Sensei Blogs

Only One Resolution: Accept Less Mediocrity

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t make resolutions. While committing yourself to some action or new behavior based on an event like the entry of a new calendar year seems logical, I find the concept flawed. Too much expectation and pressure, such as that placed on New Year’s resolutions, does not foster the right environment for change in one’s life. Often these resolutions are emotional reactions to missed opportunities, envy of others or the desire for more physical possessions. To be meaningful, resolutions must be born from life experiences, which happen throughout the year. Success is achieved when you can capitalize on that experience and desire to change or improve your circumstances when the situation is upon you.

Thus, I tend to make resolutions throughout the year not on December 31st; however, this year is a bit different. It may be because of the cumulative circumstances of this past year or my advancing age but I find myself motivated to make a single resolution for this coming New Year: accept less mediocrity. Accept less of it from my clients, my staff, my business, my peers and most of all, accept less mediocrity from myself.

Too often I’ve accepted a “job well done” compliment as a measure of success. It satisfied my ego and placated my need to be relevant. On the reverse side, I’ve accepted friendship and good will as trade for promised deliverables only half or poorly delivery. I’m not certain if it was fear of change or the fear of success that held me back, but I was too often satisfied with just enough. On occasion throughout these past few years, across my personal, social and professional experiences, I’ve found myself needing to push beyond such mediocrity and demand more to maintain my personal equilibrium and sanity. I did not pre-plan or resolve to do so, it was merely a reaction to hitting a wall or a breaking point. The surprising result was that I achieved greater personal happiness or success when I pushed through whatever personal or emotional obstacles stood in my way or that that of my colleagues. Sometimes the immediate results were negative, caused concern or hurt feelings, yet in each case the long-term result was positive because it resulted in progress. I moved forward.

Inspired, I’m publicly declaring my New Year’s resolution to accept less mediocrity. I’m going to question, demand and expect more of myself and everyone around me. Regardless of the outcome, I’ll know there were no stones left uncovered, no thoughts left unexplored and no sentiments left unexpressed. No regrets.

Have you accepted mediocrity this past year? What causes us to do so? Join me in this pledge?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Marketers, What Your CEO REALLY Thinks Of You

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in earned media. You’ve built your Facebook fans to 10,000 in 6 months. You’ve increased the lead funnel by 15% over last year. You’re the golden child of the organization; you’ve played squash with the CEO and received the keys to the executive washroom.

All is right with the world.

Until the company’s fortunes or the economy in general takes a downturn and the marketing budget is the first to get cut and the first department to see layoffs. Your executive washroom keys are taken back; you’re shocked that you once again have to “go” with the rest of the nobodies in the organization. You bide your time and do more of the same with less. Then (Oh Happy Day!) the economy rebounds and the marketing budget is the first to reap the rewards of the loosened purse strings.

Anyone in the marketing industry for more than 10 years, be they a corporate marketing or agency professional, has experienced this phenomenon at least once. When the business or the economy suffers, just as marketing is needed the most, CEOs stop investing in it. When the company’s fiscal outlook swings “to the black” and everyone is optimistic, budgets return to normal.

To my fellow marketers, what does this universal truth say about what CEOs really think of marketing or the value they place on what you do? I’ll tell you: it says they see you a marketer, not revenue generator. Your department is a cost, not a profit center.

Do you still think that branding, brand awareness and lead generation are the goals of marketing?

“What is the value of a mother’s hug?”

AAARRRGG! A week does not go by that I don’t bang my head on my desk in frustration with the articles, presentations and social commentary I see marketers spewing about the value and importance of branding and engagement, especially in the discipline of social media.

Of course brand awareness – the first stage in the customer lifecycle – is important; without it, marketers and sales teams cannot nurture the client towards strong purchase consideration. Of course social media is important; without it, we cannot identify the opportunities and obstacles in the way of consumers’ decision-making processes. Of course content marketing is important; without it, we’re not seeding social proof into the newly-social search engines. All of these go-to strategies and tactics marketers are so found of promoting these days are important, but without a calculation that demonstrates how they’re turning the marketing department from a cost-center to a profit-center, marketers will forever be the fair-weather friend of the CEO and the board of directors.

