Many marketing teams are adopting the agile methodology as a way to manage their many efforts in today’s rapidly changing marketing world. And many of them report a significant increase in productivity and throughput as a result.
A central component of the agile methodology, for marketing or software, is the daily morning standup meeting. This is a 15-minute standing meeting at the beginning of the day in which each member of the team describes: Continue reading
Sometimes it’s hard to do justice to a major marketing approach in a single blog post. Bear with me; I’m going to try.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is kind of hot these days, although it’s not necessary new. In the past it’s sometimes been called key account marketing, or something similar. You can use it to close and grow specific larger accounts. Continue reading
A few weeks ago a senior executive of Facebook predicted that it would be all video in five years with no text or photos. That seems highly unlikely to me, but it does reflect the rapidly growing importance of video for storytelling and engaging with audiences. There’s a good reason why brands will pay so much for TV ads. Continue reading
This is part of chapter 4 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book which is available on Amazon.
Your best Bullseye opportunity is to sell more to your current customers.
Many companies focus too much on closing new accounts. But it is far less expensive to sell more to existing customers than to land a new customer, whether you’re selling to consumers or other companies. Depending on the company and industry, estimates are that landing new customers costs five to 25 times more than growing an existing one. Since these new sales are so much easier and less expensive to close, they have a much higher profit, too. A study by the inventor of the Net Promoter Score showed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%
In higher education they understand that retaining students is as important as landing new ones: after all, what’s the point if every time the admission office lets a new student in the front door two are walking out the back? So they stay close to their customers (students and parents) and are constantly looking at programs to improve their retention rates. They call this “enrollment management.”
In some companies, such as SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, retaining customers is a KPI (key performance indicator). The loss of customers is called churn. The best SaaS companies lose less than five percent of customers annually.
For some B2B companies just a few, large customers account for a disproportionate share of their sales and profits. Perhaps just 20 percent of customers provide 80 percent of profits (and therefore the “80-20 Rule”, also called the Pareto Rule). In higher ed fundraising, which definitely requires marketing support, the proportions can be even more extreme: sometimes 95% of money raised comes from just five percent of donors. Those few, vital accounts demand special attention and programs.
If you’re retaining and growing current accounts at a high rate, you then want to turn those customers into advocates, because people today believe recommendations from friends and professional colleagues – and even strangers on social media — more than they believe your marketing. And recommendations are free; you’ll never do marketing cheaper than free.
So for all of these reasons, increasing customer satisfaction and retention and selling more to existing customers are key parts of your Phase 1 Bullseye activities. Let’s get to it!
In 2003, Bain business strategist Fred Reichheld wrote an article for The Harvard Business Review entitled “The One Number You Need to Grow”[iii]. Expanding on some original insights from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, he had researched customer loyalty – a particular passion of his. In the article and blog post, he outlined what would become known as the Net Promoter Score® (NPS ®).[iv]
With NPS you ask customers one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [company X] to a friend or colleague?” They are asked to respond on a 0-10 scale. A rating of 9 or 10 is considered a promoter, 7-8 is neutral, and 6 or below is a detractor. To find the Net Promoter Score, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. According to Reichheld, companies with a high NPS grow the fastest and those with a low NPS have slow or no growth, or may even be in decline. You want to have a positive NPS, and the best companies have an NPS of 60-80, or better.
This question is often followed up with a second, open-ended question: What is the reason for your answer?
The NPS can provide a valuable baseline for companies and a way to measure improvement. And that second, open-ended question can be invaluable research, too, because you find out what are the most important issues affecting your customers. The NPS answers can provide important information to salespeople for follow-ups since the respondent should not be anonymous, but asked to identify themselves.
Reichfeld developed the NPS when social media was still pretty young. Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Pinterest didn’t even exist; LinkedIn was only a year old. While it has its critics (or detractors 😉 the Net Promotor Score is more important today than ever with the ability of a positive recommendation or negative comment on social media to be seen by so many people almost instantly, and for the insights it gives into your customers.
