Supplier Recommendation

(What follows is an excerpt from David Shedd’s book Build a Better B2B Business: Winning Leadership for Your Business-to-Business Company, which is available at Amazon.com)

Face Reality: Most companies in most industries will not discover the “silver bullet,” the “magic elixir” that returns them to the exciting growth track of the past.  As Yogi Berra said:

The future ain’t going be what it used to be.

Instead, growth will come from serving current customers better and (as a Bain and Company study found) “finding profitable opportunities within the boundaries of current operations.”

Thus, your most likely success strategy will come from growing outward from your current customer base.  To do this, you need to turn your current satisfied customers into your biggest allies and best friends.

How?

• Survey them


• Listen to them


• Team with them

1.         Survey Your Customers

Institute a simple customer satisfaction survey.  GE and others have used a two-question customer satisfaction survey with success:

On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend this supplier to other people?

0 – 3: Negative

4 – 7: Neutral

8 – 10: Positive

Do you have any comments or suggestions for ways that we can serve you better?

With such a survey, you learn whether your customers are satisfied or not.  This can be a yellow warning light to make you aware of problems or of your company’s need to enhance or improve your product or service. 

The key is to make this survey or any survey as easy to respond to as possible so that your customers actually respond to your survey request.  Alas, many companies try to make it easier for them to collect and collate the survey results while making it harder and thus less likely for the customer to respond.  Instead, stick the short survey in an E-Mail and ask the customer to answer the questions and hit the Reply button. Personally, I am glad to respond to a survey like that. It takes me two minutes and I get a chance to share my thoughts.  But, I rarely click on a hyperlink to take me to a survey. It takes too much time, and I dread that the survey is going to be 30 questions long.

For those customers who are uns`atisfied, follow up and redress the issues raised; make sure that the customers know that you have heard them. For those customers that are very satisfied, ask if you can use them as references or ask for testimonials.

2.         Listen to Your Customers

Your current customers are a gold mine of information if you listen to them.  If you pay attention they will give you a deeper understanding of their industry and your competitive position as a supplier.  They may tell you about:

• Upcoming changes at their companies and other companies in their industry


• Your relative competitive position in the market


• New opportunities in their industry or in other industries

All of this information is invaluable in helping you grow and improve your business.  If your salespeople are not getting this feedback, train them how to ask and listen better.  Further, as the leader, get out into the field, speak with customers, and get this information yourself.

(The section on how to team with your customers will appear in a future entry.)

By Tom Pisello of Alinean

In order to achieve success, B2B marketers are currently using social media to better connect, dialogue and collaborate with prospects, customers, advocates/influencers and partners.

But what best practices can be used to best drive more engagements and deeper relationships?

We at Alinean recently concluded research of the Fortune 500, and select small/medium-sized businesses across a range of 31 different industries to determine what level of engagements these firms were achieving (or failing to achieve), the required investments to garner success, and the ultimate benefits these investments were yielding.

The research looked for engagement best practice, and found that marketers who implemented a layered, hierarchical set of engagement best practices, including a successive layering of Content, Campaigns, Monitoring and Collaboration, achieved superior ROI results.

Much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, each successive layer of these practices, relies on a solid foundation of prior levels for success – finding those that implemented a higher level strategy without having a proper foundation achieved much less success and squandered their social media investments.

The Social Media Hierarchy of Needs is the term we have applied to these best practices, and the tiers consist of the following:

• Tier 1: Content
  
• Tier 2: Campaigns
  
• Tier 3: Monitoring
  
• Tier 4: Collaboration
  

Tier 1: Content

If you don’t have anything important to say, or information of value to deliver to your community, you won’t achieve successful engagement with users. Therefore, the foundation of any social media campaign is a good content marketing strategy providing the community with value-added communications and deliverables.

Content that is most effective today includes (in priority order):

1. Value-focused including discounts, special offers, giveaways and calculators,
   
2. Entertainment including contests, games, applications, videos, music and cartoons,
   
3. Ideas such as recommendations/advice, webinars, white papers, diagnostics and articles,
   
4. Credibility including 3^rd party research reports, articles and white papers,
   
5. Personal connections, especially with celebrities, pundits, influencers and thought leaders.
   

Tier 2: Campaigns

Users won’t know that the content exists without campaigns, a promotional “push” of content via the social media channels. Campaigns involve coordinated social media communications to connect to and engage new prospects or existing customers, leveraging content as the value-add to entice and support engagement.

Some campaign examples can include: 

• Posting “deal of the day” promotions to Facebook fans,
  
• Scheduled tweets to promote a live webinar from a thought leader,
  
• Research summary tweets to promote research findings and important white paper content,
  
• Syndication of a blog post to LinkedIn Groups to gain new connections and spur discussions.
  

 Tier 3: Monitoring

Above the campaigns, monitoring is required to actively listen to and dialogue with the user community. Monitoring involves sales and marketing actively participating with the community via social media channels, to reinforce and cultivate relationships with existing community members, and proactively gain new relationships with additional prospects, customers and partners.

The monitoring can include:

• Answering questions or queries about the company or products,
  
• Assuring that campaigns are achieving the expected goals, driving the right responses, reactions and results,
  
• Monitoring for positive sentiment and use for promotion to gain additional followers, or monitoring for incidents/issues and negative sentiment to help mitigate these issues and limit risks,
  
• Listening for competitive mentions or requests, engaging users who might be considering competitive solutions,
  
• Providing feedback to fine tune campaigns and content to meet user needs.
  

Tier 4: Collaboration

With so many resources available beyond employees, the most innovative companies are driving ideas, innovative improvements, and partnerships via dialogue with the social media community – a term we call Collaborative Innovation.

As opposed to the “push” oriented focus of traditional campaigns or the “pull” orientation of monitoring, collaboration is an interactive dialogue with followers, connections and fans for mutual benefit.

Collaborative Innovation is engaging with prospects and customers via social media to provide interactive ideas, reviews, feedback and input around:

Product Improvements, termed “Social Sigma” by Forrester, such as market opportunity, features and benefits, design, pricing and more, including:

• Marketing Research, replacing focus groups with social feedback to test offerings, slogans and marketing ideas, and pricing.
  
• Business Development, such as advice on go-to-market, channel or strategic partners
  
• Operational Advice, such as seeking and gathering advice on operational process improvements, procurement, and suppliers.
  
• Crowd Sourcing, using the community versus traditional providers for services or solutions, such as using the community to develop the next advertising spot.
  

Measurement and Integration

Along with the hierarchical tiers, the research indicated two key additional supporting best practices, highlighting the importance of:

• Measurement of social media metrics, benefits and success, in particular tracking of engagement, influence and trends as well as success metrics such as benefits and ROI. 
  
• Integration of information, such as passing of lead information to lead nurturing systems and existing customer dialogue to CRM solutions, and processes integration, such as centralizing and coordinating social media marketing governance and resources.
  

The Bottom-Line

Achieving value from social media efforts requires the user community to be attracted and engaged. To drive the most effective engagement, a set of best practices has been researched revealing a hierarchical roadmap to engagement success. Implementing each successive tier of the Social Media Hierarchy of Needs can help B2B marketers drive more marketing success and ultimately ROI from their social media efforts.

For more information and resources on Social Media ROI, please visit: http://www.alinean.com/socialmediaroi.aspx