So, are you a marketer or a profit generator?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Image Credit: George Marks

Your Product Sucks; What It Does is Amazing.

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A common mistake that many software and product marketers make is to orient marketing collateral, Web site navigation and even brand messaging around its features and functions.

Take a look at most technical product or software web sites and you’ll quickly see a navigation button for “features.” Drill down and you’ll see a litany of sub-navigation listing each specific feature, a clever icon, a description of the feature and possibly a video tutorial on how it works. Everything a customer might want to know about the features – except why they should care.

Make no mistake; this is an ailment that many marketers suffer from. When diagnosed, I dispense a healthy dose of snark by stating,“your product features suck!” The remedy is usually met with guffaws, snorts, and hurt feelings. Undeterred, I continue with the rationale for this tough medicine; it doesn’t matter if the features are good or bad, just think they’re bad. Why? Because I’ve yet to meet a marketer faced with a bad product who doesn’t try to slap lipstick on pig. It’s meant to serve as a cue for marketers to rethink their content strategy.

With few exceptions – especially in the software industry – product features are not unique. Yes, marketers will attempt to wordsmith uniqueness into them, but in reality you can find similar features with a simple Google search.

I advise clients to orient that same collateral, Web site navigation and brand messaging around what the product’s features enable the client to do instead of what the product feature does. For example, sentiment analysis in a social monitoring platform doesn’t “identify positive and negative sentiment around brand mentions”, it “builds a better sales funnel by more efficiently identifying unsatisfied competitors' clients with the best opportunity to convert.” As a business buyer, which would you respond to more?

What’s motivating your customer?

When you ask yourself who is reading your content or visiting your site and what do they really want, it’s really a simple concept. What’s difficult is getting over your ego and obsessive need to talk about yourself or how clever your product’s features are.

Understand that when potential customers visit your Web site they already have specific questions in mind that they want answered. And if they don’t come with specific questions in mind, there are questions that are subconsciously driving how they navigate your site. For those in B2B industries for example, there are typically 3 types of users that visit your site from the same prospective customer, and each has their own unique set of questions they’re looking to have answered.

1. The Researcher – generally front-line employees or those in the trenches that have identified a problem that needs a solution. They’re looking for detailed solutions to their problems, what’s going to make their job easier, what’s going to get them that raise or promotion?

2. The Validator – typically a mid-level manager; they don’t care for solution details or demonstrations but are verifying the options provided by the Researcher in order to create cost-benefit analysis to present to their boss.

3. The Executive – spends the least amount of time on your site and are usually looking for one thing: comfort. They want to know they are not the only customer you have in their industry and that others have taken the risk and are happy.

Know that your audience is not interested in your product. They’re interested what it will enable them to do. Now go rethink and rewrite your product’s features. "They suck!"

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Get Off Your Ass; Identify Your Own Influencers

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

It’s becoming clear that social influence scoring is not going away anytime soon – or ever – and so the debate over the validity of such scores and the businesses that provide them rage on. I know I’ve contributed my fair share of thoughts, dialogue, and rants on this subject and I have to say I’m rather tired of the same old debate. I’ve yet to read an article that satisfactorily explains how any software-generated score in isolation accurately dictates the real influence of an individual to measurably impact the decision-making of an audience based solely on their activity across a few social networks. Yet the providers of these scores remain in the spotlight; in fact they’re multiplying across business silos and industry verticals.

So what have we learned or accomplished?

Nothing. People are still gaming online engagement to increase their scores, marketers and HR professionals are still basing decisions on these scores and brands are still distributing product samples to those with high scores. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

So maybe it’s time we change the focus?

Can we change the public discourse from what a social influence score is or isn’t and, understanding that this virus is incurable, focus on how to successfully use it to our advantage? What would that look like?