To sell more to current customers, they have to like what you’re providing — and maybe even be delighted by it. You’re selling an experience that starts with the very first marketing or sales interaction that they have with you and hopefully will continue for years.
A common framework used to understand the customer experience is the 5Es:
Entice: How do customers first hear of you? How are they lured into possibly doing business with you?
Enter: What’s their initial experience with us?
Engage: How do we interact with them as they do business with us?
Exit: What is the end of their experience like?
Extend: How do we encourage repeat business?
Consider the 5Es as they apply to the in-restaurant customer experience for a pizza shop.
Entice
Enter
Engage
Exit
Extend
For a take-out customer, there would be additional/different elements to the experience.
And that’s all just for buying a pizza!
Imagine how complex the customer experience is for a hospital, or an airport, an online retailer, or a B2B company selling and servicing multi-million dollar equipment, or providing a complex service (like managing marketing campaigns) over a period of years.
All of these categories of interactions are called touchpoints, and you use them to analyze and design an ideal customer experience (CX).
Note a few key things to keep in mind about customer CX touchpoints:
You have two groups of people who need to be involved in creating a great customer experience: customers and employees.
Designing a great CX begins with… customer research. (By now you should expect that, right? We’re not flying by the seat of our pants here, people.) In the previous chapter, I presented ideas about how to research your customers. Here are a few that are important for CX research:
Employees are the front-line representatives of your organization. Not only do they have the most direct experience with customers but, unless your operation is completely automated, they can also have the greatest impact on the customer experience. Companies need to engage employees from the start in understanding the customer experience and empower them to improve it. The best companies create groups of employees to study and improve the customer experience.
You need to remember that you have more than one CX; even the pizza shop has people who eat in the store and do take-out. For larger companies, there are far more interactions and touchpoints. And in many B2B situations, the users of your products and services may not be the people who authorize the purchase or pay for it. Your CX studies and improvements need to account for all of your stakeholders.
This customer experience work is not something that should be left to a few senior executives to try to do on their own in one or two meetings. An initial customer experience program can take months to show results in the form of greater customer success, reduced complaints, and improved customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores. In the best organizations, it is a never-ending mission.
To create an effective presence in the mind of your customers, you first need to understand where they are – online and offline – and what they want to do at each point of their journey. Obviously, the buyer of an industrial pump has a very different customer journey than the buyer of a pizza. And even within a company, you will have potentially many different journey maps for different personas and products. Customer journey maps can be a central tool for understanding and improving the customer experience, and creating a successful marketing program.
The map will vary depending on how you sell and service your products. The customer experience is very different depending on whether you sell directly, online, through retailers, dealers, or distributors, and how you handle return and service in each of those channels.
Plus there may be multiple stakeholders behind a single customer or persona. The person who experiences the tech product failure may not be the person who calls support (in the company or a family). Both companies and consumers may have buying teams.
Organizations use customer journey maps to understand their many customer touchpoints which can include store visits, visits to the website, use of an app, interaction with a social media account, viewing of ads, interactions with salespeople, experience with the product return process and so on. (Note that your touchpoints aren’t places, they are experiences that the customer has.) There is no single way to create a journey map – if you search Google for them you’ll find a tremendous variety of customer journey maps– and they can be quite complex. They can also be a very important tool in understanding and improving the customer experience and creating an omni-channel marketing program.
Customer journey maps describe the customer experience from their points of view, not the point of view of your internal processes. For example, if a customer needs to return a product their experience starts with the decision to return it and finding out how to do that, which is before their first interaction with your team. Later you may connect your internal marketing and sales processes with the touchpoints.
Journey maps can contain descriptive and prescriptive information. In fact, you could have an entire journey map – or “experience map” – that only describes the current state of the customer experience, and a separate one describing an ideal future state. Or you could combine that descriptive and prescriptive information into the same journey map.
Below is a customer journey map (used with permission of Kerry Bodine & Co.) which shows the good, neutral and bad of the current touchpoints that a customer has when interacting with a company. Note how the customers’ emotions are shown at each touchpoint. Those touchpoints with negative or neutral emotions are ideal to target for improvement, as well as especially important touchpoints (not all touchpoints are created equal).
