Providing customer joy

Customer joy is defined by delighting your clients. At every point where they interact with your company, your customers should have a positive experience. These points of interaction include

• Content: Every communication, such as a blog post, case study, newsletter, webinar or customer-centric content created by marketing, should leave a positive impression.
• People: Each time one of the employees at your company talks to a customer, these interactions should be positive. This includes
  • The first time you made contact at the beginning of the buyer’s journey as a prospect
  • Working with your salespeople throughout the purchase decision as an opportunity
  • During implementation for going live with your product or service
  • On-boarding and training with your product
  • Collaborating with your customer success team
• Product: If your product offering isn’t stable, you’re fighting a losing battle. An unstable product filled with bugs will wreck your customer’s experience.
• Support: A system like Zendesk (www.zendesk.com) is used for submitting tickets if/when your clients need help with your product. This offers you the capability to look for ways to improve your clients’ experiences.

When your customers aren’t happy, you’ll hear about it, one way or another, especially in the age of social media. When customers aren’t happy, they will leave. It is much less expensive to retain an existing client. The cost to acquire new customer accounts through marketing is expensive.

Surprising your clients

Your customers need to continue finding value in your business. B2B companies have a dedicated customer success team in order to provide ongoing service and support to your clients. The idea of “surprise and delight” is a big part of customer success. Your customers need to be elevated from the mundane tasks of their everyday jobs. Here are ways that your company can surprise your clients:

• Go beyond your value proposition: The solution you presented to your accounts in the buyer’s journey is why they chose to purchase from your company. Your clients expect you to honor what was promised in the terms of the purchase agreement. Attempt to deliver services beyond whatever your customer was expecting, to help them realize your value immediately. One way to do this is to meet deadlines earlier than expected, or overachieve on goals you set together.
• Provide added-value: Providing additional value to your clients is becoming an expectation, not an add-on. Look for ways to meet and exceed their expectations, such as offering additional products or upgrades at a lower cost.
• Host events: Whether it’s your annual user conference or taking them to dinner, an invitation to an event is a great way to surprise your clients and engage them.
• Engage them on social media: Posting Tweets, retweeting posts from their company accounts, or commenting on LinkedIn posts will be a pleasant surprise.
• Send them mail: The same way you sent direct mail to your sales prospects and opportunities, you should continue sending fun packages to your clients. Examples of items to mail include:
  • Sweets (cookies, candy, or brownies) or healthy fruit baskets
  • Hand-written thank you notes from you and/or your company’s CEO and executive leadership thanking them for their business
  • Branded items, or “swag”, from your company, such as t-shirts, water bottles, notebooks, coffee mugs, or other fun giveaways

Send your clients a “welcome kit” after the purchase decision and the contract has been signed. This welcome kit should contain swag from your company’s logo to start engendering brand value as soon as on-boarding starts.

Establishing relationships

Account-based marketing is a continuous cycle. Marketing and sales have worked to gain new customers. Your entire organization is responsible for keeping your customers happy to prevent them from leaving. The term for losing a customer in business is churn. One way to prevent churn is by having strong relationships with your customers. These relationships are based on trust and providing good service.

Your account’s journey is a symbiotic relationship. Contacts in the account interact with all facets of your organization during their experience as your customers. Here are the ways your clients have relationships with various departments in your organization:

• Marketing: The first touch point your customers had was with marketing. Each customer clicked on an ad, came to your website, met at an event, or downloaded a piece of content.

  ABM marketers continue to build a relationship by supplying content (such as training webinars, checklists, and how-to guides) and meeting your customers at events such as your annual user conference.

• Sales development: The call with your business or sales development representative (BDR/SDR) to schedule that first discovery call or demo.

  After the customer comes on board, the BDR/SDR should send an email thanking the customer for their business and offer to help in any way.

• Sales: Throughout the account’s journey, the account executive who signed the customer should continue to reach out. ABM goes beyond the buyer’s journey, and sales should, too. Checking in periodically (at least once a quarter) to see how the customer is progressing with your product or service is a great way for sales reps to stay engaged.

• Support: The dedicated team of support staff who answer your customers’ service tickets and provide training.

  A support team should actively monitor each customer account to escalate issues quickly and follow-up after resolution of these issues. Providing technical support and the ability to resolve issues can make or break a relationship with your customers.

• Product: Your clients spend tons of time interacting with your brand and using your product or service. Your company’s offering will ultimately have a strong impact on the customer’s experience. After all, it’s what they’re paying your company for.

  The key here is providing a good product. When the product isn’t stable, or is filled with bugs, then you’ll be continuously fighting a losing battle to keep your customers happy.

