Obviously, humor and B2B marketing don’t go well together, OR perhaps it should be the other way around! Humor and B2B marketing can go extremely well together! At least, it worked out greatly for Cisco a few years ago when they released a Valentine’s video produced by leading business comedian Tim Washer. Check out the video below!
Chapman Social Media Aid
Next week, students in my social media marketing classes will pick companies and organizations to work with in their semester-long team projects. Some of them already have ideas of who they would like to help but most teams still need to find access to a company or an organization. I am receiving many emails from businesses asking for student help but my inbox is getting messy.
Therefore, I developed a brief survey that I ask you to fill out if you wish to be considered. Your willingness to facilitate a student project is much appreciated and please note that non-profit organizations are also encouraged to participate as we wish to reach out more to the broader community.
For best chances to be considered, please complete the survey ASAP, ideally before Monday classes begin at 1 pm, 2.30 pm, and 7 pm (February 4) but most likely there will still be teams in need of a company also on Wednesday February 6 (classes at 1 pm).
Disclaimer: There are no guarantees that your project will be chosen by any student team but please consider throwing your name in the hat if you are willing to open up and allow for students to gain some valuable real-world experience. Please note that these project teams are not to be mistaken for paid consultants. In the past, some businesses have been very grateful for the valuable help they have gotten and some organizations have indeed achieved higher levels of social media presence, organization, and understanding. In other cases, businesses had expected more from the students. That is just the name of the game and neither I personally nor Chapman University is responsible for the actions or recommendations by the students.
Voice of the B2B Customers’ Customers
In the early 1990’s, companies started to listen more systematically to the “voice of the customer” (VOC)* after the quality movement made it clear that companies had room for improvement in this regard. Companies could more precisely identify how to provide the most value by dissecting the customers’ voice so that they could hierarchically structure and prioritize their needs. Many companies learned from this exercise and customers benefited.
However, VOC also missed the boat in one major way. The voice of the customer approach assumes that the customer is talking to you. But what if the customer is either unwilling or unable to articulate anything? This is the “silence of the customer” which could be equally if not more important than what customers actually say such as when “96% of customers who are unhappy don’t complain.”
Thinking about it, in a B2B context this could also mean that social media listening efforts could be misdirected if listening is limited only to direct customers. Instead of trying to listen to direct customers when they may not have anything to say, companies could be better off holding their ears close to the ground where the customers of the customers interact instead. Why? Well, imagine if we could hear customers’ customers concerns. Wouldn’t that put us in a better position to also predict what our customers’ needs are, articulated or not?
* Abbie Griffin & John R. Hauser (1993), “The Voice of the Customer,” Marketing Science, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 1993.
Good Domain Parenting
When speaking about social media, I often draw laughter when I say that I find it incredible that there are still parents out there who name their babies without first checking if the matching domain name is available. What they don’t know is that I am only half-joking when I make that statement. Perhaps “incredible” is an exaggeration but I do maintain that you could do your child a great favor if you think ahead in this regard. I registered our two kids’ domains when they were about 5-6 years old and was lucky myself to find them still being available. Yes, it is possible that .com as a top level domain will be more or less irrelevant when the time comes for them to “brand” themselves online as technology changes. Still, the expense of about $10 a year pales in comparison to all other investments parents make in their kids future and the rewards could be significant.
Case in point. In today’s class when I said the above, one of my students came up and said that that was exactly what his dad did when he was born! His name “Zachary Campbell” is a common one as well but thanks to his dad’s foresightedness, he now outranks others with the same name, even some semicelebrities. Check out his site, hire him!
B2B Social Media in Silicon Valley
Took the Southwest shuttle from Orange County to San Jose in Silicon Valley today and met with some marketing executives at a major B2B company. It was educational for me to hear first-hand accounts from marketers about their struggles selling social media initiatives to non-marketing executives. Without strong companywide support, the social media efforts undertaken, however well-intentioned, may not even get a fair shot at being successful as they tend to be understaffed and underfunded. Even the projects that do get some traction on social media can suffer from not get the recognition they deserve due to a general lack of appreciation of the power of social media. Continuing to provide some good examples could perhaps convince them over time. However, it would clearly be ideal should they have the very senior management’s blessing. A great way of demonstrating such support would be if the CEO would jump on board and started tweeting or blogging, wouldn’t it?
