On with the 8th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6) (#7)

In case you’re just dropping in … as B2B marketers we know that our businesses are fundamentally made up of three types of customers. The ones we have, those we’ve lost, and potential accounts doing business elsewhere. CEI is a metrics-based planning tool for driving revenue growth from all three of these targets and over the past few weeks we’ve been working our way down the following outline:

1. CEI Initiative Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. 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 plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
6. (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting

As of last week we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
• Using metrics for Reference Account Management and sorting a top 10 list of best customer references, and why.

A Rant About Reference Account Management – cont’d

In my view, good Reference Account Management is perhaps one of the most overlooked things about B2B sales and marketing today. It’s seems to have been subverted by what the 1990s called “relationship selling” or “relationship marketing.” (By the way I am so tempted to try out a new acronym “RAM,” but I won’t).
After last week’s post I devoted some time on Google checking on as many high quality Sales, Marketing and Account Management job postings as I could stand. I had hoped to call some folks up to talk about how different companies are using CEI-type metrics and try to get some understanding of who is responsible for them. After a while I logged off in dismay. I’d read more than forty job descriptions and only one mentioned anything at all about the act of –or responsibility for (call it what you may)– maintaining an index of Sales-ready reference accounts.

As a sales person this finding (unscientific, yet time consuming) makes me feel needy. As an account manager it makes me think nobody is looking. As a marketer I just feel dirty. Even after the much needed influence of Fred Reichheld’s “Ultimate Question” (note to self: call Howie about game show idea) and Net Promoter Scores ― it pains me greatly to think this means that if we asked 1000 companies who their top-10 sales ready customer references are (and why) possibly only 20 could produce the information. Wow.
Because of this I’m sort of ranting this week.

If the discipline of stock managing Sales-ready references is being ignored at your company – especially in an economy where heroic customer experience is required – fix it, or buckle your seat-belt please. I say this because I believe a proper tool for this type of microanalysis and segmentation is the real brass ring for customer experience professionals.

To explain, let me bust out some John Lennon and ask you to imagine what you can do once you’ve managed your CEI metrics into a real-time data driven Reference Account Management list:

• Match prospects you are selling to with just the right customer references during the sales cycle
• Align customers with other customers for:
  • Account assignment groupings
  • Sales plans and quotas
  • Geo-analysis
  • Vertical-analysis
  • Predictive analysis
  • Campaign planning, newsletters, webinars, user conferences, PR etc.
• Align product roadmaps with prioritized customer needs
• Anticipate customer needs
• Use rules-based market profile of your most satisfied and loyal customers to frame market-to-market searches for new prospects

My point is this is that all of the above mentioned stuff sounds great if not essential ― and I think the last 7 posts I’ve done on this subject show that this is not so much about rocket science as it is about ownership and effort. Every company that is serious about growth (sometimes survival) needs to have a CEI-type initiative in place as a part of the organizational DNA. To that, I now add that these metrics are a tool to be used for holding the right people accountable for the right things. Knowing why customers become genuinely loyal to a supplier has everything to do with taking actionable intelligence from the bottomless well of information that is “the customer experience” and plying it back into the strategies and tactics that make your company tick.

Sales organizations that rely too much on relationship selling may not be as inclined as others to take a metrics driven approach. In fact, some studies say that in sectors such as manufacturing just more than half are less likely to consistently use comprehensive customer experience metrics as a part of their prospecting strategy. I think that could be a reason why American manufacturing is getting its collective butt kicked.

Stay tuned for more next week.

This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

Metrics, metrics, metrics…don’t know about you, but our sales team hates the word!  Some of them claim it’s the big brother feeling, some of them just hate having to keep track of one more thing, but for management, metrics are the lifeblood of our organization.

Here at ReachForce we have an inside sales model so we sell just about every deal over the phone.  We used to be content just tracking meetings set, proposals sent out and deals closed.  We felt like keeping up with these few metrics was enough.  We were at ease knowing most of what was going on, but when our sales team struggled we had zero visibility into why.