We know, for example, that “social celebrities” who work the digital channels to get a lot of attention for their heavy social chatter and activity are popular – maybe even famous – due to their many thin connections that rank them highly by social influence scoring platforms. So if you define “influence” as the ability to amplify a message across social channels, then I guess you can call them influential and we can close the book on this discussion. However, from experience these amplifiers don’t impact short-term decision-making, which is true influence. Is there something the score can tell us anything that is important?

Can social celebrities have real influence? Of course they can. I consider bloggers who elicit many reactions as witnessed through thoughtful commentary, phone conversations and subscriptions among their audience, real influencers. There’s a dramatic difference between these two. Someone with 50,000 Twitter followers, lots of retweets and blog mentions but with little to no engagement on that blog is less influential than someone with only 5,000 Twitter followers, fewer retweets and blog mentions but consistent and meaningful debate among a targeted community within his or her blog. Most social scoring platforms – as they work today – would elevate the former with a higher score and deem them more “influential.”

Mapping Influence Marketing

What’s missing from the ongoing debate around the value of social influence scoring is the potential value in mapping the many degrees of social connections and relationships. Some are thin and vanity-driven; others are deep and meaningful, as is also the case in the traditional media and offline realms. Understanding the degree of relationship between individuals and groups is key to understanding the nature of the influence they might exert.

For example, I often tune into the Fox News broadcast when travelling though the US or watch it online when out of the US. I tune in enough to be one of the people that they claim to be a “regular viewer” and a data point in the rating statistics they use to sell advertising space. However, while I consider myself a “conservative,” the reason I tune into Fox News is the same reason I sometimes tune into America’s Next Top Model or slow down to gawk at a car wreck. I’m fascinated by the spectacle, the ugliness of humanity. I don’t tune in to educate myself or seek information in my decision-making but to gawk, a sick guilty pleasure. Fox News data crunchers and advertisers consider me someone they influence but do they? Maybe, but certainly not in the manner they intend.

Analyzing the Data

Until factors such as degree of relationship, context of engagement and sentiment of commentary are successfully interpreted and analyzed by software, the onus is on YOU to do the work. Does this make social scoring platforms worthless? No. Can they measure the nuances required? No. As I discovered in an interview with Andrew Grill from Kred.com, progress is being made. In the meantime, get off your ass and do the work.

Look for companies like Jugnoo or Kred that provide the raw data around audience engagement and use it as one metric among others you collect, vet and analyze to understand who has true influence over you target audience. I’m talking about the power to influence a purchase by a prospect, not the power to amplify a generic message to a loosely identified group of people.

Mama always told me “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” She is one smart lady.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

B2B Marketers Have No Funny Bone

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Last week’s exchange on the place corporate blogs have within the modern marketing mix inevitably featured the oft-used buzzword: “humanize,” as in “a blog is an excellent opportunity to humanize your brand.” The term represents the concept of making a business more relatable to its customers, moving beyond marketing-speak, product brochures and spec sheets to showcase the personality of the company and those it employs. Humanizing a brand is supposed to make a business more relatable to its customers and thus more likely to earn their loyalty and patronage.

Among the many tactics and social channels purported to humanize a brand across the blogosphere, the one not given enough due is humor. Business-to-Consumer (B2C) industries such as Old Spice, Taco Bell, E-Trade, Blendtec and Budweiser have famously leveraged the tactic but, even with some stellar examples of humor-filled campaigns in the Business-to-Business (B2B) space, few have dared to show such personality.

Are B2B vendors and buyers really so staid and boring? If you’ve attended any B2B conference or trade show after-party, you know the answer. So why is humor still considered a four-letter word in this space? I argue that it’s less about marketers’ lack of a collective funny bone as it is about their education on the subject.

Comedic Marketing is Risky Business

Humor is a double-edged sword; it can connect two people over a shared experience or divide them with a cut-to-the-bone sarcastic comment. Often the very same sentence can elicit both reactions. So is it more about risk?

It might be a calculated risk, but when grounded in truth the payoff can be huge. Even though it was created many years ago, the benchmark used by modern marketers for humor in B2B marketing is still IBM’s “Mainframe: The Art of the Sale” campaign.

