My $24.95 lesson in marketing in an age of empowered customer.

I recently purchased Ad-Aware Plus because my computer has been acting really strange and opening random websites involuntarily. Well, I received a very nice notice from Google stating that my computer might be infected and I needed to get software to clean it up. Google listed three products; since I trust anything that comes with Google brand seal of approval I just clicked on the first one. OK, so $24.95 is not a bad deal to get this annoying problem solved.

Right? Well, wrong!

I buy it and when I go to download, it does not. So I contact their shiny online customer service agent. He comes online within seconds…I am happy as a clam. I need to get this resolved and get back to work asap. Rep tells me that I need to pay another $25.95 service fee to help with the download. Seriously? You are asking me to pay more to help me access something I already paid for? Click! I am out and on twitter ranting and raving about Ad-Aware.

Then it occurred to me, I am the empowered customer now. I have a voice.

Lessons #1:

We are living in an age of empowered customer. Same customer you just ticked off might just have 6000 twitter followers. She might be advising a $100MM company and be in charge of a multimillion dollar IT budget. More important than any of this…she now has a voice that can potentially reach thousands of YOUR customers.

Lesson #2:

One of my favorite bloggers Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent had a recent post that highlighted the need of customer-centeredness in budgeting for marketing as well as communication strategy and customer service. She stated “Marketing budgets need to be set on customers’ ability to pay, not marketing spend.”

The point of setting marketing budgets based on customers’ ability to pay is especially poignant for B2B service providers. When I speak to clients about marketing budgets, we often shift our thinking from setting benchmarks based on what we spend last year or what the competition spends. Instead we focus on determining measurable and predictable results based on the customers’ engagement with the service offering. For example engaging customers on social media is not necessarily a budget intensive activity but rather it is time intensive and has to be strategically administered.

In this age of customer empowerment, lines are not only blurred but completely emerged between customer service and profitability. Marketers can no longer hide in their cubicles and burry themselves in excel charts within the safety of quarterly budget meetings. Social media is the acid test for all things marketing and it is immediate. Throwing money at bad business practices is no longer effective. We have to get back to the basics and scrutinize our business models. As marketers we have to be courageous and question managements' view on marketing ROI.

After all ROI really comes from customer not from marketing activities.

Managing the Sales Prevention Department

Recently I was having a conversation with Margaret Johnson of Oakwood Systems Group about the importance of removing roadblocks from the customers’ purchasing journey. She alluded to a term I really liked; she said every time we ignore removing all the roadblocks from our customers’ overall experience with our firm we essentially assign them to the Sales Prevention Department.

How true! There is such a ghostly abyss as the Sales Prevention Department. We send our customers there without even knowing unless they have the enough mojo to raise their voices and tell us what went wrong. They simply disappear into “thanks, but no thanks” land.

So what can we do to abolish this Sales Prevention Department? One simple and clear strategy is to ensure sales and marketing work in alignment. Easier said than done, right? But here is a perspective that can help us all understand each other. Sales is a transactional function so they are looking at everything in terms of numbers and quantifiable items. Marketing on the other hand is a world of perceptions, compelling messages and persuasion. I look at it as gas and motor. You can have the most sophisticated motor (sales) but without gas (marketing) it will just sit there.

As my friend Margaret pointed out mapping out the purchasing journey is not enough. We should be focused on the entire engagement process. This way each inquiry, each conversation, each download, every web visit or blog comment has a value. Perhaps not in terms of dollars and cents but in terms of business results. After all we are not working to achieve only this quarter’s sales objectives but rather for the achievement of overall business results.

Who is afraid of negative blog comments?

There is a justifiable fear out there in the B2B Professional Services space that once we allow people to comment on our blog or become a member of our LinkedIn group we will open the backdoor to negative comments circulating online “in perpetuity”. Professional service brands are built on reputation of the company, its executives and the quality of the service they provide. It is natural to want to keep weaknesses or shortcomings close to vest. Who among us has never received a complaint email from a disgruntled client? It might not even be related to the service we provide. The client might just be having a bad day. We don’t want those emails displayed on our home page. Home page is a place for shinny happy testimonials strategically placed to be found by those friendly search engine robots.

But here is another perspective to consider. Contemporary marketing strategies such as demand generation and customer engagement practices have relationship building at their core. And relationships are built around interactions. So in that sense every interaction is an opportunity to build a relationship. We have to change our thinking and start looking at negative comments as opportunities and welcome them to reside on our website, blog or fan page instead of circulating out there in cyberspace without even our knowledge.

With blogs, Facebook groups, LinkedIn discussions, YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare and many other social media outlets companies have to embrace the fact that there will be instances where the content we put out there might rub someone, somewhere the wrong way. Social media platforms give us an opportunity humanize our brand and clearly demonstrate how committed we are to solving our customers’ problems.

As we gear up for demand generation efforts it is important to get comfortable with possibility of negative comments or reactions to the content. Instead have a clear roadmap as to how the company will respond, who will be in charge of tracking and answering, what incentive to offer as a follow up and how to measure. Having a strategy is the solution, instead of last minute scrambling to respond or hiding in case we get negative feedback.