Tag: Customer Research

Top B2B marketing posts for 2009 (hint: social media)

December 30, 2009 by Chris Koch

Who says B2B marketers are lagging in social media? If they are out there, they aren’t reading this blog. Of the top ten posts on my blog this year, only one did not involve social media. Though I’m supposed to be an objective researcher, I have to admit bias here. I think the social media phenomenon is the most exciting and important thing to hit communications in my lifetime. So writing about this stuff is fun. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

Thank you so much for your comments, links, and tweets this year. I’m happy to say that traffic to my blog has quadrupled (I’ve gone from a D-list blogger to a C-list, I think) in 2009 thanks to you. I look forward to collaborating even more in 2010. Have a happy and safe New Year!

Check out these top posts if you haven’t already:

  1. Six factors driving B2B social media marketing adoption
  2. The four components of social media management
  3. Want proof that the C-suite is into social media? Here it is.
  4. How to create B2B social media policies
  5. Why B2B marketers hate social media
  6. Social media strategy for B2B: what’s required and what’s optional
  7. Why bother with thought leadership? Five questions and answers.
  8. Eight reasons to monitor social media and a list of tools for doing it
  9. Where should your corporate blogs live?
  10. Why B2B marketing will become more visual, vocal, and mobile

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Categories: Blogging, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership • View Comments

Want to understand your customers’ business needs? Give them an award.

November 6, 2009 by Chris Koch

Like most marketers, I spend most of my time desperately seeking to understand my target audience (B2B marketers) and delivering content that they find relevant and engaging. It’s a struggle.

But once a year around June, my life gets a little easier. That’s when I get to sit back and watch the submissions for our Marketing Excellence Awards (MEA) roll in. It’s a beautiful thing. Marketers from around the world tell us in great detail about the campaigns and programs that have netted them the most business results.

We have five different categories for the awards that cover important areas of focus for B2B marketers. The number of entries we receive in each category and the quality of those entries give us a sense of marketers’ shifting priorities from year to year and reveal general strengths and weaknesses of the profession (for example, we’re great at sales enablement and demand generation; we suck at metrics—just not in our blood, it seems).

Everybody wins with the MEAs. For us, it’s an opportunity to build a closer relationship with the winners and generate some great thought leadership. The winners get serious recognition for their work that helps their companies and their careers. If you haven’t considered creating an awards program for your target customers, you should.

I wish I could take credit for the MEAs, but it was developed long before I got to ITSMA. I also wish I could take credit for the excellent eBook that oozes with best practices from this year’s winners. You have to check it out. It was developed by my ITSMA colleagues Pam O’Rourke and Maria Lindberg.

However, I can share some of the best practices we’ve developed for separating the wheat from the chaff in the MEAs. The guiding principles we use to determine the winners are the same ones that guide the success of any marketing program: innovation, execution, and business results. We ask a series of questions designed to reveal how well the entrants have fulfilled those three key principles:

  1. What is the story? We humans are wired for stories. What is the narrative that explains what you are trying to accomplish with this program? Creating the narrative helps project members focus their efforts and will help sell the effort to others inside the business and with customers.
  2. What are the motivating factors? Successful marketing programs always have a compelling call to action. But marketing programs are themselves calls to action. There should be an important business justification that causes marketing to create the program. That justification can come from inside, such as wanting to enter a new market or shore up sagging sales, or outside, such as a new competitor entering the market.
  3. What is the customer need? The depth and creativity of your research can be the deciding factor in whether the program rises above the noise in the marketplace. Research provides the supporting evidence for a new insight into customer or market needs. For example, segmentation could reveal a market that you never knew existed. Role-based research can help personalize your message to the needs of the specific buyers and influencers involved in the purchasing decision.
  4. How do you quantify the need? Research also provides the quantification of the need and the benefits of your solution that are most worth highlighting for customers, such as:
    • Improve efficiency
    • Increase customer satisfaction
    • Increase profitable revenue
  5. Where is the innovation? To be sure, one of marketing’s primary roles is to support sales. But marketing should also be helping drive the business strategy and execution of the company. One of the ways to do this is through programs that challenge the current ways of doing things, both internally and with customers. Marketing programs should help the business stand apart from competitors in the segment. The best signal of success is when competitors feel compelled to respond.
  6. What are the constraints? Of course, all marketing programs come with constraints. Budget is the overriding limiter, but it’s important to quantify as many constraints as possible because the limiters help define the ambition of the project.
  7. How do you measure success? Establishing clear metrics before you start provides guard rails for the project and makes it easier to provide progress reports. Of course, knowing the metrics before you start also makes the data gathering process much easier.