Created by Tim Washer, the unchallenged king of comedy in B2B marketing, the story connects with the audience because it’s real and even through its humor it says something the audience wants to hear. Fans of the television sitcom The Office will see the similarities in the deadpan humor and how close it walks the line of reality. “You can't just be funny, but you have to say something. You have to have a strong point of view and make a case for something,” comments Tim Washer in an interview with MarketingProf’s Matthew Grant.

Most B2B customers are, in fact, people.

Yes, most B2B customers are, in fact, people. That’s not my attempt to infuse humor into this article but a statement on the reality of B2B marketing. We sometimes forget that it’s people who research our products, test them and make decisions on whether or not to purchase. And, as people are known to do, our decisions are often impacted by our personal feelings and connection to the business and the people pitching us. And that brings us back to concept of humanizing your brand.

"How do you humanize a B2B brand? How can you take a brand like an IBM that people don't have a relationship with on Facebook and share [its] stories?” asks Tim. "Much of it," he said, "is just telling the truth, but doing it in a humorous way.” It seems that the key ingredient to humorous B2B marketing is less about the “Yuk-Yuk” factor but the truth it’s based on.

The other lesson to be learned from this successful campaign was that the butt of the joke was not IBM’s product but the problem customers sought to cure. As with other effective marketing tactics, humor must be used as a content marketing strategy focused on improving your customer’s business, not yours.

Join the discussion: why is humor used so little in B2B marketing? Too risky?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

How Kred Changed My Point of View

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

My disdain for social scoring platforms is no secret. Not only have I expressed my opinions on this site, my perspective on – and experiences with – these tools have been widely written about in books, magazines and on other blogs. I’ve been interviewed on Web, radio and television broadcasts where I’ve shared those same views. I’ve not been able to attend or speak at a conference this year without someone yelling: “Hey, it’s the Klout-guy!”

If all of those articles and interviews were to be boiled down to one sentiment, it would be that you’re a fool if you pay any attention to social scoring platforms. There are many factors that have impacted my view on these, from my personal experiences during job interviews, inaccuracies in scoring algorithms, security concerns, poor operating practices, and of course the fact that these platforms can be gamed, thus rendering the scores meaningless.

While I’m not the lone marketer with these apprehensions, some have asked why I’ve been so vocal in my opposition. In truth, it has been less about the business of social scoring as it was about the use of social scoring. A new breed of “professional influencers” who understand how to game the algorithm for personal and financial gain has emerged and they’ve muddied the social pool, making it difficult to distinguish real influencers from fabricated ones.

Brand marketers (and others within the organization) were misplacing their trust in these scores and crafting communication strategies around them without understanding the context or accuracy of the reported influence. As a marketer who prides himself in successfully creating word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that drive measurable results, I took exception to how these scores and platforms were being used.

Overcoming Prejudice and Logic

A lunch-time conversation with Dups Wijayawardhana, the co-founder and CEO of Empire Avenue, shed some new perspective on the debate when he challenged me with this statement: “Even if you believed none of these tools could accurately measure influence, in combination with other tools and processes, they have value.” In theory I understood his point but in practice I could not get over the inaccuracies that many have proven exist in these measurements or the subject matter of said influence, not to mention the fact that I could not always gain direct access or ownership to the actual database of names these tools spread my message to, or the algorithms used to identify them.

The one point I could never argue was that such tools – and the very concept of scoring influencers – will not go away. Scoring influencers was done before social scoring platforms like PeerIndex, Klout and Kred became so popular and I’m certain many more will emerge in the future. I owed it to my clients to further explore the current state of these platforms.

Meet Kred.com

After a lengthy and very frank discussion on the subject with Andrew Grill, CEO of Kred.com and Lee Bogner, Vice President of Business Development, I began to see the evolution of these tools and, for a moment, had hope in the future of the practice. Created by social analytics leader PeopleBrowsr, Kred measures influence in online communities connected by interests.

