail’ as it is very difficult to achieve due to the continual evolution of technology and data. The ever-increasing number of marketing channels also presents challenges. In reality, I’m sure that very few businesses can honestly say that they have a complete SCV currently in place for marketing – if they do, I’d love to see it!

Is it worth it? Well yes it is…or should be! The more information we can collect, the more questions we can ask and answer, the better informed we are.  Consumers are making more and more information about themselves available in the public domain, and it’s down to us to start hoovering it up. We need to gather it, integrate it and use it to help shape marketing strategies.

Even at a simplistic level, using a SCV will enable us to analyse the channels a prospect is engaging with, and should help define how you communicate to them in future.  It might be seen as Big Brother behaviour, but for enterprise account based marketing, building a profile of high-level contacts and knowing things like individual interests and hobbies, group memberships and employment history can help start a very effective communication process.

What are the main steps in obtaining strong enough data for a single customer view?

Now more than ever, the wealth of data available on any one customer or prospect is immense. Offline media, websites, social media, events, direct mail, email and telemarketing are all areas and channels where data can be collected and fed into a SCV.

In the B2B environment, the challenge is increased by the complexity of company structures and contacts responsible for multiple areas. Getting to the right decision maker or influencer for the product you are selling is, and always will be, a key focus for B2B marketers.

By adopting some of the SCV thinking and techniques, we can create group views, company views, department views and influencer views that can all be linked, with information flowing between the multiple levels delivering all the benefits of a SCV in the consumer market.

Our next challenge? Making sure we ask the right questions of the data and get the insight needed to deliver successful results-driven sales and marketing campaigns.

What tools are available to help us?

Many CRM systems and solutions now implement the SCV from within, using increasingly intelligent data gathering and integration techniques. Sales and marketing software such as Salesforce.com is widely used by big enterprise organisations and is continually evolving to integrate with new data collection channels and digital data.

But are businesses actually using these types of systems to their full potential, especially from a marketing point of view? Experience tells us that this is infrequently the case. We know that getting to a true SCV is and always will be challenging, but these tools can be extremely useful for getting as close to customers as possible.

Through the right technology and effective planning, the challenges we face in increasing our customer and prospect views can be significantly reduced. We may never achieve a complete single view but we can get pretty close if we use all the tools and data at our fingertips.

It’s that time of the year again, and there were plenty of April Fool’s gags that didn’t disappoint.

As usual, Google pulled some amusing pranks, including new maps for the 8-bit NES, a self-driving NASCAR, and the launch of Chrome’s multi-task mode.

Sir Richard Branson launched Virgin Volcanic and planned a journey to the centre of the Earth. And Warby Parker, an American eyewear retailer, released a range for dogs, aptly titled Warby Barker.

Atlassian, an American provider of tracking, collaboration and software development tools, released a tongue-in-cheek video introducing a new way to boost developer happiness – spooning.

Great for marketing

Ultimately, the point of all these gags is that they’re great for PR. They’re a fun way of getting the media to take notice of you in an interesting, less expensive way.

As long as your organisation’s PR and social media activity is aligned to your sales and marketing strategy, it’s a huge opportunity to improve your website’s search engine ranking, build awareness and inspire your staff.

Measurable results

The economic downturn has forced marketing departments to prove their worth by delivering against measurable metrics. Now PR is under the same pressure to keep its place in the budget.

So seasonal opportunities, like April Fool’s Day, need to be well thought out. Will your planned activity increase web traffic? Is it in line with your SEO strategy? Will it deliver tangible results?

What’s the strategy behind your tweets and blog posts? Tweeting and blogging ‘just to be out there’ doesn’t really cut it.

So, where should you start? Here are three ideas to get you started:

1. Be focused – Write down your business’s key words – and use them. Constantly ask yourself why you’re doing it and how it relates to these key words and your end goal.

1. Be consistent – Tie all your activity together. Make sure that if someone visits your site it matches the news you’re putting out – the serious stuff as well as the fun stuff.

1. Measure the results – and work on improving them. Which tweets got re-tweeted? Which blog articles are most popular? Which press releases generate a spike in traffic? Monitor and then adjust your strategy accordingly.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a look at what The Guardian considers the ten best April Fool’s Day gags.

