Marketing Interactions

Transparent CRM Streamlines Processes

Many companies I've worked with have spent a lot of time and money implementing CRM systems, only to struggle with user adoption and commitment to continuous updating.  There are various responses to this, depending on who you talk to:

Executive: We give them tools and they don't use them.  So, why give them more tools?

Sales:  We work on commission and need face time to make quota.  Hire a clerical person to do data input. 

Marketing: We can't effectively nurture leads if they aren't kept updated.

Contact Center:  If we'd known the latest information about the customer, we'd have been better able to help them. 

Any of this sound familiar?  Here's the deal, sales people do not have the time to spend inputing data that's really double entry and not productive for them.  After all, they know the information about their contacts, so what's in it for them to spend precious time updating a system that's basically a record keeper?

Answer: Make the updating of the CRM system transparent to the sales team.

How?  By providing them tools that help them do their jobs more effectively, but are smart enough to pull the relevant information out the backside and update it to the CRM automatically.  By streamlining processes and eliminating work that drains time from other tasks, you can create a winning situation for all constituents.

A few tools that you can implement on your sales portal that will help you accomplish this are a sales letter generator and a proposal generator with integration to your CRM.  Allow your sales team to share stories about what efforts helped them close the sale - add them to your knowledgebase and attach the comments to the customer's record in the CRM.

From your customer portal or website, if you implement a requirements survey for new project requests or a customer satisfaction survey or a suggestion area, it's a matter of web services to pull the relevant information into the CRM and update a customer or a lead. 

The most important thing to do is to look at the processes you have in place now, determine which of them can do double duty and eliminate all the overlap.  While you're at it, don't forget to think about what you'll need to be able to work with all this new information.  The ability to search/query it in different ways and generate meaningful reports that go beyond numbers and statistics can be extremely useful in planning/altering your strategic sales goals and achievements.

Plus, the added time in the sales persons day means they can sell more...faster.  Isn't that the goal in the first place?

For more on this subject, take a look at Brian Carroll's post, Why Don't Sales People Update the CRM and What Can Be Done About It?

Meeting the Need for Social Networking

Do you offer your employees the capabilities of the latest social networking tools with an eye toward increasing productivity?

I'm not saying let them all blog away, I'm suggesting that there are ways to invoke the same types of interactions via your sales portal, partner extranet or company intranet that will let them do the same kinds of things.  And do them safely behind the firewall and within security parameters.

The following are some features you might want to think about implementing to help your employees streamline their workloads and gain the collaboration and interaction that your current portals are lacking:

• Share your story options that allow employees to post content about how they've won deals or how to work with a difficult customer situation or even how to interpret a requirement requested by a customer.  This information can be useful across the enterprise and will help you capture knowledge that would otherwise live with a specific employee.
• Commenting on the stories or on other site content allows the people running the web site to gauge how well they're providing information that your employees need and also facilitates collaboration and extending the conversation about that topic.
• Allowing them to take topics to a discussion forum and get feedback quickly from company experts can help both streamline what it takes to get the job done and build a database of useful knowledge.
• My favorites file cabinet on the homepage of any portal can allow your users some discretion over controlling how they access the content they need all the time and eliminate time-intensive searching to find something they use on a regular basis.  What one uses, another might not find helpful, so providing this capability allows them to customize their views.
• Consider creating an RSS feed for a critical area of a portal or even for all new content added to the portal so users know immediately if there's new information they need that's now available.  This can also be accomplished by utilizing a "Notify Me" option and allowing users to select how they'd like to be notified of new content (each post, daily, weekly bundles), and which areas of the site they want to be notified about.

These are only a few ideas, but might go a long way toward satisfying the growing need for interaction that is being driven by the social networking era.  Holding your employees back and making it difficult for them to interact won't serve you and it may even slow down current productivity as employees try to find work-arounds or even go outside your company to interact.

What are you doing to keep up with new technologies your employees are clamoring for?

How effectively does your website play with users?

Different types of people will visit your website doing research and looking for reasons to either include your company in their search for a solution, or to eliminate it.  Effectvely addressing the needs of different types of buyers is a tough order. 