For influencers, Kred presents a visual history of a person’s social media influence in a rather cool drill-down dashboard that’s fun to play with. However, cynicism saw this interface as another gamification tactic to keep us interested and playing their game. On the other hand, for marketers Kred offers four distinct services:

Brand Follower Scores
Find the most engaged (influence) and engaging (outreach) followers of your brand over a select timeframe.
Brand Champion Influencer Identification Score
Find the most engaged and engaging users around your @name #hahstag, or keyword matching your brand over a select timeframe.
Competitive Follower Score
Find the most engaged (influence) and engaging (outreach) followers of a competitive brand over a select timeframe.
Competitive Mention Score
Find the most engaged and engaging users around a competitor’s @name #hashtag, or keyword matching your brand over a select timeframe.

It’s not these services that had me rethinking my stance on Kred, but its philosophy and business practice in providing those services.

No Secrets

Kred is an open book. It doesn’t hide the algorithms it uses to identify, segment and rank individuals, which is extremely helpful for those of us who like to do a deeper dive into the nature of relationships between influencers and followers when designing influence marketing campaigns. Further, its history as a data management/analysis firm becomes evident when you review its methodology; Kred gets it.

Advanced Filtering

It understands that social scoring gamers, employees (yours and your competitors) and others “work the system” to artificially increase their scores, so it actively seeks out, flags and removes these individuals from the lists Kred provides its clients. In that same vein, Kred analyzes the sentiment of content shared by those it scores to offer greater and more accurate segmentation of the audience.

Kred’s focus is not to sell scores or be a facilitator between you and your audience but on providing a customized consulting service that works to help identify the multitude of considerations and filters required to accurately manage an influence marketing campaign. Oh, and if you don’t want to use Kred to broadcast a message, you can take the list and work it yourself.

Multi-Dimensional Scoring

Its scoring is two-dimensional and evolving. Kred states its scores “reflect trust and generosity, the foundations of strong relationships.” It scores “influence” as the ability to inspire action and “outreach” that reflects generosity in engaging with others and helping them to spread the message. “In the future, you’ll see the scores become multi-dimensional with the inclusion of even more data sources that could include attribution, affinity, context and more,” states Mr. Grill. This provides marketers greater insights and allows for better planning and decision making in our outreach efforts.

It's About Me

Kred’s business plan, service and platform are designed to build their business by truly improving the effectiveness of a business’ influence marketing efforts, not to increase its own revenues by being a middle man between the business and a black hole of undisclosed "influencers".

While I’m still wary of any platform that claims to be able to unequivocally and scientifically rank something as fluid and unpredictable as influence, I appreciate the openness and flexibility of Kred and how it provides me with solid data points that I can choose to incorporate into my own influence marketing programs.

Could there be hope for social influence scoring platforms?!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The Grand Paradox of Social Communications

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You cannot read a marketing or social media blog today without stumbling across the advice: “humanize your brand.” The advice is certainly not a new concept to marketing, but one that has had new importance breathed into it in the face of the ever-evolving digital relationships businesses have with their customers.

It’s the grand paradox of digital and social communications; we’re racing to connect through inanimate computers and mobile phones in order to build stronger relationships with people.

Messages are often misconstrued by our inability to effectively translate our intent to the written word. Doing so is a task that requires tremendous training and skill and very few of us are either so trained or skilled. Yet, with social networks and blog content management tools in hand, we’ve all become active brand publishers attempting to fabricate relationships through social channels.

Some argue that the real problem lies in the consumer’s inability to interpret our intent because each views the same message with his or her own personal filters. The emotional, financial and social states of each member of a business’ community impact how they process the communications received. Businesses using social channels to sell products and services often create content without understanding where the customer is in the decision making or purchase cycle, thus decreasing the likelihood that their efforts will contribute to any form of relationship-building.

Regardless of which theory you subscribe to, digital communications have distanced us from our customers as much as they’ve embedded us in their lives. As a result, the need to “humanize our brand” has become a more urgent priority for marketers. Nuances, colors or even a headline could make the difference between your digital handshake being perceived as firm and strong or limp and weak.