• Customer success: The forces on the front line servicing your accounts are the customer success or client relations team. The customer success manager (CSM) is the main point of contact who owns the relationship with their assigned accounts. A good CSM knows the ins and outs of the account, including vital information:
  • Primary users: Who from the account is most active with your product or services?
  • Organizational hierarchy: Who are the stakeholders, champions, decision-makers, and executive leaders?
  • Usage: How is the account using your product or service, what is the functionality, and how often are the account’s users active?

  • Contract terms: What level of product or service is the account using, and when is the agreement is up for renegotiation?

  This is important. Sales usually must get involved with any contract renewals or upgrades. The primary task of customer success is to service the account.

• Executive team: Getting your C-level executive leadership involved in the account takes the relationship to a higher level. A great way to surprise and delight your contacts is personal communication from the CEO. Having a senior executive send an email (even just a few sentences to check the status and see how things are going) will leave a great, lasting impression with your customers.

Before having your executive leadership communicate with the account, be sure you’re fully aware of the account’s status. Check your CRM and support platform to see whether there are any issues or recently submitted tickets that impact the current status of the account.

There are many different ways to build a relationship with a customer account. Like the initial buyer’s journey, working with the account during their experience as a customer is about engaging them on their terms. Here are ways you can create a solid foundation of your relationship with the account during their initial on-boarding:

• Have a communication plan: The CSM should set the expectation for contact frequency, whether it’s a weekly email status update or phone call to check in during the ramp up period, or monthly for on-going communication after the account is live and using your platform.
• Know your champion: The primary user in the account will be your VIP in the account. This contact is the person you want to develop into your customer advocate.

Getting your customers talking

A huge payoff from a satisfied customer is when they tell their friends and colleagues about your product or service. Happy customers are a great way to attract new customers. Your happy customers may become brand advocates for your product or service. Such brand advocates move beyond spreading the word to friends and colleagues, and can influence any number of prospects in the general public. These practices help to get your customers talking about your business:

• Do a good job. Provide a product that works effectively without bugs or issues, and support your customers with any questions they have in a timely, courteous manner.
• Measure to know you’re doing the right things. Ask your customers for feedback by email, send out quarterly or annual surveys, and look at support tickets to identify areas for improvement.
• Segment your customers into people who had a good experience. You do this by reviewing the feedback from surveys, examining the notes in your CRM or support systems, and talking to your customer success managers. These information sources can quickly name your happy customers.
• Give them tools to talk their experience. Your customers need a neutral place to come and share their stories. A few places online to do this include
  • G2Crowd (www.G2crowd.com): A business software review platform, leveraging more than 50,000 user reviews read by nearly 400,000 software buyers each month to help them make better purchasing decisions. G2Crowd users get unfiltered reviews from peers who use similar solutions. This is the first review site to recognize an account-based marketing product category.
  • LinkedIn Groups (www.linkedin.com): The Groups feature on LinkedIn provides a place for professionals in the same industry, or with similar interests, to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts. You can create your own group for your customers to share their experiences.
  • Net Promoter (www.netpromoter.com): This review site asks a simple question: “Using a 0-10 scale: How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?” Your customers then rank your business on a scale of 1 to 10; 10 is the highest Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). Respondents who gave your company a score of 9-10 are the ones you should target to develop into customer advocates.

A rising category of marketing technology (MarTech) software solutions are focused primarily on customer advocacy. By providing a platform just for your customers, you’re giving them a safe, dedicated space to voice their opinions. Using technology platforms built for your customers helps to get them talking. Here are a few software solutions to consider:

• Trustfuel (www.trustfuel.com): Trustfuel is a B2B word-of-mouth platform that turns your happiest customers into brand ambassadors to drive new business. The platform helps to discover potential candidates via industry standard techniques such as Net Promoter Score®. Then, Trustfuel intelligently recruits these unique customers to refer their friends, provide testimonials, amplify your messaging on social media, write online reviews, and act as references for sales.
• Ambassador (www.getambassador.com): Ambassador empowers marketing teams to increase revenue by leveraging the power of recommendations. Their flexible referral marketing platform automates enrolling, tracking, rewarding and managing loyal customers, affiliates, partners and fans. This allows B2B companies, consumer brands, and agencies to scale, and optimize referral marketing programs. Ambassador’s open API also seamlessly integrates with existing technologies, enabling companies to create a custom experience that aligns with their brand.
• ChurnZero (http://churnzero.net): ChurnZero powers subscription businesses to engage customers, generate more revenue, and prevent churn. You can see real-time insights into customer activity to get alerts on contacts in accounts, such as when there is a lack of engagement. You can also communicate to your customers while they’re using your application or platform to serve up content, like an ad promoting your next users meetup.
• Gainsight (www.gainsight.com): Gainsight allows companies to monitor and engage with a variety of customers — without compromising scalability. You can structure, streamline, and optimize your team’s workflow around the customer lifecycle, knowing that you’re sending the right message to the right customer contacts at the right time. This helps to deliver a personalized, unified experience to your customers.
• Influitive (www.influitive.com): B2B buyers are tuning out marketing and sales messages, but prospects are more interested in listening to the advice, recommendations and reviews of knowledgeable peers when making purchase decisions. Influitive helps B2B marketers tap into this trend by capturing the enthusiasm of their advocates, then turning that into measurable improvement in marketing and sales effectiveness. With AdvocateHub, marketers build powerful advocate communities where members systematically increase their status, access and network as they participate in activities like referral programs, reference calls, product reviews, and focus groups.
• RO Innovation (www.roinnovation.com): RO Innovation activates and amplifies the “Voice of the Customer” to accelerate revenue in the B2B sales process. RO’s software serves as the critical link between happy customers, sales activity and closing new prospects. RO ties together the critical marriage of customer reference management and sales enablement.
• Boulder Logic (www.boulderlogic.com): Acquired by RO Innovation in 2015, BoulderLogic’s easy to use customer reference software helps to increase revenue by closing deals faster. The powerful, intelligent matching algorithm identifies and delivers the most effective reference at exactly the right time. Achieve more with fewer program resources by saving time searching for references, maintaining a continuous pipeline of new testimonials and increasing adoption through integrations with other software including Salesforce and Influitive.

• Smync (www.smync.com): For building customer advocacy, Smync searches social networks and integrates with your CRM to create an SRM (Social Relationship Manager), identifying your most engaged customers across all social networks. The Smync platform provides the toolkit to activate social relationships with the customers wanting to share their experience with your brand on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis.

  Smync provides several utilities, such as

  • Share, which generates shareable branded landing pages for offers or email sign-ups
  • Shout, which aggregates social posting rights from customers to create buzz around bigger events or launches
  • Community, which builds branded advocate communities that generate trusted reach, user generated content and customer insights

Interviewing your customers

To really understand your customers’ sentiments, the marketing team needs to have conversations with them. Developing a relationship between your clients and marketing is essential for creating customer advocates. One of the first ways to start building this relationship is through an interview. When marketing interviews customers, the content from this interview can be repurposed for such collateral as a case study, a quote for your website, or a blog post.

Always ask for your customers to approve their statements before publication. Send an email with the quote you want to feature, or the draft of the content, for your customer to review and edit. This will increase trust as you continue to collaborate for creating content.

Marketing team members typically don’t have a close relationship with customers. When marketing wants to reach out to a customer for an interview, the initial communication should come from the person who owns the relationship. The people to ask are your team members who have directly helped the customer. These primary team members will most likely be either

• Customer success manager: The main point of contact on your client services team who is responsible for supporting the account.
• Sales account executive: The salesperson who closed the deal.

The person who owns the relationship should send an email to the client, connecting them with your marketing team member who will produce the content. In the email, they should introduce the marketing contact, explain the marketing contact’s role, clarify why marketing wants to interview the client, and ask whether the client will agree to spend time with marketing.

Whoever manages the relationship with the account will be the person from your team whom all communication should flow through. Even after the interview has been conducted, marketing should send drafts of communication to the primary account manager before reaching out directly to the customer.

When the client says now isn’t a good time, there may be an underlying issue that should be investigated by customer success and support.

When the client agrees to an interview, the marketing team member interviewing the customer at the account should treat this interview as a reporter or journalist. The interview questions should be based on the 5W’s and an H:

• Who? Ask your customers details about themselves. Where are they from originally? How long have they been in the industry? How long have they been with the company?

  These questions will help you get to know your customers better before you dive into specifics about how they interact with your company.

• What? What are their responsibilities in the company? Have they had various roles or titles in the organization? What’s the typical day like?
• When? When did they make the decision to purchase from your company? Was there a catalyst for making a purchase decision?
• Where? Where does your solution fit in with their organization’s business objectives? Is your product/service being used at just one of their office locations, or only within one business unit?
• Why? In their own words, why did they decide to purchase from your company? Why do they continue to do business? What need is being fulfilled? What do other people in the organization like about your company’s offering?
• How? How often are they using your product or service? How can your offering be improved? Are there opportunities to use your company’s offering in a different way?