In the bottom section of this journey map, the needs and expectations of the customer at each touchpoint are described.
Other journey maps may plot what the company will do to enhance their customer experience, including the content that they’ll provide at the touchpoint
Your maps should also note places in the journey where the customer is anonymous and when they’re known. For example, your website may deliver different content – or an entirely different experience – to a known prospect than to an anonymous website visitor.
Customer journey maps can require months of time and lots of research. The best are based on customer input, such as interviews, surveys, and analytics. And you can also look at the data that you have about how you’re interacting with customers before and after the sale. There is no one way to do journey maps. Do them so that they’re useful for you.
And if a competitor provides some part of an experience that’s better than yours, don’t be afraid to copy them until you can improve on it. I’m always amazed, for example, when I go to a retail website that is clearly inferior to Amazon; the experience delivered by the market leader is out there for everyone to see—and copy.
Improving the customer’s experience is an effort that involves all parts of the company. With attention to this over time employees should become more and more customer focused and empathetic.
In Forrester’s 2015 report, “Mapping the Customer Journey”[i] Tony Costa and Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha describe four approaches companies use to successfully create journey maps:
While the first two approaches require weeks of research and analysis, the Co-creation and Quick-fire approaches achieve significant results in a single day. For example, an airline might use a Co-creation workshop to improve their customer experience when rebooking flights, or a retailer might use a Quick-fire session to improve its product return experience.
The Co-creation and Quick-fire approaches are designed to create quick wins, customer empathy, buy-in and momentum behind idea of using customer journey maps. That sounds like a perfect place to start with journey maps when implementing the Bullseye approach. You could create some in Phase One, have successes, and build the internal support for deeper customer research and involvement in later journey map creation using the Hypothesis-first or Research-first approaches that require more time and resources.
Many industries have produced examples of great customer experience enabled by digital and mobile.
Those examples demonstrate that you don’t need to have a digital product to take advantage of digital and mobile.
People love positive interactions with other people — and improving those interactions, rather than automating or eliminating them – may produce your greatest leaps in customer experience. [These aren’t really bullet points; do you have a better idea on how to format them?]
In marketing, we strive for the right message, to the right person at the right time. And with customer experience it’s similar. If digital offers the fastest and best customer experience, use it. But when in-person is required, provide that.
Every year corporate research and advisory firm Forrester surveys tens of thousands of consumers and publishes its Customer Experience Index. USAA is often at the top, with companies such as Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Zappos, Kaiser Permanente and others moving in and out of the top tier, too.
For several years Jon Picoult at Watermark Consulting has taken the results of Forrester’s survey and correlated them with shareholder value.He has found that the stock of public companies that rank high for customer experience significantly outperform both companies with poor CX and the market in general, and typically the companies that provide poor customer experience underperform the market. (graphic used with permission of Watermark Consulting)
Give customers what they want, and they’ll give you what you want.
Here are some ways you can market and sell more to your current customers.
Many companies split sales responsibilities between “hunters,” whose job is to close new accounts, and “farmers,” who are responsible for growing existing accounts.
The two roles typically represent two different sales personalities.
The farmers are concerned with long-term relationships. Farmers build on the initial customer relationship to learn more about what the customer needs, and how the vendor can provide it. Farmers know that the relationships that they’re building may take months or years to produce results. Many hunters would not accept sales timeframes of that length.
Farmers want to take care of “their” customers, and they want the internal resources to provide solutions to do that.
Of course, people are not so easily split into two types. Hunters often need a bit of farmer in them to truly understand prospects. And farmers need a bit of hunter in them to build on the initial engagement and expand into other parts of the company.
Call them what you will, the important thing is that you have people in your organization who have an explicit responsibility to grow current accounts, and that they have the tools to do so.
Your website is a great way not just to gather insight into what customers want but also to engage with them, support and upsell them.
Using a marketing automation program, you can track what customers are looking at down to the individual. Analyzing these interactions across all of your contacts in an account may give the “farmers” in your company insight into what an organization is looking for now (see more on the role of sales in account based marketing below).