The Relationship Gap

Business leaders are being trained to do more with less, generate more profit with less investment, and sell more with fewer sales people. The very ethos of our capitalist-based civilization moves us towards this goal, so it’s no wonder that social media’s appeal of mass communications with less effort and expertise has captured the imagination of marketers and business executives everywhere. Sadly, the push to communicate digitally has decreased our ability to truly connect with people, build strong personal relationships and create truly outstanding customer experiences. The connections we are making are fickle and tenuous.

Now don’t mistake my intent, I’m not advocating we remove social or digital communications from our vocabulary but I am sounding the alarm for those who have become singularly focused on the social channel to humanize the brand. Social media has become a black hole of sorts, sucking us in and forcing us to create strategies and tactics to counter the impersonal nature of the technology that drives conversations today.

“Humanizing your brand” is certainly an important tactic of modern content marketing strategies, but social content does not humanize your brand. Social content, generated by your marketing team or your customers, is a testament to how human and relatable your brand is; it’s a time-capsule tchotchke that future generations will use to better understand what you were. It does not create what you are. Humanizing your brand requires a culture change that embodies everything a business, its staff and the products and services they produce represent. It’s a way of doing business, not a content marketing strategy.

Do you agree? Can you humanize your business through social media and content marketing strategies? Or is it what I’ve argued, just a testament to the humanity of your brand (or lack thereof)? Share your thoughts below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

How to Manage Advocates and Drive Qualified Leads

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Advocacy, the third stage in the Customer Development sphere of the Sensei Customer Lifecycle model, is the culmination of the business’ effort to engage and support the customer. A customer who has reached this stage in the lifecycle has experienced the seamless conversion of your relationship from vendor-prospect to vendor-customer and now embraces you as a business “partner” more than a vendor.

See posts on the first two stages of the Customer Development cycle:
A Purchase Order Does Not Guarantee Customer Loyalty
Advocacy, Not Sales, is the End Goal of B2B Loyalty

At this point, your team and processes have become integrated with those of your customer. You’ve established real-time pathways for communication and you’re providing relevant marketing, sales and business development support. Your customers are satisfied and you’ve earned their loyalty; you’ve created an advocate. Your job is done; sit back and watch the leads come flying in.

Not so fast. Marketers have grossly over-estimated advocacy. Referrals - even among those customers from whom you’ve earned loyalty - aren’t assured. Further, they’re not guaranteed to be quality leads nor qualified leads. This is not the time to become lax in your engagement efforts.

Advocates and the referral process still require proactive management to successfully feed the “Awareness” stage in the Customer Acquisition sphere of the lifecycle. Below are some recommendations:

1. Set Advocate Expectations

If performance expectations were not conveyed to a newly-hired salesperson within your firm, what do you believe their success would be? The same applies to customer advocates. While the best referrals often come from genuine customer commentary, it’s human nature to complain about the products and services we dislike more than complimenting those that we appreciate. For this reason, a business should not shy away from asking for referrals from potential advocates. Since these customers now consider you a business partner rather than a vendor, such requests are usually accepted and acted upon gladly.

Note: requests for referrals are less effective and generate fewer qualified leads when made to customers who have not progressed to this stage of the customer lifecycle.

2. Categorize Advocates

Generic requests for referrals may encourage lead quantity but neither quality nor high conversion. The goal of advocacy is to increase qualified, measurable leads into the Customer Acquisition sales funnel. To do so effectively, your business must first qualify the referrers based on the influence they have within their community, the quality of relationship you have with their key players, the size of their industry, etc., as applicable to your business and industry.

Values are placed on each “advocate category” based on share of wallet earned, profit generated, ease of doing business, speed the customer progressed along the lifecycle, etc. Leads are tracked back to the customer advocates and their categories, providing context, prioritization and instruction for the sales team to better manage the lead funnel.