Before the interview, meet with both the account executive who closed the deal and the customer success manager to get as much information as possible about your customer, such as why they chose to purchase from your company, and how they use your product/service. This will help give you an understanding of the relationship before your interview.

There are several formats in which this interview could be conducted. The goal is to record as much information as possible during your time with your customers. Here are ways to capture the conversation:

• Use call-recording software: Applications, such as GoToMeeting, WebEx and Google Hangout, allow you to interact digitally then record the entire conversation.
• Send them the questions via email: Asking your clients questions over email allows them to edit their answers. This can add an additional level of comfort, because they can review their responses before sending the email back.
• Include them as a panelist on a webinar: Inviting your clients to be a speaker on a webinar, which you’ll record, lets you capture their quotes in real time. This adds an authentic element to your webinar content, because your customers are sharing their own stories.

Consider using a transcription service, such as Rev.com. It charges you $1 per minute to transcribe your audio recordings and videos. This saves you time and gives you a document of your customers’ quotes to repurpose for content.

Driving referrals and references

According to Edelman Trust Barometer, 84 percent of B2B businesses start the buying process with a referral. When your customers have a good experience with your company, they will talk about it with their colleagues and peers. This type of authentic word-of-mouth marketing influences perceptions more powerfully than any other type of marketing activity.

There is a difference between a customer referral and a reference:

• Reference: You ask your customers to be a reference for you. When a customer agrees to be a reference, you can use them on a sales call to help close a new account. You can also interview them for a testimonial video, create a case study, or use a quote for your website.
• Referral: Your customer sends you new business. Your customer contacts in an account connect you with a new contact or prospect in their network who might become an opportunity.

You must understand your customer well enough to ask them to be a reference or give you referral business. Don’t treat all of your customers alike. You can’t just send an email from your marketing automation system to all of your customers asking for them to give you a Net Promoter Score®. You may reach a few happy people, but you will also reach unhappy customers. Asking your unhappy customers for a referral is like rubbing salt in a wound.

When it comes to getting customer referrals and using customers for references, it’s truly a partnership. Many customers are nervous about agreeing to be references, because they're worried about getting asked to be on sales calls all the time. The process for asking your customers to be references should include

• The initial conversation: Ask whether they would be willing to serve as this person, and how often an account executive will reach out to them (once a week, month or quarter) and how you’ll police it.
• Follow up on the conversation: Explain how you’ll collaborate with them in the future. Start with a small task, such as requesting a quote from them to put on your website.
• Make them thought leaders: If they’ve agreed to be your reference, promote them to your customers as thought leaders. You want to demonstrate how they’re smart and innovative, and why your product is great to check out. Feature your customers in such content as
  • Case studies
  • Blog posts
  • Video testimonials
  • Social media posts

Reaching new contacts

As mentioned in SiriusDecision’s 2015 Study on Customer Advocacy and Engagement, 83 percent of B2B companies say references are “critical” or “valuable” to the sales cycle. Your customers have networks. The networks of peers, colleagues, family, and friends can present new revenue opportunities. The idea of human-to-human (H2H) marketing really comes into play here, as the customer advocates who you’ve tapped to be references can provide introductions to their networks. You need to enable them to speak highly about your business.

Send an email to your customer advocates with this question: “How likely are you to recommend (NAME) to someone you know?” This is an opportunity for your customer to think about how their overall experience. Also ask, “Is there someone you know who would benefit from our product or solution?”

Don’t offer ridiculous cash bonuses for referrals. Your customers won’t have a great impression of your company.

Event marketing with your clients

A great way to get your customer advocates talking about you is to bring them to your events. Because your marketing team is investing its time and money to attend events, bringing your customers along for the ride will make your company’s presence at the event more impactful.

Before hitting the road, send an email to your customer base to see whether they're attending the same event. “See you at (event)?”

When you know your clients will be at the same conference, whether you’re exhibiting or not, meet up with them to walk the conference floor together. Offer them an opportunity to come to your booth, to give them “swag” or whatever your show giveaway may be, or buy them a meal. It’s about taking the time to have these one-on-one connections to further establish your relationship.

Here are ways to include your clients in marketing events:

• Bringing clients to your booth at a tradeshow. When show attendees walk up, you can introduce them to your customers who can talk about their experience.
• Inviting them to attend a dinner with your clients. This is a great opportunity for them to make new connections in their industry, and sit down with your company’s team members.
• Host an event in their hometown. Pull your list of client companies in your database to see whether there are clusters in certain cities, such as San Francisco, New York, and Boston, then plan a meetup event, such as a breakfast, happy hour, or one-day training session.