As we have grown as an organization we have learned that we can’t be lax on metrics, regardless of what someone “typically delivers”.  When we would notice a hiccup in our sales results, our initial knee-jerk reaction was to change how we approached things, re-visit our value proposition and the way we are communicating it to potential prospects, talk about what triggers, etc.  All great things to discuss and reinforce but it didn’t lead to the big change we wanted to see.  We went back to the drawing board.  We started looking at things a little differently and we noticed some trends among the metric conversion rates and numbers for our top performers, trends we had no line of sight into before.

Here’s what we did:

Displayed activity and metrics for the entire company to see.  It now was very obvious when someone is struggling.  Everyone’s information is updated every day – metrics reporting is now mandatory. Does our sales team like this?  Probably not but my thought is, if they are delivering then what does it really matter?  And, let’s face it, like most start ups sales is the lifeline for our business.

Since instituting mandatory metrics tracking and “the board” we have seen some pretty great results.  Having an instant, always available picture of sales activity makes tracking things through the funnel and forecasting much clearer for us.   Just imagine, if you know how many connects a sales rep has to make to set a meeting and how many meetings it takes to get a proposal, partner that with your proposal to close rate and bingo, you’ve got a good idea of how much activity will be needed to drive a close.  The cool thing about this is that for us, the reverse engineering of activity translates pretty well into results.

On the other side of the house, instituting mandatory metrics has made sales more transparent to marketing.  Our marketing team now has a much better idea of what our sales team needs to hit our company goals.  Additionally, our marketing team uses the same numbers to gauge:

• what marketing messages are the most effective
• what messages aren’t driving hand raisers
• what kinds of programs are needed to drive the leads sales needs
• how many or how big programs need to be so our sales team can spend time talking to warm prospects, not cold leads

Simply put, metrics may be a hassle for some but they are a necessity for both Marketing and Sales to keep a pulse on their ultimate challenge – driving more business faster and more efficiently.

What key metrics are you tracking?  Are they giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your business?

I’d also love to know if anyone else is tracking daily or weekly metrics in a public place.  It seems to be working here.  In fact, it has really upped the competition among our sales team.

This is the final post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 5 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title, Predictable vs. Spray and Pray and Nurture vs. Capture

A survey of B2B Marketing organizations by SiriusDecisions determined that the marketing departments of high performing companies significantly influenced or contributed at least 30% of the opportunities in the pipeline.

With Deliberate Marketing, virtually any marketing organization can achieve similar or even better results.  Not to toot my own horn, but here at ReachForce, Marketing contributes over 80% of new customers.

Deliberate Marketing focuses B2B Marketers on business objectives like adding opportunities to the pipeline, increasing revenues, acquiring new customers, and maximizing the return on marketing programs.

No longer is marketing worried about meeting or exceeding a 2% response rate. Deliberate Marketers value lead quality over lead quantity and they are motivated to move qualified buyers through the pipeline as efficiently and quickly as possible.

If you want to learn more about Deliberate Marketing and how to increase qualified buyers in the sales funnel, check out our new eBook, Funnelnomics I: Deliberate Marketing.

This is the 7th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEITM) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6)

Here is the outline we’ve been following:

1. CEI Initiative Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. 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 plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
6. (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting

So far we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for scoring to examine three existing customer scenarios as examples:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying CEI-metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building CEI-lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.

Next on the list is to take a look at using CEI response data to help locate, target and engage with net-New prospects.

Reference Account Management

The most obvious and useful way CEI scoring benefits the new sales process is the buttoned down way it sorts advocacy dynamics and pinpoints which current customers would make the best references based on data analysis, not on someone’s opinion. There is nothing more powerful from a news sales perspective than having a well stocked supply of sales ready references. It happens every day across the world, thousands of times a day ― a sales person bursts into the marketing or account manager’s office needing three references to connect with their prospect. Not only is the list of needed attributes arms length, but it all needs to happen before tomorrow afternoon. Sound familiar? Yes it does.

This scenario takes us back to the first exercise we did for determining what a customer’s advocacy rating is. Remember it’s a matter of reading how a customer feels about their entire experience with your company using a scoring schema that takes metrics from both qualitative (loyalty) and quantitative (satisfaction) feedback into account. So if asked to produce recommendations about what customers should be the best sales-ready references we’d produce response scores rendered from a two-step lens build that would look something like this:

Step 1 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

Once each row on the customer list has an assigned CEI Advocacy Score, simply sort this column in descending order and in combination with the column for customer response time to your survey plus overall satisfaction scores, plus Key Weight. This  (if you remember back to the 1st and 2nd posts in this series) is because the survey invitations were sent as an integrated campaign, i.e. first an email, then another, then a phone call reminder from the account manager, then another from an executive, then perhaps another email, etc., thus determining how quick to respond each survey taker was. It stands to reason that someone who responded quickly in combination with high scores from Advocacy, Satisfaction and Key Weight are going to be a good sales ready reference account.

Step 2 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

So the above mentioned sort produces a top 10 list based on:

Next week we’ll cover ways to build rules-based profiles of your most successful customers and your relationships with them and then use the data to score how well new company targets match the rules.

Here on The B2B Lead we declared Barack Obama (of course now President Obama) to be Marketer of the Year (and Advertising Age had something to say about that too) on November 5th, after winning the presidency.  He and his team had a marketing strategy unlike any other before him.  They had a clearly defined message of Change and targeted that message to the people by speaking to them in a way and through a forum they already understood.  He understood the power of viral marketing and social media and embraced it, using it to his advantage.  I believe this played a major role in him first winning the democratic nomination and ultimately the presidency.

My question now is – will he continue?  He united many Americans under the promise of Change and reached out to them where they were to deliver his message.  By having a presence on many social networking sites, he seemed accessible, a people’s politician.  I believe that his presidency will be strongest if he continues to communicate with the people the way he did during his campaign.  Don’t we all want a people’s president?

But it seems since the campaign ended, there is little to no involvement in the same social sites that were instrumental in getting Obama elected.  For example, his LinkedIn profile still lists him as US Senator and Presidential Candidate.  His Facebook page still has over 3.8 million supporters and over 500,000 wall posts but little to no interaction from Obama or his team.  His supporters seem to still be interacting on Facebook but without much from the big guy himself.

What Obama did do after the election is create change.gov.  This site was set up to allow Americans “opportunities to participate in redefining our government.”  The site did offer some neat opportunities for Americans to give feedback and their opinions for where the country should be headed.  Unfortunately, as of today, the site has been taken down and directs you to instead visit whitehouse.gov.

The new whitehouse.gov includes a blog as well as the President’s soon to come weekly video addresses (past Presidents did these too, in case you didn’t know, but have always been on the radio).  The first blog post comes from Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House.  It is very informative and gives you an idea of what to expect from the new administration.  I felt the most notable was that they “will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”  You can also sign up for email updates from the President.

The new website went up exactly at 12:01pm today so not everything has been completely fleshed out.  Phillips wrote, “We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know. Like the transition website and the campaign’s before that, this online community will continue to be a work in progress as we develop new features and content for you. So thanks in advance for your patience and for your feedback.”

I am looking forward to seeing what else they add.  I hope there is continued involvement in the social networking sites that contributed to Obama being elected to the White House.  Or is his Facebook profile now a matter of national security?

This is the fifth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 4 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title and Predictable vs. Spray and Pray.

Deliberate Marketing doesn’t involve capturing any and all leads, then tossing them over the fence to sales. Deliberate Marketing is about engaging with prospects, understanding their needs and scoring them based on their interests and behavior to determine their stage in the buying cycle. It’s about nurturing them with targeted communications and offers until they are ready to engage with sales.

A prospect that downloads a whitepaper probably needs to be further nurtured by marketing before being passed on to sales, whereas a prospect that requests a 30-day trial can be immediately handed off to sales.  This is different for each business; be sure to have an agreement with sales on when leads should be handed over.

With a Deliberate Marketing approach, B2B Marketers can ensure their leads receive the proper follow-up and that buyers are not discarded simply because they are not ready to make a purchase immediately.  Feedback loops between marketing and sales are necessary so that any leads that are passed to sales too early can be sent back to marketing for continued nurturing.

Check out this photo – It’s our VP of Products, Jason Morio, at his sophomore prom in 1991. Someone posted this picture on their Facebook page, tagged Jason and an update was sent to his (Jason’s) friends. Before Jason got back to Facebook the photo had spread like wildfire here at work. So while this provided us with a lot of good laughs, it made me think…

What about those Spring Break 1988 pictures? How about the ones of you when you weighed 300 lbs.? Or even better, the pictures from your friend’s bachelor party? You know the ones.   You thought these old pictures were buried in a box somewhere for no one to ever see again.

With social technologies taking off they way they are, how are you to prevent your old, maybe not to proud of, photos from getting out there?

Looks like you can’t anymore.

You can clearly see why this one falls in the WTF category – what do you think? And how do we as professionals ensure we aren’t mixing up our personal and professional lives? And not just today’s personal life but our lives back when we were younger and carefree?  Is it even possible anymore?

We recently just had our 2009 sales kick off here at ReachForce. This time we focused part of the day on nurturing prospects in the sales opportunity funnel. Typically once leads are flipped into the sales funnel it means hands off for marketing. Sales people take over all communications at this point.

Here, we use Salesforce for our CRM and Eloqua for our Marketing Automation. We are able to push marketing campaign activities directly into Salesforce but once a lead is converted, it can’t be converted back to a lead if the prospect goes quiet or isn’t quite ready to buy. Why not salesforce.com? Why not? You’re making it so hard for us to really build a closed loop system. Anyway…

To help our sales team stay in regular communication with their prospects in the opportunity funnel we’ve (marketing) put together a few things to help them. Here’s what our sales team is now armed with:

• A daily prospect intelligence report – a news feed with any public news from companies in our sales funnel. This gives our sales team a little more insight into the company they are selling in to and gives them a reason to follow up if they run across some applicable news. You can do this with Google Alerts too. Set one up for your biggest prospects and see what they have to say or what is being said about them.
• Best Practice email templates in Salesforce – we (marketing) put together a series of emails and added them to Salesforce so our sales team can access them when they need them. My recommendation here was to periodically send best practice or thought leadership pieces to prospects to stay top of mind. These are not sales oriented emails, these are adding value emails. But, they can be customized to fit each prospect’s specific situation. I’m really interested to see if and how they actually use these.
• Blog posts – The B2B Lead is all about giving our readers good B2B Marketing and Sales tips to help them in their day to day jobs. So as we are adding new posts we’re making sure we are sharing those with our sales team. They can then forward these along to prospects when applicable. Not everything is for everyone but who knows, that one tip they forward on might just get them to move. And, who doesn’t want tips that will help them be better at their job?
• Newsletter – we have a very popular opt-in newsletter, in fact, our subscription list grew by 50% over the last 8 or so months. Our newsletter isn’t ReachForce promotional, instead we pull our best tips from The B2B Lead and put them together in a newsletter format. For this, we’ve just added a check box to the Salesforce contact record and if the sales rep wants us to include them in this group, they just mark the box.

So here’s what we just rolled out, what are you doing to nurture prospects already in the sales funnel? And who owns this nurturing? Marketing? Sales? Both?

On with the 6th in a series (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI^TM) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. Many thanks to those already asking questions or offering comments.

As B2B marketers we know that our businesses are fundamentally made up of three types of targets. These are the customers you have, those you’ve lost, and potential accounts who – so far – have decided to do business elsewhere. CEI is a metrics-based planning tool for driving revenue growth from all three of these targets.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working our way down a list of 6 areas that frame up a basic CEI initiative set up:

1. Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. (We are here)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

Last post we discussed the Key Weight – or how long and how often does a customer “experience” your company, and how account-by-account Key Weight scores should influence how the entire body of survey response data gets interpreted.  Not taking newness or lower frequency of use metrics into account leaves open a broad chance that important dangers or opportunities get overlooked as you update Account Management plans (which we’ve demonstrated using example analysis from a recent ReachForce Customer Experience Survey results i.e. Key Weight + Data Accuracy + Project Manager Expertise). See (#5). To build on last week’s discussion, let’s take a look at some other lens-building using Key Weight as the prime factor:

Customer Categorization – by putting customers with common Key Weights into separate buckets you’ll get true apples-to-apples comparisons in terms of stack-ranking other response scores. Examples of the kinds of questions/scores that can apply were given in drop (#4) but here they are again:

It is advisable to bucket in a way that creates a “big” middle (i.e. Top 15%, Upper-middle 35%, Lower middle 35%, Bottom 15%). This is because the main gist of the plan is to create a process of continuous improvement that pulls customers (see below) from Bucket D into C, C into B and B into A.