John Crane, former CIO of National Australia Bank, and John Suffolk, former UK government CIO, spoke at our recent Sales & Marketing Forum on the opportunities available to suppliers when an organisation goes through transformational change.

Discussion points included:

• The challenges of transformation – what’s the real role of the CIO and their team?
• A glimpse behind the scenes – how are major decisions made?
• Knowing IT’s place – should you be approaching IT or the wider business?
• Inside the IT function — it’s not just about the CIO
• Why do they turn to certain suppliers?

Finally, we asked our guest speakers to put their marketing hats on and come up with some ideas and suggestions on how suppliers should engage with CIOs.

The full forum write-up can be read here or viewed below.

The rise of email, text, social media, and video for marketing has changed the way we engage with our prospects and customers. We can reach them in a matter of seconds, at half the price, without having to leave our desks. And we can measure responses and track the success of a campaign with relative ease.

However, the explosion of virtual communication has raised doubts over the importance of face-to-face communication, which can be time-consuming and often costly.

In person is still best

But I believe that face-to-face interaction is vital for building trust and growing relationships. In fact, it may be more important in these tough economic times than ever before.

At our S&M Forum in January this year, former UK government CIO, John Suffolk, highlighted the importance of face-to-face meetings in building the trust needed for complex B2B sales decisions.

According to a report from Meeting Professionals International (MPI), 40% of prospects converted to new customers through face-to-face meetings, while 28% of current business would be lost without face-to-face meetings¹.

A white paper released in 2010 called “The Future of Meetings: The Case for Face-to-Face”, found that in-person events are better suited for capturing attention, inspiring positive emotions and building networks and relationships².

A paper by the National University of Singapore states that “face-to-face business meetings afford participants opportunities to develop transparency and trust among each other in ways that are not always possible in other types of communication.”

It also says that “trust is an integral part of the business relationship and building it is a function of having repeated personal interactions with one another. This is not to say that trust cannot be built using computer based technologies, but the evidence suggests that it takes longer to build.”

And don’t forget the all important fringe benefits. Face-to-face business meetings allow side-line conversations that are often very valuable in obtaining background information, politics or contacts that could really make or break a lead generation process.

So, the lesson is that when you need an important decision to be made, face-to-face is the way forward. But, there’s more to it than simply setting up these sales meetings. You need to think about the marketing collateral and tools your sales team can use before, during and after the meeting.

First, you need to get them interested enough to accept a meeting with you. Think about how would introduce your company in a new and interesting way. During the meeting, simple, strong PowerPoint slides can help you to engage with the prospect. Showing examples of your successes, or charts and diagrams all help you make the right impression. And lastly, think about what you’l leave behind to make sure you aren’t forgotten.

So there you have it. Whilst social media and electronic interaction play a vital role in getting those messages out there, we mustn’t cast aside the value of good old fashioned contact. It’s just a question of finding the right balance of electronic and personal channels and working out where they belong in our sales cycles.

Sources

1 http://www.mpiweb.org/Libraries/NTA-Reports/Meetings_Deliver.pdf

2 http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/perspective/perspective-15297.html

3 http://www.iacconline.org/content/files/WhyFace-to-FaceBusinessMeetingsMatter.pdf

When we talk about objectives for marketing, it’s easy to overlook ’speed to market’. But a few times in the last couple of weeks it’s come up as a big opportunity – something that is relatively easy to improve and which can have a fundamental affect on business results. Three ways it can help you:

1. Being the first to talk to customers and prospects about a new proposition (topics like consumerisation or the cloud lose their shine slightly by the 5th time you hear about them!).
2. Generating early interest so that you have some opportunities ready and waiting when sales need them (rather than waiting for sales to ask and then having a further wait of weeks/months before a campaign delivers results).
3. Responding to something in the news or something that’s happened to a prospect within a timeframe that’s still relevant. PR is very good at this of course – but marketing often struggles. Some of our most successful campaigns have happened when we’ve got it right and responded to news or an announcement in ‘near-real-time’.

I remember a few years ago when an RBS manager defrauded the bank of £21m (it’s an interesting story – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-389418/The-bank-boss-21m-fraud.html – including the irony that he was named business manager of the year 3 times). One day after the news broke, we contacted risk/anti-fraud/anti-money laundering contacts in financial services to explain how a client’s software could have detected and prevented the fraud. One of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever run.