What Social Media Can Do
In my first social media marketing classes today, students were asked to identify various uses of social media, preferably with a business use case in mind. If you cannot read my handwriting… here comes some of the prominent uses of social media:
- Communication/Conversations
- Connection/Network
- Humanization/Personalization
- Marketing Research/Opportunity Identification
- Brand presence/Awareness creation
- Reminders about ones existence
- Employee relations and employer branding
- Collaboration
- Communities
- News
Social media is quite multifaceted in other words! Not bad, huh? So, are you leveraging most of these uses or are you limiting yourself?
3 Keys to Social Success
There are many guidelines out there when it comes to how one can achieve success through the use of social media. To me, three core perspectives stand out as being particularly critical.
- Long term perspective. Without the patience to develop long-term relationships and networks, one is likely to fail. To strive for short-terms results may not be wrong per se but it cannot come at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction.
- Generous approach. Give more than you take and you will be offered plenty in return. This is related to the long-term perspective as well and the generosity is also about proactive sharing, offering ideas, connections, and resources to those in your network you believe would benefit from them without them asking for them.
- Human appearance. Trying to sound corporate, professional, or intellectual can on social media come across as being snobby and standoffish and is thus also less likely to engender any interest in interactions by other parties. A more casual, informal, and sometimes humorous communication style is a much more effective way to get other people to open up and be willing to develop better relationships with you. In the end, it may very well be seen as being unprofessional to be too professional!
What do you think? Other factors you think should be a top priority as you find your approach on social media?
Social B2B Relationships
The fact that many business-to-business (B2B) relationships are characterized by long-term norms of trust and commitment should not be news to either academics or practitioners. The value of establishing loyal partnerships between buyers and sellers to ensure consistent delivery of customer satisfaction has become increasingly evident. Such partnerships typically involve multiple people in each company having multiple relationships with people in the other company. Over time, such social processes make a specific buyer-seller relationship difficult to break as the the organizational boundaries begin to blur. Over time, many staff in boundary-spanning jobs experience a role conflict in that they almost forget which company they work for or at least which company’s goals they hold, or should hold, closest to their hearts, at the same time as this is for the good of the whole partnership.
Even if most would agree with the above statement, now with the emergence of a plethora of often free social media and networking technologies that are getting easier and easier to use by the day at the same time as they become more and more powerful, some still question the potential value of social media in a B2B context. This is puzzling. Yes, there may be too many platforms to choose from. Yes, there could be situations where social media may not be applicable. But still. What could be wrong with having more tools as your disposal to further strengthen and develop existing relationships between buyers and sellers?
In a B2B context, you often hear naysayers say things like: “I don’t need social media to manage my customer relationships, I only have a handful of customers to manage and if I have a problem, I just pick up the phone.” Still, wouldn’t it be helpful to also know what is going on in the lives of your customers when you don’t have a problem? Perhaps they have a problem, a problem they may even voice on social media, and you are nowhere near to pick up the signal. That sounds like a problem to me. Or, what do you think?
Selling Social Media to CEO Laggards
Social Media Campfire recently asked me to share some tips on how the value of social media can be effectively communicated to CEOs and other decision makers who are genuinely skeptical towards the business value of social media. It turned out to be a very interesting evening also for me as the Social Media Campfire participants had plenty of insights to share on this topic as well based on their extensive experiences trying to get the message across. Based on our discussion, one thing that I think is noteworthy, is the one of overcoming the pride factor of CEOs who have been truly skeptical.
Now we are dealing with True Laggards
Given that social media no longer can be considered a new phenomenon, one thing to recognize is that executives who are still holding out by refusing to adopt any social media tools for business purposes represent a shrinking group of executives that could only be classified as true laggards in the adoption process. One implication of this is that for them to change their minds, it is going to take a considerable amount of persuasion as many of them likely have expressed deep skepticism toward social media now for a number of years. Thus, they would have to swallow some pride in order to make such an adjustment and for some, this may not come easily.
One way of dealing with this concern is to give them something to take pride in at the same time as they start adopting social media. For example, one can acknowledge that some of the critiques of social media that many skeptics have expressed could have been at least partially warranted. Security issues of an employee sharing too much information have hurt some companies. Others have indeed suffered from employees wasting too much time on social media without much return on their investment to show for it, at least not in the short term. Customers already suffering from information overload not wanting to connect with suppliers on an ever-increasing number of social media platforms. Etc. This way, executives may be better able to start a more nuanced discussion today regarding how social media potentially could add value to their business and in what ways they should act in order to avoid the traps.
A big thanks to all participants at the Social Media Campfire and to the hosts Kathi Kruse, Marieke Hensel, and Chris Voss plus the beautiful locale at Coworking Fullerton / Branding Personality and for more about our discussion, please also check out the recap by Kathi Kruse!
Seller Beware and Persuasion by Ambiverts
Last week, Daniel H. Pink gave a talk to Linked Orange County at the Irvine Barclay Theatre where he shared some insights from his new book “To Sell is Human.” In the following, I comment upon some of these ideas or findings:
1 in 9 Work in Sales
Pink started out by stating that the number of salespeople haven’t changed with the emergence of technology. 1 in 9 professionally active Americans work in sales and that ratio has stayed the same over several decades. Perhaps that is true but I also think that a key question is how the nature of the sales profession has changed and how technology is playing an increasingly crucial role to facilitate the sales cycle for salespeople. That being said, it is indeed noteworthy that his studies confirm that so many people still today have their primary professional focus on sales.
Aren’t We All in Sales?
Then Dan Pink addressed the other part of the pie, the 8 of 9 professionals who are not having variations of the word sales on their business cards. He argued that those people, too, are in sales as his research shows that professionals today spend about 40% of their time convincing and persuading others, whether they be bosses, partners, suppliers, etc, to get them to do or to support various activities, goals, etc. That we are all engaged in sales to various degrees may be worth emphasizing lest we forget. This should serve more as a reminder than as a news alert to many, I presume, at least to my students (I hope!).
Seller Beware!
In line with what many others have pointed out in the recent years, Pink noted the increasing power of buyers armed with more realtime access to ever-more information to aid their shopping comparison processes. Dan Pink raised the bar further in this information arms race, though, when he argued that buyers now not only have achieved information parity with sellers but that they actually in many cases now know more about the market than the seller, even if the latter lives and breathes the market every day! Thus, the call for a “Seller Beware” alert as some naïve and unsuspecting sellers may otherwise be taken advantage of. Talk about a role reversal! I do believe that this is an interesting point as some sellers may have become so complacent thinking they know their industry inside and out so that they are no longer closely attuned to trends and competitive moves, at least not as much as some very motivated buyers may be.
If this were the concern of just a few buyers it may not be so harmful to a seller. However, we could expect many of these well-informed buyers using new technologies to disseminate such information in increasingly effective ways to guide also other, more mainstream, buyers to the best deals in town. Clearly, some such über-informed buyers may turn, or are turning, their market expertise into bona fide businesses themselves and could perhaps no longer be accurately classified as mere buyers.
Persuasive Selling by Ambiverts
Another issue raised by Dan Pink that stood out to me was the research into the relationship between the degree to which a salesperson is extrovert and salesperson performance. Citing some fascinating recent research by Adam M. Grant* at the Wharton School, it was found that the best performers were neither extroverts nor introverts, but rather those salespeople displaying a little bit of both (or neither?). Hence, such salespeople could be labeled as being ambidextrous in this regard, or “ambivert” as Grant calls it in his research. If this finding holds up in more studies, it finally may signal the end of hiring and promoting salespeople based on their extrovert nature in favor of those who keep a somewhat lower profile. Even if there are many other books on sales (e.g., Consultative Selling) which call for a significant listening dimension among salespeople, Pink does a good job in illustrating how an “ambivert” salesperson can operate successfully. At least for large parts of their interaction with clients, salespeople need to allow for sincere listening and learning about the true customer needs at the same time as good salespeople also ought to know when to make their moves, an important aspect where the complete introverts may miss the boat.
* Grant, A. M. 2013. Rethinking the extraverted sales ideal: The ambivert advantage. Forthcoming in Psychological Science.