If you have a customers-only section to your website, requiring registration and login, you can provide custom content there. You could even have private, branded portals for your most important customers. Many companies crowdsource their support function to an online community of customers answering questions for one another in a knowledgebase; the company may even give an annual award to the customer who provides the most frequent/best advice.
FAQs are exactly what they say they are: answers to your most frequently asked questions. Use FAQs to answer the questions that you hear over and over from customers.
And once people have visited customer-only pages, you could target them with remarketing ads about customer-only events and offers.
Just as email is a powerful channel for customer acquisition, it can also be central to customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.
The first step in using email to sell more to existing customers is to create segments in your lists for them. You need, at a minimum, several email segments such as Contacts, Active Prospects, and Customers, but you may also want even more granular segments based on other customer characteristics such as what or how much they’ve bought in the past, geography, or whatever other factors are important in your company.
Ecommerce companies with large lists create RFM cells based on Recency (how recently a person bought), Frequency (how often they buy) and Monetization (their average purchase). Using a 1-5 scale for each of the three factors, with 5 being the best, they can create 125 or more cells of current customers and test frequency of emails and different offers with each cell to maximize profits.
Create unique content for your customers. Customers need a different webinar than your prospects. If I’m a long-time customer, I don’t want to get the email offering 25% off the first year to new customers. Why, I might wonder, are your newest customers getting this, but not your most loyal ones?
So you need to segment and understand what messages and content will be most meaningful for existing customers.
Newsletters are just a special type of email, and they can be valuable for increasing sales to current customers. The mistake that many companies make is using the newsletter to talk about themselves (We have a new logo! We have a new customer!). Fill your newsletter full of information that adds value for your customer; sometimes that’s as easy as refocusing an article from “this is what we did for a customer” to “this is what this company achieved (with our help)”. Make the customer the hero of your stories.
As I’ll discuss in chapter 16 on social media, social media is not a great customer acquisition channel for most companies – at least not as good as email and many other programs.
Social media can play a significant role in growing existing accounts, though.
First, even without a significant following, you can listen to the conversation about your company and your competitors on social media to understand what customers like and dislike about you and them, and then react to those insights and individual comments.
Social media properties, especially on Facebook and Twitter, can be central to a company’s customer support. Some companies have social media “support” accounts separate from their main accounts. Two keys to successful social media customer support are (1) quickly respond to customers who post there, and (2) immediately take the issue offline. You don’t want a long, potentially embarrassing exchange to live forever on social media.
And you can use YouTube for customer support by posting videos demonstrating how to use and fix your products.
In-person events are one of the strongest brand building activities, and B2C companies may even sell a significant amount of products at one. In our increasingly digital world, the personal touch means even more.
Whether B2C or B2B, many companies have held successful events such as:
Every element of an event is part of the customer experience including the invitations, venue, decorations, music, food, activities, Wi-Fi and follow-up. Make it memorable, and on brand.
You can also provide online and virtual events, of course, such as webinars. And combine the physical and digital with augmented reality.
You don’t need to be an airline (miles) or credit card company (points) to reward your customers with a loyalty program.
Dry cleaners provide discount coupon books to their best customers.
Bookstores and pizza shops provide loyalty cards so that after 8 or 10 purchases the next one is free.
CVS uses data to personalize the discount offered to each customer on the checkout receipt. If a customer’s average purchase is, for example, $20, CVS may offer a discount if they spend $30 or $40. If their average purchase is $40, though, the starting point for the discount may be higher.
Bertucci’s offered diners contest cards that could only be redeemed on a future visit.
You can use email and text messages to alert customers to these special offers.
Text messaging lets you take advantage of the platform in your customer’s pocket and purse: their smartphone. Over 95% of texts are read. Can you claim that for your other marketing channels? (Text messaging is also called SMS, which means “Short Message Service”.)
I could have put text messaging in another chapter, or made it an entirely separate chapter, but it makes the most sense to use texts to reach existing customers who already trust you and are willing to give you their mobile phone information. Of course, the very first thing you need is permission from people to text them. Legally you need to get people to opt-in to text messages before sending them.