3. Enable Advocates

Requests for leads, regardless of how willing the customer advocate is, do not always generate action. Translating the willingness to refer into taking action requires you to empower the advocate with the right content and means to act upon that desire. Online tools such as referral forms, co-branded blog posts, etc. or offline events where advocates are encouraged to invite colleagues to a networking event can enable customers to act on your behalf.

Without context and timing however, such tools are less effective. As with the Loyalty Phase of the Customer Lifecycle, relevance is critical to success. Blindly sending requests for referrals to advocates dilutes the referral pool and challenges their good will. Generate a plan that strategically asks for referrals from specific customers when relevant transactions occur such as customer feedback, successful resolution of a customer complaint, financial milestones, etc.

4. Acknowledge Advocates

As with other good deeds, referrals are cause for celebration and a genuine expression of appreciation. Acknowledging the value of a customer’s referral provides the positive reinforcement required to maintain the balance between the two partners in this venture: vendor and customer.

Further, it’s imperative to highlight converted leads and the impact that the new customer provides the referring customer, not your business. The value to your business is understood; you’ve increased your revenue. The value to the referrer is not so clear so it’s important to highlight the connection between their action, the converted lead and the benefit to their business. What has this new client, the lessons learned or the additional revenue added to your business that will directly impact the referring business? Can some new partnership or benefit be created by having both clients reselling your product?

Notice that we didn’t list “reward advocates” here. Rewarding advocates with financial incentives and other perks is often appreciated but typically carries only short-term value. Improving the advocate’s business and/or the relationship between the business partners is strategically a better long-term plan.

The lesson to be learned is that advocacy is not to be taken for granted. Advocacy – and advocates – must be planned, managed and tracked as carefully as any other stage in the Customer Lifecycle. Advocacy is the launching point for new customers, not the end-point of the service team’s customer management efforts.

Join the conversation. Is this a realistic model for B2B organizations? Or are they simply too focused on short-term goals for such long-term strategic planning?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Advocacy, Not Sales is the End Goal of B2B Loyalty

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In the B2C world, “Customer Loyalty” has become synonymous with points or rewards membership programs which are used to aid in the acquisition of new customers rather than building value in existing customers. Such loyalty programs are rarer in the B2B landscape yet the tactical importance of loyalty is equally misunderstood and underutilized.

91% of B2B executives questioned in a Sensei Survey listed “increasing sales” as the purpose for generating customer loyalty. If a purchase was the end or final point of the customer lifecycle, then these executives might be correct; however, increased sales are a by-product of loyalty, not the end result. The goal of increasing loyalty is to establish the foundation of customer advocacy.

Creating true advocates, those with the personal dedication and passion required to recommend your business or with the power to truly influence their peers towards a purchase decision, requires unquestioned loyalty. Without it, referrals are infrequently given and rarely without direct solicitation from you. Creating these advocates should be the business’ guiding principle when developing customer loyalty programs.

Relevance is Key to Loyalty

This degree of loyalty is not earned by volume price breaks but through relevance. How relevant is your relationship to the customer on any given day? How relevant are your products and offers to the customer when they’re received? How relevant is the response to customer service requests?
Most B2B businesses group customers by industry, size, purchase volume, share of wallet, etc. and formulate general loyalty strategies to coerce increased purchase orders. Using such general categorizations as the basis for loyalty programs is a short-term plan that limits the value of the customer from reaching its potential.

Sensei recommends the following strategies to generate advocate-worthy loyalty.

1. Align with Your Customer’s Value Proposition

Understand the value proposition that your customer proposes to the end-user and adjust your products, packaging, and options to help them deliver upon that promise. Remember that your existing customers are not only your customers; through their advocacy they are a conduit to many potential new customers. Adjusting your products and services to better align with the channel’s value proposition ensures the unquestioned loyalty required to drive advocates.

2. Monitor and Be Flexible Enough to Adapt In Real-Time

Monitor the changes in the economy, competitive factors or other issues that impact your customer’s businesses. How has their business’ focus had to change? What are their current attitudes towards the future? Have their short- or long-term strategies changed? Market conditions are evolving at increasingly frequent intervals; what was once a motivator is now an obstacle to doing business. Your business’ ability to proactively adapt to such changes will demonstrate leadership and solidify fervent loyalty.

3. Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

Relevance is not expressed in offers and promotions that anyone in the business’ category or geography can also access. Personalization requires rewards, education, ancillary products or support that is specific to the business, not their category.

Further, don’t confuse loyalty with reward programs in B2B industries. To demonstrate relevance, consider incentives that include premium packaging or personalized marketing collateral that will increase their ability to generate more revenue. Or consider providing the customer an outside consultant to create a customized social or marketing engagement strategy to better connect with their customers. Or for customers with time-sensitive or mission-critical end-user engagements, consider offering priority customer service handling.

Ironically, when you eliminate the goal of increased sales from your loyalty programs, you achieve the greatest sales increase. Shifting tactics from cash incentives or general point-for-purchase schemes to relevant and personalized services builds a longer-term loyalty that produces brand advocates. Among these customers you’ll earn a greater share of wallet and increase their life-time value to your business. However, of even greater value are the referrals generated by these customers, which have the power to drive more qualified leads than most customer acquisition strategies.

Join the conversation! What's your take on Loyalty in B2B? Should the end goal be advocacy as I suggest here or increased wallet share from existing customers?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The Score: Marketing Metrics 94, Insights 0

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

What the average marketer tracks every day:

Tweets. Shares. Views. Likes. Retweets. Searches. Comments. Pings. Pokes. +Ks. Reads. Phone calls. Leads. Qualified leads. Converted leads. Return on Investment. Conversations. Recommendations. Votes. Mentions. LinkedIn connections. Pins. Returned calls. Repeat visits. Twitter followers. Unique views. Keywords. Tags. Social rank. Klout score. Inbound links. Sale. Household income. Lifetime value. Subscribers. Facebook fans. Latent leads. Referral ops. Influencers. Cost per acquisition. Sentiment of conversation. Social graph. Opens. Registrations. Touchpoints. Churn. Business cards collected. Reach. Email lists. Bounce rates. Quotas. Open rates. Click-throughs. Ad views. Ad clicks. Ad conversions. Inbound leads. Outbound calls. Content. Web site conversion. Viralness of videos. Peer Index Score. Customer acquisition. Contact frequency. Kred score. Size of wallet. Attendee rate. Surveys completed. Number of posts. Frequency of posts. Length of posts. Impressions. Cost Per Click. Cost Per Thousand Views. Cost Per Conversion. Cost Per Action. Connections. Activity. Drop-off rate. Engagement rate. Unsubscribe rate. Number of press releases. Number of interviews. Number of press events. Volume of coverage. Share of voice. Backlinks. Delivery rate. Response rate. Size of purchase. Brand mentions. Average time on site. Referral sites. Exit pages.

What the average marketer learns about the customer experience from what he/she has tracked: 0.

Get the point? Take a minute. Walk outside. Breathe some fresh air. Throw a football around with the neighbor’s kid. Clear your head. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

…

Back? OK, now pay attention. All that time you spent counting: a colossal waste of time.

It’s imperative that you understand you’ve lost this battle. Sulk; lick your wounds; hit rock bottom.

Then start counting again but this time, with a plan. Begin by mapping a customer lifecycle that pinpoints the interactions a customer has with your brand from first awareness, through purchase and on to advocacy. Next, append the metrics you’re monitoring to that specific customer’s lifecycle map.

In no time, the metrics you’re counting will transform from numbers to insights. You’ll start to see trends across different customer segments: what frequency of posts leads to qualified leads; what types of conversations create actual lead conversions; what sentiment levels lead to increased customer churn.

The insights you failed to realize during the past two years while busily collecting data will become crystal clear within the first quarter. No, realigning your thinking and your company’s processes around this strategy is not simple. Nothing worth doing ever is.

What’s your take? Is there value in number crunching if it’s not tied to the customer value? Join the debate.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego