Tag Archives: customers

Engage your B2B customers offline, too

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For business-to-business companies, communicating with customers is always challenging. Their attention is focused not only on all their other vendors and suppliers, but also on running their own businesses and serving their own customers. While new and emerging social media tools provide a potential B2B communications playground, it’s worth remembering some tried-and-true way of keeping these customers engaged – and remembering that in a tough economy, a little extra attention from a vendor can go a long way. These five ideas are nothing new, but I’ve found them to be effective in making customers feel connected:

Handshake1. Invite key customers to become members of a ”customer advisory council”

This tactic is a great way for you to get some authentic feedback from some of your top customers while involving them in your business and making them feel like they have a stake. Choose a manageable (7-10) number of customers—either top sellers, a representative cross-section of your entire base, or just key accounts you want involved. Let them know they’ve been selected to be a member of this council and invite them to join. Gather the group together via conference call every other month and use it as a forum to share ideas for new products, garner feedback, and take pulse of your market. Give the council an opportunity to make some decisions, as a group, about a new direction, product, or service that your company is thinking of offering. If you do have some budget or if the customers are located close to your facility, bring them in for an all-day meeting. Introduce them to executives, give them a tour of your site, have them meet and share feedback with product managers and other key personnel. Highlight the council when you roll out one of their ideas: “Based on the feedback from our customer advisory council, we are pleased to announce…”

2. Repackage useful information for them

In a down economy, a lot of businesses just can’t or won’t pony up the money to attend trade shows, training classes, or industry events—no matter how valuable the content might be. So deliver valuable content to them. Scour trade publications and the Web for great articles about topics relevant to your industry or customers. Break down the content from what would normally be a two-day product training class into a one-page summary guide. Share general business management tips. Take all of this information and compile it for your customers. Distribute via the channel (Web, mail, e-mail) and frequency (each week, month, quarter) that makes the most sense for your customers. Include your company’s logo and branding – “Industry Roundup from Company X.” It’s a great way to put relevant information in front of your customers that they probably wouldn’t come across or have time to look for anyway. (Always attribute the original sources, BTW.)

3. Feature your customers in your company’s marketing efforts

Instead of buying stock photography or using bland product images, highlight your customers. Hold a photo shoot at their location and show them using your products. Use these images in printed collateral materials, on the Web, in trade show displays. Profile your customers’ businesses on your Web site and include their quotes on how they’re using your products. Ask some of your customers to be profiled in case studies of your company. Look at the marketing materials you were already going to spend money on anyway – and then find a way to incorporate your customers into them. A great example is HighJump Software’s online resource center. It’s filled with customer case studies, videos, and webcasts that showcase how HighJump’s customers use its products.

4. Create a contest for customers to participate in

The options here are endless. Hold a photo contest where customers submit pictures showing a creative use of your product. Have a design contest where customers weigh in on the look, feel, color, style, or functionality of one of your products. Develop a charity or community service program where all of your customers compete in their local area to donate the most money, service, volunteer, time, etc. to a given organization. The prize can be free product, passes to an industry event or tradeshow, free literature or collateral materials – offer something of value to your customers that you already have or have access to, but make the contest itself more fun and worthwhile than simply the prize they’re competing for. As a bonus – you may end up with photos, videos, or product ideas that your company can use later!

5. Match up businesses for mentoring

Chances are, your customers could probably learn a lot from each other. You probably have a mix of long-established and developing companies in your customer base. Why not offer to match up your customers so that they can mentor each other? Broker introductions between customers and then give them some guidelines to get them started. Check-in throughout the year and ask how the relationship is going. Highlight successful mentor-mentee relationships to other customers to show how knowledge sharing can benefit everyone. And if you facilitate ways of making your customers more successful, it should lead to more success for your company, too.

There are countless additional B2B marketing and communications techniques that can help you connect to your customers in a personal way. In light of all the “new” communications tools and tactics available now, it’s important to remember that mixing in some of the “old” stuff can still be effective!

Image source: Flickr user ThomasHawk

Answer Honestly: Communications conundrums

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At my recent ski trip out to Lake Tahoe with good pals, we ended up with a case of Molson Canadian beer one night. The bottles contained labels with the phrase “Answer Honestly” and then presented an either/or question: Would you prefer to be rich or good looking; would you prefer to be a vampire or a werewolf; etc. It led to some pretty heated debates among some slightly tipsy people about the relative merits and ethical implications of flying vs. being invisible, for example.

Last week Steve Crescenzo even asked his own “Answer Honestly” -  tweet:

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Communicators are often faced with situations that feature unappealing options and we have to make the best decision we can based on our constraints, resources, and the needs of our organizations or clients. We don’t have a choice -  we are called upon to handle whatever situation lies before us. But wouldn’t it be fun to pick and choose? Here’s a communicator’s version of “Answer Honestly” :

Answer Honestly: Would you rather have to communicate a layoff of 10 percent of your workforce or a 20 percent pay cut for all of your workforce?

This one’s tough, and both of these scenarios are happening at a lot of companies today. On the one hand, a pay cut seems to appear more equitable: everyone takes a little bit of pain to save the jobs of some of their co-workers. But it also means that everyone’s left unhappy. A layoff affects fewer people more profoundly. From a communications standpoint, a layoff is more of an “event” that happens and is over relatively quickly. I know there’s plenty of research about “survivor’s guilt” among remaining workers, and communicators need to be extremely sensitive to how the news is delivered not only to departing employees but also remaining ones. How will their jobs change now that staff reductions have been made? How will the organization continue to meet its goals with fewer people? Is this all or will there be more layoffs to come? But I still think I’d rather have to communicate a lay off than across-the-board pay cuts. The pay cuts mean that everyone remains in the organization, but everyone now has something to complain about. And they will complain – here is some pretty solid evidence of that. While across-the-board pay cuts are often communicated with a “we’re all in this together” mentality, it’s tough to get people to focus on the needs of group/organization versus their own personal situation. It depends so much on the culture of the organization and its leadership.

Answer Honestly: Would you rather have to communicate a product recall or a financial/ethical scandal?

Hmm. Both of these scenarios can be red flags for endemic corruption within an organization. A product recall can be difficult if the source or reason hasn’t been identified. But at least in that situation there’s a chance it was an accident or honest mistake that led to the quality issues. There are plenty of great examples known throughout communications-land as best practices for how to handle this type of event: Lexus, Tylenol = good, Ford/Firestone, Peanut Butter = not so good. If handled correctly, the damage to an organization’s reputation can be minimal, and in some cases it’s an opportunity to provide outstanding customer service. With a financial or ethical scandal, however, the root of the problem is usually shady people doing shady things. There’s not much you can do to overcome that, and it typically indicates that a culture existed within an organization that allowed it to happen – management either participated, encouraged, or looked the other way (do I even need to say Enron? Didn’t think so). There’s typically great distrust of an organization after a scandal, and often attempts to repair the reputation are immediately labeled as disingenuous spin. I’d have to go for a product recall here (and hope that the recall is not due to some sort of deliberate malicious behavior – which I guess would make it an ethical scandal, right?).

Answer Honestly: Would you rather duke it out with Human Resources or Legal over your communications strategies and wording?

Shoot me now. Obviously communicators have to work with all involved stakeholders when communicating internally or externally. There are certainly laws regarding employee privacy, forward-looking financial statements, and competitive/proprietary information. But a communicator’s quest for transparency is often foiled by one or both of these functions. They are business partners, however, and deserve the same respect that we seek as communicators. Working with them is not optional and often these functions to provide a different viewpoint that can enhance communications. If I could choose to only work with one, though, I’d have to go with HR. Often times the run-ins I’ve had with legal come down to, “It’s the law. We can’t say it your way. End of story.” With HR, there can be a little more wiggle-room and with some good supporting arguments, you can often win them over– or at least meet in the middle.

Answer Honestly – what would you choose?

Web 2.0 in a 1.0 industry

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When Marty McFly rocks his guitar solo in ‘Johnny B. Goode’ at his parents’ high school dance in Back to the Future, he leaves the shocked crowd slack-jawed at what they’ve just heard. The line he drops is something like, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet… but your kids are gonna love it.”

Welcome to my day job. I work in a 1.0 industry (construction). My main goal is managing my company’s relationship with the independent dealers who sell our product, and most of them are small business owners in their 50s who buy our products via distribution partners and resell/install to homeowners. These dealers are old school. Great, hardworking, dedicated businesspeople… but old school.

During a recent flight I read through Todd Defren’s excellent new (and free!) eBook on social media marketing called “Brink.” It’s filled with fantastic nuggets on how to “make an entrance” into social media, including tips on blogger relations, creating content using a variety of media channels, and reaching out using Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking. Reading it made me excited and disheartened at the same time.

How do you implement social media tools and strategies if your audience isn’t ready for it yet? My audience – our network of dealers - can barely handle e-mail. I’ve had several phone conversations with dealers where I’ve had to explain to them how to open Internet Explorer. At length. A lot of them only want to send and receive information via mail or fax. (Apparently a fax machine is this thing from the early 1990s that you fed paper into and then that paper was magically transported to other fax machines).

Last year I created a secure extranet site for our dealers. It includes a blog where I post news items about our products and programs; forums for dealers to share information and best practices with each other; a media center where they can download .pdfs of our literature and view presentations from conferences; and lead management tools. Despite the fact that this group of dealers has hundreds of combined years of experience in their industry and could benefit greatly from more interaction, the utilization of this extranet community is near zero. No comments on blog posts, no posts or discussions in the forums, and rarely do people access files from the media center. It has the potential to be a great community for these dealers. But a community doesn’t exist if there’s no one there.

So what do I do? How much do you try to drag an audience along? How much should your communications strategy reflect where your audience currently is, versus where you’d like them to be? How do you keep from pulling a Marty McFly?