by David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter

CHALLENGE

Taking a customer-centric approach to marketing offers many benefits for marketers. Understanding how and why a prospect buys from you allows for more precise, targeted and relevant marketing. And, the results of taking the customer into account when executing marketing campaigns should show up on the bottom line.

Good Technology, a B2B mobile solutions company, already listened to its customers at an annual face-to-face customer advisory council, where it learned about specific business issues facing its clients in the rapidly shifting mobile enterprise landscape.

The company also realized its marketing programs were performing. However, it was becoming more difficult to predict how those efforts would convert into pipeline, a sign that the buyer had taken control of their buying journey.

Good Technology decided to bring in a third-party vendor to help undertake a much more comprehensive look into its customers.

Julie Gibbs, Vice President, Marketing and Communications, Good Technology, explained, "We, as vendors, wanted to really look at how we are approaching our communications and marketing, including after-market communications, with our customers to improve them and make them more relevant."

She continued, "Our goal is to be a strategic partner that understands our customers’ business initiatives, and not just a vendor that sells products."

This case study covers the steps that led to a 130% lift in lead quality, 40% increase in Sales-accepted leads, and a 30% boost in return-on-marketing.

CAMPAIGN

By utilizing a third party for the more extensive research into its customers’ buying lifecycle, Good Technology was able to gain an unbiased look into how its customers interact with the company and its marketing campaigns.

The third-party vendor also provided a buffer between Marketing and the rest of presented the results internally across all lines of business and the senior leadership team at Good Technology. This approach ensured every organization understood the customers’ point of view and created stronger alignment across departments.

Step #1. Conduct customer interviews

The interviews of Good Technology customers used for the primary research included more than 30 global Fortune 100 companies, as well as a number of SMB customers.

These interviews involved the following:

• Typically the VP or director in IT responsible for purchasing, implementing, managing or owning emerging technology (most often specifically mobile technology)


• Interviews lasted around an hour, and most were in person at the customer’s offices


• Interviewees were asked about the trigger event -- what internally caused them to want to find a new solution, or evaluate a new technology


• Focused on discovering what experience the customer wanted to have with the vendor, and what marketing assets those customers were using in their buying process

Good Technology’s customers were receptive to the interview process, and the company found that the interviews created a sense of relationship, partnership and goodwill.

Step #2. Analyze interview results and share internally

Analysis included reviewing detailed feedback from Good Technology customers and mapping the buyer’s journey, including customer experiences and interactions.

From there, the material was put together in presentation form for what Gibbs described as an "internal road show" to tell the story.

She added that having a third party as part of the internal presentations was valuable.

"It wasn’t someone at the company telling the story and potentially creating friction, it was a third party," Gibbs stated. "That’s really important for internal credibility. You don’t want to be the person who says, ‘So-and-so is really unhappy with your product, or services, or support.’ You want to be able to show the data and quotes from your customers."

The customer feedback analysis uncovered two interesting facts for a B2B marketer with very large enterprise clients.

First, even very high-level executives frequently used freemail (such as Gmail and Yahoo!) email accounts when conducting research and interacting with marketing activities and assets. They did this explicitly to avoid talking to Sales before they were ready.

Second, while these prospects were interacting with industry and vendor websites, they also heavily took advantage of Gartner, the technology research firm, throughout the buying cycle to determine what vendors to consider.

In light of this learning, Gibbs said Good Technology increased the focus on its relationship with Gartner.

Step #3. Perform a gap analysis

With the customer interviews analyzed and presented throughout the company, Marketing next performed a gap analysis of its marketing programs and assets.

This analysis was pretty straightforward. Gibbs said the marketing team took a sheet listing the information and assets Good Technology customers were looking for at each stage of the buying cycle, and then listed all of its current marketing resources.

Comparing the two lists, the team gave each marketing resource a rating of red, yellow or green.

She said, "Where does what you are currently doing stand, and where does it fall short? You will often find you have some strengths that you are not looking at the right way and that you tend to focus on the weaknesses."

Step #4. Take action on the gap analysis

"Then we asked, ‘How can we change our marketing approach and assets?'" Gibbs said. "What can we do quickly? What’s going to take a little bit longer, and what do we have to build for longer term?"

She said the first step was to eliminate efforts that had no impact on Good Technology’s business. In this case, Marketing stopped producing e-books.

The customer interviews found the problem was not the content of the e-books; it was simply calling them "e-books."

Gibbs explained that using the marketing lingo/jargon term did not resonate or have credibility with Good Technology's B2B audience.

"The asset may have great content the customer is not going to use simply because you are calling it something that they don’t trust," said Gibbs.

Marketing found its customers trusted whitepapers, so the e-books were rewritten, reformatted and reproduced as whitepapers.

She offered more examples of different time-frame activities:

• Short term -- Stop doing things that didn’t have impact; begin using customer-centric terminology


• Medium term -- Repackage and rethink marketing campaigns to match the buying cycle map


• Long term -- Rebuild the marketing resource infrastructure to more closely match what Good Technology customers need

Gibbs said the final stage was to measure the impact of these changes.

Step #5. Continue the process through the entire customer experience

This effort was undertaken with the intent of better understanding the customer to help refine and improve marketing efforts.

Internally, customer service and support also became very engaged with the results of the initial customer interviews, and wanted to extend the insight into the post-purchase process.

The result of this interest was replicating the process on the post-purchase experience of Good Technology’s customers.

The company is currently in the process of "gluing" these learnings together to create an end-to-end customer experience map, so the company can provide a consistent customer experience over the entire lifetime of the relationship.

RESULTS

Gibbs said the results of just the short-term changes brought on by this effort are impressive:

• Across-the-board 30% increase in the return on marketing


• 130%, and more, improvement in lead quality response to certain marketing assets


• 40% increase in conversion from Marketing-qualified to Sales-accepted leads

She added that pipeline velocity was another key metric, and that lead quality was more important to Marketing than lead quantity.

"If you have big customers, you need to have a face-to-face relationship with that customer," said Gibbs, explaining what she learned from this campaign.

Gibbs added, "We talk about digital, we talk about social, and they are critically important. But nothing replaces sitting down and having a conversation on a regular basis. If you don’t have those conversations -- and build, really work on building the relationship and understanding your customer’s point of view -- you are not going to be successful marketing and selling for the future."

Creative Sample

Example of email copy from rethinking marketing campaigns

Sources

Good Technology

New Business Strategies – Good Technology’s customer marketing vendor

Related Resources

Guided by Buyers: 4 tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy

B2B Marketing: Embracing customer centricity

Digital Marketing: Understanding customer sentiment

Customer Relations: Bringing power back to Marketing during the B2B buying process

Customer-centric Marketing: Tap into your culture to differentiate from the competition

8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities

What is B2B?: Discovering what the customer wants by understanding your Buyer’s Funnel