Do you have an awards program with your customers? If you already have one, are you asking the right questions to find the best of the best (and make your life as a marketer easier)? Please comment with a link to your awards program and tips for making the most of them.

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Categories: Customer Relationships • View Comments

Want to launch a new product or service faster? Do some research.

September 25, 2009 by Chris Koch

I helped host an ITSMA round table this week and a near universal complaint from our B2B technology clients was how difficult it is to launch new services in a fast, efficient way. One client summed it up by saying that there are two points of resistance in the process of bringing new things to market. The first comes at the beginning of the process—the “why” battle—where everyone takes pot shots at the new idea. The second comes after everyone signs off on the new offering and they are suddenly confronted with all the things they need to do to make it happen—the “how” battle. The organization goes into a kind of collective amnesia as all the interested parties begin denying that they ever wanted to have anything to do with this misguided thingamajig—what’s it called again?—and complain about not having the resources or the time to make the proposed launch date.

Put more energy into the first battle
Our client said that in the past he has devoted most of his energies to the “how” battle because his company prides itself on seamless delivery. However, this week he said he was going to shift his strategy. “I’m convinced that we put so little into the first battle that we end up spending way more time and money on the second than we need to,” he said.

In other words, companies start trying to deliver new products and services before they’ve adequately answered all the questions about whether this new thing is something customers actually want, whether it’s something that salespeople can actually sell, and whether it is something that operations can actually deliver at a reasonable cost.

Stop relying on human nature
The biggest reason for this lack of investment at the front end is human nature. We’re optimists at heart, and we like to trust that past success will lead to future success. We also like to trust our own instincts and experiences as useful guides. And we don’t like to spend a lot of time weighing our decisions before taking action. Makes us feel weak.

But of course, all we can really ever trust is the data. Good data, that is.

Talk to the right people first
By good data I mean taking a comprehensive research approach during the “why” stage. When we’re thinking about new offerings, we need to consider all the pieces of the business that will be affected by the decision—from customers, to operations, to strategy, to profitability—and factor them into the research.

We need to make sure that we gather the opinions of all the different constituencies that will be affected by the decision. Important stakeholders need proof, through research, as to whether their own experiences, views, and hunches are borne out by the facts. Otherwise, they will fight tooth and nail during the “how” stage because they haven’t really bought into the idea that the new thing is necessary, nor do they want to change what they are doing to accommodate it.

This is why the second fight takes so much time. Those who resist keep going back to the “why” argument and point out that there was never convincing evidence that we needed this new thing in the first place. Meanwhile, the backers of the new thing are convinced that the organization has already invested too much time and money into getting this far and that it’s too late to turn back now. Resistance hardens and it takes much more time and resources to actually implement the new thing—meanwhile, no one’s really sure if it will succeed or not.

It’s tough to work your butt off on something that you’re not sure about. That’s the nut of the problem in delivering new services. Instead of focusing on design and delivery, we’re still wondering—and fighting about—whether what we’re doing is worthwhile.

Do research early and save money on the second battle
It seems like a waste of time to stop and ask everyone what they think before plunging ahead with new offerings, but it will save money in the end.