So if we bear these advantages in mind (more relevant to the audience, ahead of sales demand, ahead of the competition), maybe we can make a stronger case for streamlining the process when it really counts.

On the other hand, it did take me a week from having a conversation about this to writing a post on it, so maybe we’re doomed to remain behind the times…

At a strategic level, aligning sales and marketing can mean embarking on a major organisational change programme. Sometimes it only happens when there’s a change in personnel at the top. Waiting and hoping for that to happen can be very frustrating for professional marketers ‘stuck’ in a company that doesn’t give them scope to make a difference to business results.

But I think there’s a ‘ground-up’ approach that can be more effective, simpler – and certainly more fulfilling – than waiting for some seismic organisational change to happen.

Every campaign can be aligned with sales at a more practical level to create the kind of programme we can all be proud of.

You often hear marketers complaining that ‘we hand leads over to sales and nothing happens with them’. Assuming that these are good opportunities in the right organisations, the difference can come down to how well engaged sales were with the campaign. Does the number/quality of leads match up to what sales need to hit their targets? Do they know how the leads were generated and qualified? Do they know what content converted these leads? Do they have the relevant materials to help them run meetings or follow up with the leads?

It’s also important from the perspective of your prospects. Does the handover to your sales team feel like a natural continuation of the journey that your marketing campaign took them on? Does the sales meeting or call live up to the promises that your marketing made in terms of the value they would get from taking this next step?

The six steps to getting your sales team fully on board

1.     Make sure that marketing is pitching what sales are selling – and vice versa

There’s often tension between marketing’s desire to campaign around strategic business issues and big ‘solutions’ that shift the audience’s perception of a company’s offerings, and sales’ need to be out pitching things that they know people can buy, the company can deliver and they are comfortable selling. In reality, both sides can learn from each other and there is usually a happy medium where elements of the campaign can be pitching the big vision and providing sales with materials to be more comfortable in strategic conversations, while also creating ‘point’ sales opportunities around specific products/solutions. But unless you work with sales upfront to agree this ‘happy medium’, don’t expect sales to be effortlessly engaged by the ‘opportunities’ that your campaigns deliver.

It’s about mixing an ‘outside-in’ approach (aligning campaigns to audience needs) with the best elements of the traditional ‘inside-out’ approach (running campaigns around what your business is best at and where you have a track record).

2.     Use the sales team as a source of messaging and content

Marketing often turns to product teams, customers or even external analysts for input when creating content and messaging plans. But running sessions with sales can also be highly productive – both in terms of ideas for content and messages, and also in ensuring that sales feel part of the campaign from the start. Here are some good questions to ask your salespeople:

• Who is your best customer? What makes them unique?
• Can you talk through some recent deals that you’ve won? How did they come in as a prospect? Why did we win?
• And some deals that you’ve lost – why did we lose? Who/what did they go with instead?
• What alternatives do prospects have? What solutions do they typically have in place, what are the consequences of doing nothing, what’s the competitive landscape?
• Are there any specific elements of the overall solution that you use as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to open up wider deals?
• What kind of questions/issues are buyers typically struggling with in the first sales meetings?
• What do you typically talk through in your first sales meetings?
• If you were approaching someone ‘cold’ and making the case about why they should meet you, what would you say?
• Are there any resources/presentations that you think work best as leave-behinds/prompts that move people along the sales process?

3.     Properly define what makes a ‘lead’ relevant to sales and how many they need

It’s not just about handing over BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) qualified leads to sales. Sales may actually want something completely different – a smaller number of earlier stage opportunities with named accounts, coupled with better market intelligence and relationships for the future.

Try to:

• Uncover potential opportunities within named accounts that sales weren’t actively working;
• Build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers;
• Nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long-term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team.

Marketers also need to be confident setting the right targets, which involves asking some tough questions (it’s surprising how many sales teams may not readily know the answers!). What’s the business target? How many deals are needed? What’s the typical conversion rate (and what will the conversion rate be for the type of lead defined above)?

4.     Understand what resources sales are really using

We need to understand what assets and resources sales will find most useful both to generate their own meetings and use during/after the meetings that are booked.

We researched ten salespeople from one of our clients and these waere their top four requests:

• More proactive content about where the company is going in the future – a video or one sheet summary;
• Fewer, more targeted presentations with standard templates;
• Information on competitors and how they are better (supported with examples);
• More case studies and creative examples.

5.     Brief sales on the campaign plan, calls to action and content.

And keep briefing them as the rollout happens. Include links to relevant campaigns/content with leads that are handed over so they can see the materials that prospects have already received. Also, supply ideas of presentations they can use for their next steps.

On a recent European campaign we even included a tool that helped Sales search for relevant content or tools according to the kind of meeting they were going to.

6.     And, of course, your sales and account teams are also a channel to market

Leverage the social media profile of the sales team; they can pull through blogs and SlideShare presentations to their LinkedIn profiles, and you can prompt them with ideas of content/views to share on twitter or in LinkedIn groups. If sales are fully engaged with a campaign, they’ll also be taking the proposition direct to their best prospects. One of the big wins of your campaign could be how well educated sales are on the proposition and audience issues it solves.

In summary, for every external campaign there’s an equivalent internal programme to engage sales that is just as important. You can generate all the leads in the world, but if sales aren’t engaged or equipped to follow them up then it can easily come to nothing.

Plenty of suppliers are focusing on ‘consumerisation’ as a topic of major interest to their customers and prospects. (’Consumerisation’ is all about what it means to a business when employees would rather use their own personal devices for work, would rather select their own apps, and want to interact with each other in ways that have more in common with Facebook than traditional ‘big’ corporate IT.) As a major change facing businesses, it’s creating threats and opportunities for IT, comms, services and other suppliers.

It’d be an easy prediction to say that suppliers will spend more time in 2012 to get their consumerisation stories straight – although it’s certainly not simple to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

But the thing with consumerisation is that it’s not just another trend that marketers can use to resonate with the key decision-makers that they’re targeting. For many suppliers, it’s going to fundamentally change who these decision-makers are.

It won’t happen instantly, but over time some suppliers are going to see their heartlands (e.g. doing a single major deal with procurement) replaced with the new reality that thousands of individual employees (or at the very least hundreds of department heads) are free to make their own choices. Of course, some suppliers with security/consulting/hosting propositions may see little change (or even potential growth) while others (’consumer’ brands like Google and Apple) will find new opportunities to break into corporate markets that were previously sewn up (by major procurement relationships or ‘gatekeeper’ system integrators). But between these two extremes, there’s a mass of suppliers who face some tough choices in the mid-long term.

Assuming that they have (or can find) a business model that sustains a much larger volume of smaller (or even individual) deals, these suppliers will also need new marketing approaches to influence all of the people who could be buying, trialling, evaluating or recommending their services. You might describe it as a shift from B2B to B2C2B (I’d love to lay claim to that one but Google tells me it’s been used 25,000 times before…). As I say, none of this will happen overnight – but we can expect to see more and more examples of organisations reaching out beyond traditional decision-making units, and an increasing interest from others to see how they get on.

It’ll affect the buying journey, the sales process (e.g. more trials, less face-to-face), the approach to promotion and incentives, the real potential direct ROI from social media, the challenges of data (if you struggled managing 20,000 contacts, try coping with 20,000,000!) and the need for new types of content/user interactions. But it’s also an exciting time to stake a claim in a new area (where it feels like the Salesforce.com model has only scratched the surface and Apple is seeing success mainly by default).

“Content is King” – but maybe it’s time to consider regicide?

Wading through the morass of predictions for B2B marketing in 2012 (#irony), you can’t move for hearing that “content is King”. But I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that there’s already a near-overwhelming weight of content out there competing for my attention. At some stage you have to switch off and trust a few sources and people in your network to bring you the best of the content – or that you’ll stumble across what you need while searching on a topic.

I certainly don’t disagree with the objectives behind content marketing – it’s just that I think it’s becoming too easy and too mechanical (heard a good comment recently about the limitations of a ‘white paper factory’ approach).

So we need to be looking for what’s next – finding another dimension to add to our content marketing that will keep it ahead of the pack.

I think there’s an answer that’s about creating ‘experiences’ over and above individual pieces of content. Content can be useful; an experience can be engaging. Experience is more likely to contribute to a lasting reputation for your brand in the mind of the prospect. And at the same time, hopefully an experience is more likely to prompt a prospect to take a next step with you (proposing this next step can even be part of the ‘experience’).

I’m aware that ‘experience’ might sound a bit vague, so here’s an attempt to define what I mean.

At one level, it could be simply about content that invites audience contribution or that they can interact with. Or about having what would pass as a proper ‘journalistic’ story (the opposite of the ‘white paper factory’ approach). Experience is also a useful way of thinking about the journey that prospects (and then customers) take with your business. Differentiating with this journey can be just as important as differentiating your core product or service.

But at a specific campaign level, the most successful programmes that I’ve seen in the last couple of years have been about actually ‘doing’ something rather than just talking about it. There’s a great example in what O2 Enterprise (disclosure: our client) has done to take it’s ‘Joined Up People’ (think ‘flexible working+’) proposition to market. Rather than create lots of theoretical marketing collateral about the proposition, they’re sharing the story of how O2 itself has implemented it and the benefits they’re seeing. This coverage does a great job of summarising how different the approach is.

“It’s rather refreshing to see a big tech company actually do this kind of thing rather than just talk about it. It most certainly makes the conversation with other enterprises highly authentic, given that o2′s done it all itself.”

When we look back at the end of 2012, I’m sure that the content marketing programmes that stand out will be the ones that head in this direction of being ‘experiences’.

If you’re wondering where to look for an idea of an experience to create for your market: it’s where your expertise intersects with the audience’s interest. There’s only limited point in making a noise about something that you can’t sell to – and no point at all making a noise about something the audience isn’t interested in.

For me, the big innovation of 2012 in B2B Marketing isn’t going to be about technology or channels or techniques: it’ll be about revenue.

I’m convinced that 2012 will be the last chance for many B2B marketers in large organisations to take more accountability for revenue (and so break out of being a dispensible ’support function’).

I don’t mean revenue in the sense of ‘we ran a lead gen campaign and it generated 100 qualified leads’ (or even ‘we think the CRM system shows that a couple of the leads converted’). I mean revenue in terms of driving an understanding of the marketplace, planning where opportunities will come from, owning the long-term conversation and conversion of the audience through to sales and proving in detail the outcome – ideally past revenue through to contribution. And, on the customer side, driving the plan of how new/expanded propositions will be taken to the existing customer base.

The economic uncertainty and shake-ups happening in lots of big B2B firms have created this opportunity. If we can avoid being overly distracted by the abundance of new channels and techniques available, there’s a chance that we’ll be able to stake a claim for a place at the top table. When marketers start taking this seriously, the fabled ’sales and marketing alignment’ will just happen.

When the CEO asks ‘what did marketing do for me in 2012?’, the answer could either be ‘we sourced 30% of pipeline and 25% of prospect revenue, grew customer profitabiliy by 15% and established measurable awareness for our top new propositions’ or ‘we implemented marketing automation and social media monitoring, grew our followers by 1000% and delivered 1,500 qualified sales leads (we’re just not sure what sales did with them…)’. I know which answer I’d rather give.

In April, we researched 100 UK decision makers’ social media attitudes and behaviours. The findings have made for interesting reading, confirming some suspicions but surprising us in other areas. Above all, they’re intended as prompts in terms of important considerations when planning social media engagement.

You can read the results as both supporting the importance of social media and illustrating why it can’t succeed on its own:

For: We’ve seen that half of decision makers feel that suppliers should be active within social media, and that a surprising number have met and given business to suppliers following a first interaction via social media.

Against: But the influence of social media dips at some key stages of the buying cycle, and more traditional channels are becoming seen as more valuable than ever before in the face of ‘overwhelming’ digital interactions.

To summarise our conculsions:

Social media has reached a point where it is almost universally used, but is at its most effective alongside other channels – hopefully we have reached the stage where it can be sensibly considered as an element of any wider marketing strategy rather than hyped as a standalone silo…

If you are interested in any further information from the full findings (over 20 different question areas and variations by size of organisation/age/job function), please contact peverett@themarketingpractice.com.