Building buzz

Getting good buzz can be a daunting task. As a marketer, when I see a company who has a lot of buzz, I often wonder how they got people talking about their brand. For generating buzz or word-of-mouth marketing, it’s about promoting your business in an unbiased and positive way. It’s authentic, and not just another spin that marketing is putting on content.

Such brand advocates move beyond spreading the word to friends and colleagues. They can influence any number of prospects in the general public. Here are ways to get your customers’ help in building buzz:

• Thought leadership: Feature your clients in blog posts and “customer of the month” spotlights on your website, then ask them to share the links on social media.
• Press release: When you’re announcing company news or debuting a new product, include a quote from one of your customer advocates discussing why they're excited about this new development.
• Connect them with influencers: Your company should be collaborating with industry influencers, such as reporters and speakers. Also, you can engage them by introducing them to your customers.
• Webinar: Consider putting one of your customers and an industry influencer on a webinar together, with one of your company’s executives serving as a moderator. The combination of these voices will create a powerful buzz.

Host a “CEO Town Hall” webinar at the beginning of the year. This is an opportunity for your company’s leadership to communicate with your clients. In this webinar, discuss achievements from the past year, opportunities for improvement, and what’s to come for the year in product development. Transparency is essential with this type of communication and helps to build buzz for the year to come.

Reviewing your existing product

Feedback is a powerful tool. Asking your customers what they think about your product is a great way to get feedback. There are several ways to engage your customers for reviews about your product. Here are a few solutions:

• Send in an email: This is an opportunity for the customer to step back from the product and holistically respond to the question: “How likely are you to recommend us to someone you know?”
• Create a survey: Tools like Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) have an easy-to-use function for capturing your customers’ anonymous feedback. When you need to know who your customers are, be sure to include a “Name” field in the survey. For anonymous customer satisfaction feedback, Suggestion Ox (www.suggestionox.com) is a free platform for 100-percent anonymous feedback.
• Prompt your customers: Include a survey or form inside the application, asking for feedback. There’s a higher chance of getting responses, because you’re catching them in context of using your product or platform. Your customers can then respond to this survey after doing something with your product. Tools such as Trustfuel aid this action.

Your customers can be frustrated. Putting a survey in your application may not be the right time to ask. This is why it’s important to look at data in your CRM or support ticket system to get these insights about what your customers currently are experiencing.

Asking for input on your product roadmap

Depending on how closely your marketing and sales teams know the people in a certain account, the information from a survey could help guide the content and support that are offered during a customer’s first experiences with the product or service. As your marketing team strives to build a relationship with your customer advocates, your product and engineering team needs to have a select group of customers to reach out to for input on development of future product features and enhancements.

Create a group of your VIP customers who can be a sounding board for product developments.

Commonly called a customer advisory board (CAB), there are several benefits for forming a core group of customers to provide feedback on product developments. This should be a small, limited group only available to an exclusive selection of customers. A product/customer advisory board is a great way to empower your customers. If they’ll be your advocates, they must believe in the product and be invested in your mutual success.

Be very selective in this process. These customers should be doing something novel with your product, such as pushing and testing the product’s limitations if you’re a software company.

It’s also good to make sure the customers are aligned with your ideal customer profile (ICP). Consider including one or two outliers or innovators who may not fit perfectly with your ICP as they offer a unique perspective.

Don’t put a customer on there just because they’re a strategic account you want to upsell or cross-sell.

In the long run, it’s about appointing customers who will be partners. If you get the wrong people on your CAB, it can create a precarious situation. One of your customers may want an update that applies only to their industry vertical, or specific use case, and is not prudent for all your customers using your product.

It’s also important to keep in mind how sales can sell any new product developments. When your CAB is comprised mostly of customers who fit in your ICP, any feedback they give about product development should align with how your set of target accounts can also benefit from these new enhancements. Consider how any new feature sets would be viewed from your target accounts in a certain vertical.

Factoring in feedback

In the process of gathering feedback, input, and reviews from your customers, you’ll hear many differing opinions. It’s up to your executive team to take this feedback and determine what should be considered for future product developments or improvements in your offering. What’s important is being able to rank and prioritize feedback with what’s in line or already on the list for your product roadmap.

Asking for feedback can be a double-edged sword. When you ask clients for feedback, they’ll expect you to take the feedback and do something with it.

Document all of your customers’ sentiments and feedback. This way, you can list why you didn’t take their suggestions if your customers prompt you for an explanation later on.