In working with our clients, we’ve found that it’s particularly important to survey both customers and employees when developing an important new service, because it allows you to put the “why” argument to rest using objective data. You can compare employee perceptions about customer needs and the potential new service with the perceptions and needs of the customers themselves. What a concept, huh?

Now getting customer input isn’t as simple as asking them what they want and then delivering it to them. You need to balance their wants with their willingness to pay for those wants and your ability to deliver on them for a reasonable cost. That’s why the research process needs to be iterative. Here’s a typical progression:

  1. Competitive intelligence. It pays to know what’s available from competitors before you develop your own offering.
  2. Influencer research (analysts, journalists, bloggers, academics, etc.). Get help in determining the need in the market and pla around with options before going ahead.
  3. (Concurrent) Customer research and employee/partner research. Using the competitive and influencer research as a base, develop a survey that asks about the market need and a few different versions of the offering.

If our work with clients is any indication, you’ll be surprised at the gap in perception between customers and employees. For example, one company we worked with was considering offering 24×7 support as a new service, which would have meant a huge investment of resources and big changes in its organization.

On the survey, almost two-thirds of employees said that customers wanted 24×7 support, while just a handful of customers actually wanted and were willing to pay for 24×7 support. What they did want was 12×5 support in their local time zone with the option of 24×7 support for critical issues. The data was incontrovertible evidence that the service offering as originally envisioned was off base. Working with development and delivery people (who took the internal survey), the company worked to modify the offering to meet customer needs—while saving millions in the process.

For marketers, the research becomes great fodder for a marketing campaign that offers rich evidence of listening to customers and developing new services based on their actual needs. Makes our jobs that much easier.

What do you think? Will you share your war stories about new product or service launches?

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Categories: ITSMA Research, Service Development and Delivery • View Comments

Get Beneath the Surface with "Deep Metaphors"

August 19, 2008 by Chris Koch

We often complain that B2B products and services don’t appeal to customers at a personal level. But maybe we’re just not trying hard enough.

Jerry Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, has an interesting theory about how to reach customers below the surface, called “deep metaphors.” In this excellent interview, Zaltman defines deep metaphors as “fundamental frames or lenses that we use to orient ourselves to the world around us. They work largely below awareness or in our subconscious minds and shape and reshape just about everything we think, feel, hear, say, and do. They are almost a secret or hidden language of thought and action.”

As an example of how to reach the subconscious, Zaltman shows a Michelin tire commercial in which a baby is sitting inside a tire that is floating on water during a light rain. Inside the tire, pairs of stuffed animals surround the baby—any resemblance to Noah’s Ark is purely intentional, says Zaltman. In interviews that Zaltman did with viewers of the commercial, he heard Michelin portrayed as the holder of safety for families.

In all, there are seven deep metaphors, says Zaltman. In this article, they are defined as:

  • Balance (equilibrium)
  • Transformation (changing states or status)
  • Journey (as in life)
  • Container (keeping things in and keeping things out)
  • Connection (feelings of belonging or exclusion)
  • Resource (providing survival)
  • Control

Counted together, these seven metaphors account for 70 percent of our inner feelings, according to Zaltman, who helps companies uncover these metaphors through extensive interviews with customers through his consulting firm.

It’s an expensive process, no doubt. But it got me thinking. Perhaps we could use these metaphors to guide some of our programs with customers in B2B.

I think B2B technology marketers should pay particular attention to the metaphor of connection. In hundreds of interviews with technology people, I’ve always noticed their passion for the profession. Indeed, I think technology people are more loyal to their community of practice than they are to their companies. Anyone willing to work for free (as in the open source movement) is fired by passion.

And two of the passions that fire the open source movement are connection and recognition. In survey after survey of open source contributors, they always cite recognition by their peers—as expressed by downloads of their code—as their main motivation.

I think we in marketing should keep this quest for connection in mind when developing our programs and campaigns. What do you think?

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