It helps to acknowledge that different personalities approach the buying process in different ways.  For example, extroverts are more likely to want two-way interaction options, while introverts may want more information availability without intrusion.  Creative people value experiences and like personalization and action opportunities.  Caretaker types will tend to subjugate their needs while first making sure they meet the needs of others.  Methodical people will want specifics and details and to know they will get the results they want if they use your company to meet their needs. (I've oversimplified here, but this should give you the basic idea.)

There are many different permutations, but you can see how those five examples could easily approach the buying process with different expectations and perspectives about how they will solve their problems.  The trick is to make sure your website addresses the needs of all of them.

For the Extrovert, make sure they have the option to contact a sales rep or your company easily.  The ability to join an expertise forum and proactively join a conversation about your products will appeal to them.  Above all, make sure that when they make a request, they get an answer -- and not just an auto reply.  Webinar registrations will also be higher with this group, although once you gain some trust with introverts, they may attend as well because they are in still removed from participating unless they choose to do so.

For the Introvert, this person will want to browse your content without interruption.  They may feel personalization attempts are an intrusion, so make sure that they don't have to give you any information they don't want to in order to access the information they need to gain confidence about your products, services and solutions.  You're going to have to give these people more before you can get anything in return. 

The Creative will appreciate the boldness of your user interface and the types of options available to them.  These are the ones who will quickly engage with flash pieces, videos and case studies that show how others have used your products.  They'll be the ones who will want to see how far they can push your products to do things on the edge.  Showing flexibility and variety in your case studies, methodology and approaches to working with customers will be appealing to them.

Caretakers will want to know that your solution has positive benefits for the different constiuents involved in the project.  Showing them the way the results your product delivers impacts different stakeholders will be important.  Additiionally, they'll be the ones most interested in the support and service your company provides.  They'll want to make sure that ongoing needs can be handled efficiently.

Methodical people are the ones who want all the specifics and details.  Data Sheets, in-depth white papers, and information about the process involved in implementing the solution.  They want to make sure they are in control of the situation and will want all the facts.  Intelligent FAQs that deal with deep issues specific to the product they're interested in.  Comparison matrices that demonstrate why your product is the solution they need, versus the competitors'.  Requirements surveys that help them define what is required in purchasing your product and specifications that help them know exactly what your product or service can handle are going to be of interest to them.

And finally, a little disclaimer to say the above is what we've seen and is no way conclusive.  But this should be enough to give you a way to evaluate how your website might interact with some of the different personality types and give you some ideas how to adjust it if you find your website skewed too far toward one type, at the expense of others.  The idea for this post came from reading Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? while I was reading their breakdown of personality types.  If you are interested in this kind of thing, go buy the book.

Shiny and Deep - The Interactive Marketing Story

This is a cool concept.  Marketing has to be pretty slick to catch our attention given all the messages clamoring to be noticed.  However, if there's no substance beneath that shiny surface, what's there to talk about?

From a B2B Website perspective, this refers to the way you present information beyond the shiny homepage and the catchy hyperlinks and graphics.  How deep is it?  Is it a story that your website users, prospects and customers will engage with?  One of the biggest questions to answer is, once they've read a scene of your story (let's say a white paper) are they going to move on to the next (perhaps a case study) because the story they've read so far has impact?

I appropriated the concept from Seth Godin (see the post) who uses the fact that there's a Bob Dylan Encyclopedia to emphasize depth beyond his songs.  Which is pretty cool.   I didn't know such a thing existed.  Sheesh, where have I been?

The point being, would anyone be interested in your story enough to read the whole book? 

What can you do to improve the odds, you might ask?

• Make sure your content and articles logically lead to another piece of the story
• Develop interesting ways to talk about your company and products - engaging ways
• Present information that shows a new angle or strategic thinking outside the norm - something shiny and deep at the same time.
• Reference other related content to put the story in context
• Discuss topics in online conversation areas that take the story live
• Create interesting scnearios that your prospects and customers can see themselves in and "get" what your solution can do for them through vicarious experience

How much deep does your shiny lead to?

Scenarios for Customer Interactions Via Portal

Trying to design a customer portal is one of those mountainous projects that can be overwhelming.  It feels like a huge project and sometimes it's hard to know where to start.  The easiest way is to look at it from the outside first.

What experiences do you want the people to have who use it?  There are an overwhelming amount of resources you can choose to put on a customer portal.  For example:

1. Order Purchasing and History
2. Project/Order Status
3. Service requests
4. Product Information
5. New Project documents, plans, proposals, etc.
6. Updates
7. Warranty information
8. Training courses
9. Industry trends and how you help your customers stay ahead of them
   
10. New Innovations
11. Discussion forums with your experts
12. Discussion forums - peer to peer
13. User groups
14. Customer stories showing successful uses for your products
15. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
16. Requirements definition tools
17. Strategic knowledge

And the list can go on and on.  But once you have the list, how do you turn it into a user-friendly portal experience that delivers value?

The first step is determining how the things you decide to include are done now?

• What processes are in place?
• Do they work?  For both you and your customers?
• How can they be improved?  What's the point?
• Are there integrations to be done to ease the flow of information both to the portal and from the portal to legacy systems?
• Once the customer participates in a specific process, what do they do?  What's next?

A good way to do this is to develop scenarios for each thing and step your way through them like you are the customer.  It's important to put yourself in that mindset and think about the processes in context.  Then think about what the customer's logical next step options could be.  This will help you determine what portal resources should be available in certain areas.  Can be more than once, so don't limit yourselves.

This will help you determine how your portal resources will fit together.  Determine a flow structure.  Then you'll want to switch hats and do the same thing from a company perspective.  Which has it's own quirks and difficulties and is more in-depth than today's post.

Scenarios for interactions are a great way to put yourself in your customers' shoes and find out what the experience is like for them.  It doesn't hurt to run your final version by a few of your customers and gauge their reactions.  And don't pick all the same kinds of customers either.  Different perspectives can shed a lot of light.

How happy would you be walking in your customers' shoes in dealing with your company?

Every Click is a Conversion

I was reading "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?" and came across that thought.  It makes perfect sense for B2B websites with long sales cycles.  With the added pressure for B2B marketers to produce measurable ROI, it seems that if each click is a conversion that builds relationships and trust, engagement and interest, then the content is doing what it's supposed to do.

The Eisenbergs's latest book is loaded with a wealth of information.  I definitely urge anyone who is driving the marketing conversation at their company to go pick up a copy.  Heck, if you're at all curious about persuasive scenarios and personas (which I've talked about a lot in the past) then you owe it to yourself to see what they have to say.

Back to the clicks as conversion idea.  As I think about this, I wonder if the people who build B2B websites ever think about the site user's context?  What happens when a user clicks on a link at their site?  What scenario are you hoping to initiate?

Have you thought further than the one article you're posting?  Like what happens after the user clicks to read the article?  What else to they see?  Are you building a path that escalates attention or are you only focused on that one click?

All the research shows that people spend an inordinate amount of time researching purchases on the web.  Many B2B purchases are big enough to demand due diligence, but also big enough that the people charged with overcoming challenges need to develop a way to think about the possibilities available to them in finding a solution.  Quite often this is daunting and leaves them floundering for a way to frame the conversation.

The opportunity to engage them by enabling the user to "see" the issues, obstacles, and possibilities they wouldn't think about on their own is huge.  If your website provides content in a context that not only frames, but encourages, interaction and dialogue because it's focused on them and not you, then you're on your way to building a relationship. 

This book discusses the perspectives and scenarios that are critical to consider when your goal is to create meaningful marketing interactions.

In case I've stirred your curiosity, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing Blog interviewed the authors and posted the podcast.

Or just go buy the book and get started.

Marketing is NOT One-Size-Fits-All

The advent of social networking has pretty much eliminated the company as the one who perpetuates acceptance of their products.  The hot concepts in marketing today revolve around personalization, collaboration and interaction.  And those all need to be available on demand.

Feeling overwhelmed?

Well, it's been a long time in coming.  Back in 2000, I watched people talk about it but not really "get" any of it.  Nor did it come to the fore until companies were dragged, kicking and screaming, into change. 

I was on a conference call the other day with a sales team that was being presented with a portal.  After the presentation, they were asked what types of tools they'd like to see in addition to what currently existed as phase I.  Every reponse revolved around collaboration and personalization.  And they wanted the portal to be able to respond to them when they asked it to.

The idea that one set of value propositions will serve your salesforce is over.  Every proposal will fare much better if it's personalized.  Yes, this is arguably a lot of work.  However, there are tools that can help.  One of the keys to this is to realize that personas drive perspective.  Personalization drives impact and the level of engagement depends on emotive response to a large degree.

Knowing who the people are you are selling to will help.  I've talked about personas in the past and Best Buy has made them an art form.  But here's the deal --  Your salesforce will not know all the different types of personas or perspectives involved.  That's why adding the ability for them to share and help team members define the markets on a more individualized basis is a win for everyone.  An active exchange of expertise will only improve the ability to create interactions that drive vested interest.  Once a prospect has a vested interest, they will find it very difficult to walk away.

Another thing to remember is that no two problems/challenges are alike.  They may look the same, smell the same and have the similar symptoms, but the solution for one customer may not necessarily work for another.  Even within the same industry.

Why?  Well, many reasons.  Corporate culture, industry, business processes, the beliefs and personality of the CEO and other company assets may be configured in completely different ways.  This requires strategic insight and expertise to align your solutions in a way that not only tells them you can do what you promise, but that their emotional investment will have a pay off.  Trust is a huge factor.

Trust is earned.  Mass marketing has nothing to do with any of that in a B2B transaction unless you are selling paper clips.  I tend to think the best thing to remember is that you need to differentiate yourself from all the other folks selling similar products and solutions.  You may know your products are uniquely suited to solve their problems, but the bigger question is, do they?

What are you doing to ensure your marketing is not one-size-fits-all?

Lead Generation for The Complex Sale

Ever wondered how you can get the inside track on selling complex sales to the B2B market?  Brian Carroll's book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale is hot off the press as of today and provides some great insights to this difficult task. 

I had the privilege of reading an advanced copy a few months ago and I have to say that he's covered a lot of ground.  Some of the best things I like about it begin with his conviction that, "Lead generation becomes a conversation, a dialogue; it is not a series of campaigns."

He further clarifies, "In addition to all these resources [Intranet portals, blogs, and extranets], the best strategy is to have an open dialogue to obtain sales lead feedback such as:

• Was this helpful? Why? Why not?
• What else should we be doing?
• What other questions could we have asked to make the lead even better?
• What are we doing that we should stop?

He quotes analyst research to back up his assertions and the eye-opening observations are not to be missed.  For example, did you know that, "A study by the Aberdeen Group concluded that 40 to 60 hours of the sales person's month is spent re-creating sales-ready, customer-relevant collateral material [?]"

He further explains that inquiries are not leads and gives you a process for defining your own companies universal lead type and message map. He includes a some key points about value propositions from Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies that should not be missed.

I don't want to give it all away for you, but one of the reasons I really enjoyed the book is his focus on the many different channels for lead development, the consistency of the message and the real need for interaction to nurture sales with long selling cycles. 

Check out Brian's blog for the press release and podcast about the launch.  Better yet, do yourself a favor and buy the book. 

Marketing as a Service

Marketing to change someone's behavior is marketing as marketing.  Marketing that delivers value by offering solutions to problems relevant to the customer/prospect is a service.

I like the idea that marketing can be a service.  The very idea is indicative of something helpful.  Communication that provides value.  And marketing should provide value.  In fact, if it doesn't, then it's just clutter, spam, advertising or annoying. 

If marketing is a service, then it follows that your online interactions should be engaging, actionable, provide knowledge transfer about something that impacts your audience's need to solve a problem. Flat prose is not enough.  Flashy graphics can't do it alone. 

When I get marketed to about something I'm interested in, I want to learn something useful.  I want to be at least a centimeter closer to finding a way to solve my problem or answer my need.  This can be achieved in a variety of ways.  But, however I learn something, the next step I'm offered had better deliver more than the first interaction.  Or you lose me.

Applying that to the web or your intranet is not rocket science.  It's recognizing that one-to-one is becoming the norm it tried to be years ago and tanked.  Companies weren't ready.  The advent of social networks and the ability of people to comment to the community at large means that companies wanting to engage their prospects and customers need to step up their efforts at conversation.  No more of this looking down the hill at the masses and telling them how it's going to be.  This goes for your employees too.  You should be marketing to them more than to anyone else.

Engage and impact.  Two key concepts.  Not all that difficult if you're willing to open up the conversational exchange instead of relying on an info push. 

The thing is, if marketing is going to be a service, it needs to be fluid.  That means that everything that gets said can't be vetted and companies need to start letting their employees take an active role in the process.  Part of the enablement of making marketing a service means that knowledge and expertise needs to be shared across the enterprise in a way that works.

Posting mountains of content for your employees, customers and prospects to read isn't going to do it.  No one has the time.  Think about it.  How much learning goes on through conversation?  The combination of content and interaction in context with the problem they need to solve is what's going to be effective. 

Creating an interactive collaborative exchange around the knowledge that will solve problems builds relationships and closes sales.  Learning that your company actually has the expertise to deliver on promises is key.

This is an offline example that could have been drastically improved if the intranet had useful interaction and collaborative capabilities: 

I was in Home Depot trying to buy a shower surround a few days ago.  I looked at the displays, chose one and then tried to figure out how to get it.  I finally learned I had to go to the kitchen area to order it.  Then I spent two hours with a sales guy who looked, but couldn't find help in the intranet system, looked through catalogs and called 800 numbers trying to figure out how to order it.  We finally walked back to the display because he said that Home Depot doesn't install shower surrounds. 

I pointed to the poster on the display featuring Home Depot installation and he said it must be a mistake.  He took the poster down and we trooped back to the phone so he could call and find out.  Yep - they do installs.  Okay, good.  I made an appointment and things were looking up.  Two hours I'm into this.  Then he starts entering the order in the computer.  The shower surround I wanted is no longer available.  What? 

We walk back to the display and he shakes his head and points to the yellow price sticker.  "Ah, yes," he says.  "This line has been discontinued." When I asked him how I should've known that and why it was still on display, he just shook his head and said, "I have no idea." Then he told me to go to the new Lowes down the street.  You think I'm ever going back to a Home Depot?

If they had an intranet that actually helped them do more than enter orders, things might improve.  Their employees wouldn't be left holding the bag without knowledge or answers and I might still be a customer. 

Marketing as a service.  Interesting concept.  What do you think?

CRM Effectiveness Improves with Experience

Most people think CRM effectiveness centers around making sure your sales reps are utilizing your CRM system.  I think effectiveness is better achieved when combined with Customer Experience Interactions.

If the goal is to cut costs while delivering better service, then it would follow that involving your customers is key to achieving ROI and customer loyalty.  If you want to streamline service processes and build relationships, then collaborating with customers can produce more effective returns.  The alternative being to take a look at your customers enterprise wide and then provide a composite experience based on what works for a percentage of them. 

What I'm talking about is a Customer Portal.  If done correctly, a portal can do the following:

• Provide customer-wide information across all customers
• Give customers their own personalized view of content and resources pertinent to them
• Highlight specific information of interest to specific customers and not clutter up other customers' areas.
• Keep them in touch with current projects - showing status, requesting comments and submitting requests for enhancements or service
• Show them their order history with the company
• Mainline them to their sales and service contacts who know them so service is a continuation process instead of a start over and tell me all your information ordeal when they need to interact with your company.
• Allow them to manage their portal users on-demand, eliminating this responsibility from your service departments.  But still allowing you to oversee them.
• Create specific discussion forums for one customer or create expertise forums where they can interact with their peers and your experts to build knowledge and engage more fully by getting a view of how others use your products/services.
• Invite customers to participate in company events that deliver relevant value based on which products or services they use now or are considering using in the future.
• Use surveys to determine requirements for new product/service deployements, to assess customer satisfaction and to research the demand for new innovations.

Get the idea?  The possibilities are endless.

The ability to provide each customer with their own secure "microsite" as part of the overall portal, but to also show general information that applies to all customers allows you to personalize their view of your company.  The options you give them will build relationships by adding collaboration instead of only pushing what you think they are interested in.  Knowing what your customers want and delivering that is very powerful.  Understanding and addressing individual customer perspectives is the key to building successful interactions.

The kicker is to have certain interactions update the CRM system so you have a system of record for the customer.  Webservices make integration easy to accomplish and should go a long way in eliminating huge costs traditionally associated with aligning disparate systems and removing the silo barrier issue that has plagued many companies in the past.  Integration also streamlines processes so tasks only need to be done once, but can be reflected where needed.

According to Peppers and Rogers, (heard in a recent webinar with Don Peppers) customer advocacy is the number one driver for customer loyalty.

How much experience does your CRM initiative promote?