This is GREAT! We are both customers and big fans of Hubspot, and they released a new video yesterday and we wanted to be sure readers of The B2B Lead saw it. It already has over 200 diggs and is Number 1 in YouTube when you search “marketing.”

Continuing with the 4th in a series (#1) (#2) (#3) discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. Again, thanks to those who have offered comments and questions so far.

Working our way down a list of six areas:

1. Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. (We are here) Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting
6. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions

To get the very best read on how a customer feels about their entire experience with your company, a scoring schema needs to be created to take metrics from both qualitative (loyalty) and quantitative (satisfaction) feedback into account. And it’s more important to get the idea and then craft a schema attuned directly to your situation than it is to try and create some sort of template. The key is to start producing metrics that people can use. There is nothing more boring than a report about customer experience unless the data comes within a highly actionable framework. To get there, let me share some tactics taken from a very recent Customer Experience Survey of ReachForce customers (shameless company promotion).

First, when we set the Customer Experience Survey up, we asked questions from both ends: quantitative (designed to detect technical satisfaction) and qualitative (designed to detect perceptions and feelings). Since this was ReachForce’s first major CEI initiative we paid special attention to creating solid questions for benchmarking – against which future survey results will be compared:

Quantitative question examples

• Repeat purchase
• # Data quality issues
• Data value (ROI)
• Frequency of use
• Length of use
• Have you recommended
• 3 most important purchase criteria

Qualitative question examples

• Purchase experience
• Usage experience
• Repeat purchase experience
• Expertise
• Compare with other vendors
• Overall satisfaction
• Would you recommend
• Will you renew
• Would you seek our brand for related services

Again, keep the wording simple and short when writing the questions and use multiple choice or True/False response, except for text boxes to capture responses for purchase criteria. Don’t be tempted to assume your own multiple choices to list for purchase criteria – Get these from your customers in their own words. More on this later in the series.

Here are a few more thoughts to consider while you are deciding on questions to ask.

• Repeat purchase / frequency of use / length of use metrics will help calculate truer weights for responses to qualitative “feelings.” The more a customer has purchased from you, the more weight their feelings should have.
• Ask the ‘Overall Satisfaction’ question up front as a way to set the best survey taking tone for the responder. Doing this immediately plucks the respondent’s overall impression of your company right out of the air – then builds upon it as subsequent questions are answered. This is a good way to get very honest answers.
• Use skip logic to route newer customers away from questions about repeat purchase or renewals. In general, avoid questions that make the respondent feel like you are trying to up-sell or cross-sell.
• On qualitative questions, give responders a way to respond in varying degrees. It’s hard to get into someone’s head with just Yes/No. For example, if you ask, “Would you recommend our company?” some good variances might be “Absolutely,” “Likely,” “Maybe,” “No.”

The point of the whole effort is to target actionable data discovery to bolster a competitive advantage both by leveraging the positive and finding/fixing the negative. As a simple example the bullets below about recommending ReachForce are simply an expanded take on Net Promoter. The big difference is the angle we took in terms of prompted versus non-prompted advocacy, or as I view it, the ‘gap population,’ — and the differences that exist between companies that are a reference account (92% spending x amount) versus a full blown advocate (73% spending y amount).

• 92% OF REACHFORCE CUSTOMERS SAY THEY’D RECOMMEND US (IF ASKED)
• 73% SAY THEY’VE ALREADY RECOMMENDED US (WITHOUT BEING ASKED)

As we do our Customer Success planning for 2009 we know that 92% of customers would act as a reference account if we asked. We also know that 72% have acted as a ReachForce advocate without our asking. Additional cross tab analysis shows that the 19 point gap is comprised of customers who are more satisfied with us from a technical, quantitative perspective than they are from the warm and fuzzy ‘experience’ perspective.

This is huge because now we not only know who they are – we also know what they specifically need from us to take that step up from ‘reference’ to ‘advocate.’ It’s so important because we know (by cross-tabbing these metrics with Customer Lifecycle Value) that the 73% of customers who are advocates also spend more! What better way to fine tune projections for organic growth and cross-sell, up-sell opportunity? More next week. Chime in customer experience geeks.

In this whitepaper, Marketo sets up a great analogy between Lead Nurturing and Dating that we can all learn from (lead nurturing that is, you’re in the wrong place if you are looking for dating tips).  I don’t want to regurgitate the whitepaper, so I will just expand on a few things that Marketo touches on.

Marketo talks about the introduction to your prospect or “date”.  If you are looking for a long term commitment, be sure you are looking for your type.  If you know your best dates are tall, dark, and handsome, then that is who you should be looking for.  Do you know your “type”  when it comes to prospects?  Do you know you are looking for high tech firms with 1000+ employees that are in the bay area or are you looking for healthcare companies with 20,000+ employees on the east coast?  You have to create a profile of your ideal “mate” or customer; after all you don’t want to flirt with (market to) everyone.

Marketo also says you should be where your potential dates or prospects are.  If you know you like tall, dark, and handsome, don’t travel to Sweden looking for your mate.  If you know your prospects prefer LinkedIn to Facebook, then that is where you should be too.  Don’t waste your time creating Facebook ads and pages – you are not trying to catch every fish in the sea.  Instead, create a group on LinkedIn and participate in LinkedIn Answers.

The whitepaper goes into a few ideas for building your thought leadership.  Whitepapers and eBooks are both great but again knowing your audience will pay off here as well.  The eBook may be the “hip and stylish younger sibling to the nerdy whitepaper,” David Meerman Scott, but if you are trying to reach a highly technical audience, a well written and detailed whitepaper may be a better fit.

I guess my point, once again, is know your customer.  For another analogy, you have to know what kind of fish you are going after so you can use the right bait (shrimp, worms, cheese) and hang your line in the right kind of water (fresh water, salt water).  Casting a wide net will get you a lot, but will it get what you are looking for?  Are you using the right bait to catch your next customer, ie whitepapers, eBooks, blogs?  Are you in the right kind of water, ie on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or in person tradeshows?

Be sure to read the whitepaper for the full analogy (they do a much better job than I).  For those of you who have read the whitepaper, what did you think?  I know I left out a lot.  What great lead nurturing tips (or heck, I’ll take dating tips at this point too – not for me though, I’m engaged) did you get out of it?

Marketo provides B2B marketing automation software that translates marketing spending into revenue. Their award-winning lead management software features email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and closed-loop reporting capabilities to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability.

Next Thursday, we will be chatting about David Meeman Scott’s eBook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing (no I am not stalking him, but yes I am a superfan).

Last year, we at ReachForce declared January 15th the “Oh $#%@!” Day in Marketing.

Here’s why:

Are you prepared to deliver sales-ready leads in January? December is typically a slower month for B2B Marketing teams, since most organizations slow down current marketing programs and instead spend their time preparing for the next year. Then, you leave for the holidays happy to have completed the painful process of planning and budgeting for the next year’s activities. But once the holiday haze clears, it’s January and everyone is ready to kick off the New Year with new customer wins. Your sales team wants to know, “Where are my leads? I’ve got a number to hit.”

The “Oh $#%@!” moment…

If you wait until you get back from the holidays to begin developing your marketing programs, when are you going to have leads to pass to sales? End of January? Beginning of February? Can your sales team land those deals by the end of Q1?

Instead, start developing your 2009 programs now and be ready to execute your first week back. Remember to go back and look at where you’ve been before getting started. With the economy on a roller coaster, we’re all being forced to do more with less. It’s more important than ever to analyze and target your lead generation initiatives at the right buyers in YOUR target market. I promise your sales team will thank you.

A prospect raises their hand and fills out a contact form for a salesperson to contact them.  Woohoo, a marketer’s dream, but do you know how quickly your sales team responds or if they respond at all?  Insidesales.com conducted a ResponseAudit to test every exhibiting company at Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s user group conference, to see how quickly they would respond to a web lead.  The top three companies were winners in the ResponseAwards.  I can happily say that ReachForce received 2nd place by responding in 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

The sales rep who responded, Chase Nall, was with us at Dreamforce and received the award in person:

Here are some interesting stats from the ResponseAudit:

“39.5% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by phone with the average response time by phone of 44 hours, 31 minutes, and 8 seconds. Of companies that responded by phone the average phone attempts was 1.14 times.  53.2% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by email, with the average response time by email of 13 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds. Of companies that responded email the average email attempts was 1.45.”

I found the most amazing statistic was that over 37% of companies never responded at all.  I cannot imagine as a marketer how I would feel if I worked at one of those companies.  We work so hard to get prospects to raise their hand, and for no one to follow-up when one is delivered on a silver platter would be seriously demoralizing.

For those that did respond, the average response time was still very slow.  “Recent lead response management research from MIT shows the odds of making contact with a Web-based inquiry increases 100 times if attempted within five minutes.”  We made the five minute cut, would your sales team?  Maybe it is time for an audit of your own.

To learn more about Insidesales.com and the ResponseAudit check this out.

This tip comes from one of our favorite marketing partners, Christa Kleinhans Tuttle. Christa is the Founder and President of Launch Marketing here in Austin.

Typically, a company engages a firm when it lacks time or internal resources to accomplish certain tasks. While this reasoning is effective and can deliver results, the most significant value of working with a third party is the opportunity to gain an unbiased perspective and deep subject matter expertise.

As the owner of a marketing firm, it is my goal to provide the best service and deliver the best results possible to every client.  So, I recently went out and spoke with multiple marketing executives to better understand what’s important to them when hiring an outside firm.  Questions ranged from discovering common pain points to successes experienced when working with a third party. I also asked about the selection process, priorities, communication styles and much more. After analyzing the results, the following are three of the top points from a client perspective:

1. The Right to be Understood. It is often seen that some firms ramp up for a client pitch by preparing their resume of accomplishments instead of taking the time to do the homework necessary to gain an understanding of your company, products or solutions. The best pitches ‘feel’ like the firm is part of the company, so much so that it should be seen as extensions of your company’s internal team. The further the firm is along on that path of alignment in early stages, the better your odds are that it will add value to your team.
2. The Right to Accountability. As a client, you have the right to receive work from a firm or consultant that is of absolute value to your company. If a firm is running up against obstacles on a project for a client, it is the responsibility of the firm or consultant to notify the client of the situation, and proactively provide an outline of alternative solutions to implement to help achieve projected goals.
3. The Right to be Number One. Most importantly, you have the right to feel like you are the only client; the top priority. Regardless of how busy your point of contact is, he or she should always be responsive and accountable to your needs. If your point of contact can’t immediately start working on your request, he or she should at least respond with a phrase such as, “I can’t get to this today, but I can do so tomorrow.” A quick response to let you know they received the message and will work on it as soon as possible is priceless.

Know Your Rights
Make sure whichever firm or consultant you choose can meet these and any other needs specific to you, your internal team and your company. The expectations you outline up front can help you build a successful and long-lasting relationship with the third party you engage. To read the expanded version of this article with all ten “rights”, click here.

I’d love to hear your feedback and any points you think should be added.

About the Author
Christa Kleinhans Tuttle, is founder and president of Launch Marketing, which acts as a virtual marketing organization primarily for technology companies, and offers a range of services from developing and implementing integrated marketing plans to completing one time projects including launches, conferences, tradeshows, Web sites, print materials, online campaigns, direct marketing and more.