Text messages may be especially effective for retailers and other B2C companies. They may boost sales with timely texts such as “Show this message to get 20% off today on… [how should this be formatted?]
snow shovels before the storm hits
or
fall fashions that have just arrived
or
food on your way home from work
You also can use texts to improve your customers’ experience and bind them closer to you. For example, you can use text messages to let customers know the status of their order, and to confirm an appointment.
Use common sense, of course. Don’t send texts in the middle of the night (be especially careful about this if the people you’re texting aren’t all local). Too many of us sleep with our phone near our bed and don’t want to get woken at 3 am with a commercial message.
If you’re new to text messaging, it may seem uncomfortable or intrusive when you first do it. But if your customers have given you permission, go for it.
Account based marketing (ABM) is basically a new name for a B2B strategy that has been around forever under such names as key, strategic, or target account marketing. Rather than casting a wide net for new customers, as is done with much marketing, ABM is sometimes referred to as “spear fishing” – focusing personalized marketing on perhaps just a few dozen especially large, important accounts. While it can be used to land new accounts, ABM is especially effective for growing your most important existing accounts.
ABM requires deep cooperation between sales and marketing in terms of:
Helpful content created by marketing is valuable in educating the people at the target company and creating at least interest if not preference for the vendor. And with ABM you direct the content toward those individuals rather than waiting for them to find it. Late in the selling process sales reps may need to tell marketing to take an individual out of the marketing program altogether so they don’t get inappropriate messages that don’t really apply to where that person is now.
A major role of marketing in ABM is the development of the personalized content, which may take considerable effort for each company. If it’s possible in the vendor’s business, an effective tactic can be to send the prospect a one or two-page benchmark summary of their company’s performance, or some other highly personalized content, and suggest a competitive analysis as a foot-in-the-door next step. It’s hard for companies to ignore competitive information. Some vendors use expensive and creative dimensional mailers to gain the attention of people in target accounts, or one-to-one personalized events. Companies may need a drip program of several pieces of personalized content to get the desired meetings.
For example, voice recognition leader Nuance wanted to open C-suite doors for its sales reps to sell their documentation artificial intelligence solutions into new hospitals and other healthcare organizations. Their agency, King Fish Media, created this very cool 3D interactive mailer that included a role-specific brochure (for chief financial officers, chief information officers, and chief medical information officers – three different personas), an interactive book with video clips… and a drone! The personalized letter included a link to an account-specific URL. This package successfully opened a lot of doors for sales people.
You only do something like this for large, valuable accounts. Examples of other dimensional mailers – many more affordable than this – are provided in chapter 20.
While a single piece of ABM content, or an event for a specific account, may cost hundreds of dollars, the potential gain is so large that it’s worth it.
You also can customize your messages with personalized landing pages, remarketing ads, display ads, emails, LinkedIn ads, and so forth. Some tools let you target ads to particular individuals or companies. These are perfect for ABM.
ABM speaks the language of sales, which is usually more interested in closing and growing accounts than with individual leads. In some companies the ABM team pairs with an Account Based Sales counterpart. As ABM matures in a company, it may involve other areas beyond sales and marketing, too, such as customer service, support, and even product development – in short, the entire customer experience.
ABM is not a short-term marketing program; it is an approach that will reap rewards over months and years. Farmers welcome.
Since the accounts are already known before the ABM program begins, and the contacts are known or identified early on, ABM has squishier metrics than other marketing programs. You may measure+:e
ITSMA claims that ABM “has the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. Period.”[i] Perhaps that is achieved because it isn’t just a marketing campaign; ABM is a program that involves the entire company up to the highest executives. And it helps close and grow the accounts that have the highest lifetime value.
Could I be using software to write some, or all, of my blog posts? Could you tell? Would it matter?
Software is writing more and more of the content that we see every day, from Wikipedia (about 10 percent of listings) to the Associated Press (AP), which reported in 2014 it would be using software to write thousands of business articles a year, including many earnings reports and sports game wrap ups. Continue reading