The need to quantify

The tough times of recent years has lead to a change, now clients expect everything you do to be quantified. You need to prove your value, be prepared with lots of data; says Keith Pigues, co-author of Winning With Customers: A Playbook for B2B. You’ll need to quantify your value to customers in terms of pounds and pence, something known as “customer value creation.”

‘Many organizations are finding that some of the more traditional customer satisfaction or customer loyalty measurement systems like ‘net promoter score’ are falling short when trying to provide a real financial measure to companies to help them understand exactly, ‘how much more money am I making doing business with your company verses Company B or C?’’ says Pigues.

To make this a reality organisations now need to match sales solutions to specific customers, implement marketing strategies that increase a company’s online visibility, and creating daily management plans that use mainstream technology.

Valkre founder Jerry Alderman agrees that the next evolution in B2B marketing involves businesses attempting to understand how the services they’re offering truly impact the bottom line of their customers. Valkre has created a new metric called the ‘differential value proposition’ or ‘DVP’, which measures the amount of increased profit that a customer can bring in by doing business with one company versus another. Unlike net promoter score, the DVP percentage metric was designed for use specifically within the B2B industry.

Targeting Online Identities

Concentrating on the individual customer, even when constructing broad awareness campaigns, is becoming an important objective. Steer clear of generalised marketing initiatives; companies are beginning to analyze the online behaviour, in an effort to pinpoint the specific buyer whose needs best fit the services of the seller.

Through research, organisations are finding ways to link varied online ‘handles’ across social networks to a single individual they wish to target. Throughout 2011 it is predicted that organisations will attempt to understand the individuals buying intentions through their activates on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

With the aim of cater marketing to customers depending on where they are in the buying process and targeting customers based on their online behaviour, the same way you would though their demographics’ by their industry or firm.

‘The trend of 2011 is that marketers are as interested in delivering relevant content to relevant people, as they are to stopping the delivery of irrelevant content to irrelevant people,’ says Elisa Fink, Tableau’s Vice President of Marketing. ‘We don’t want to be spammers. Every engagement with a company is really an engagement with a person.’

As the World Wide Web continues to advance, B2B marketing strategies will continue to evolve. Indeed, digital platforms continue to increase, for example social media, for markers to explore.

In 2011, the successful will be the ones that concentrate on targeting their efforts to their customers’ online habits and interests, and provide true value – and be able to prove it – to users.