If you think back to what a Key Weight is comprised of (combined scores of “how long” and “how often”) pulling customers towards the top bucket means two really good and important things need to happen … i.e. keeping the account active/open and increasing the amount of meaningful contact (defined as “use”) you have with them. Again, don’t think of Bucket D being all bad and Bucket A being all good. It really just gives you an instrument to ascertain the degree relationship maturity and of the certainty you should have for response scores to other questions.

To build another example lens, let’s say you’ve come to the stage of your 2009 Account Management plan where you need to sort a list of customers ranking how likely they are to renew their contract with your company and what you need to do to maximize your probability of success for > 80% of them.

Again, we’ll use some data taken from ReachForce’s Q4 2008 Customer Experience Survey and see what we come up with – starting first with rating each customer Key Weight category and cross-tabbing scores for “Will you renew?” “Repeat Purchase Experience,” “Data Value ROI,” “Compare with other Vendors” and “Usage Experience.”

The questions/responses I’ve used as cross-tabs to track down answers to the questions at hand (how likely they are to renew their contract and how do we maximize probability of success for > 80% of them) have to do with stated intent to renew (cross tab 1), how good our renewal + up/cross sale experience is (cross tab 2), is the customer recognizing ROI (cross tab 3), how do we stack up versus alternatives (cross tab 4) and usability (cross tab 5). I think this mix gives us a clear view of the renewal picture.

Because increasing probability for successful renewals is in large part about eliminating barriers, what I initially look for in a chart formation such as this [above] is ascending point values as they are an indication of trouble. The logic is that scores in all columns need to get better (and show up as descending) as length of engagement and frequency of use increase.

For example:

• The ascending values in the Cross Tab 2 column tell me that we are not up-selling or cross-selling as well or effectively as need be … i.e. newer customers coming fresh out of the sales pipe (Bucket D) seem happy and impressed (9.6 avg.) erosion starts to occur (9.3, 9.1, 8.9 C-A respectively). It’s clear we need to write a remedy for this into our 2009 Account Management plan.
• Although scores are pretty high, the lack of consistency in the Cross Tab 5 column may indicate that the high-touch nature of our on-boarding process – where planning, kickoffs and software activations are the norm – may lose a bit of its shine as time goes by. This begs the question, are we being complacent with older customers, or are they distracted – and by what? To make sure this does not become a barrier to future renewal campaigns we need to take a close look at how to mitigate this trend.

In all other cases the cross-tab columns and the Analysis Score (last column) on the chart above are pretty high and have a nice descending order of value. But as an Account Management planner I can use CEI to continue drilling into things that I normally would not see that need tactical consideration:

For example:

• Bucket B is nice and full (45%) and we likely need a specific program to increase conversions to Bucket A before it becomes a log jam. Again, placement in any of the buckets is based on length and frequency of engagement and should not be seen as an index of good or bad – rather, as mature relationships versus less mature relationships. So in 2009 we need plans that focus on increasing mindshare and quality time with Bucket B accounts.

But notice a couple of additional things about Bucket B:

• The lowest two cross-tab average scores for this group are:
  • Data Value ROI (8.9)
  • Compare w/ other vendors (8.9)

While 8.9 for both questions are pretty solid averages, to a careful Account Management planner this is still a notable indication that work needs to be focused/done in these two areas to reduce the chance of them becoming obstacles to our 2009 customer renewal plan.

More next week. As always, thanks in advance for your questions and comments.

This is the fourth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 3 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads and Role vs. Title.

Deliberate Marketing techniques make it possible for Marketers and Sales teams to predict the results of their efforts because they know their direct marketing programs are focused on the right buyers in the right type of company. Deliberate Marketers do not spray a rented list of contacts with a generic message hoping the right buyers will respond. Instead, they deliver a highly relevant message to a targeted audience.

Based on preparation and research, they know they are using the right messages and the right medium to deliver that message based on the buyer profile (or persona). They also know that they are delivering this message to buyers in companies with a similar combination of characteristics as their best customers so their propensity to purchase is higher.

With this approach, Marketers can rely on repeatable lead generation efforts to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to Sales.