B2B Loyalty – Best Practices

Here are the latest trends in B2B loyalty, technology and analytics that can help business build a bond with other other businesses:

How do you transform your company from a mere vendor into a valued partner? By building a loyalty platform on a strong foundation of customer data—and leveraging that platform to identify, understand and influence the consumer behind the account number.

Here are some best practices that you should consider:

IDENTIFY: People, not account numbers

Here’s a look at a few of the predominant models for identifying critical B2B contacts:

Give them some face time.

Jeff Hayzlett, Chief Business Development Officer for Eastman Kodak Company, is intimately familiar    with the B2B identification challenge.Given the vast variety of customer types, Eastman Kodak’s approach is to facilitate meetings and events with end users who value the chance to interact with the company on a personal level. Kodak’s annual Graphic Users Association Conference brings Kodak product managers and software developers face-to-face with their end-users, while a series of customer councils for publishers, commercial printers, and database marketers helps Kodak identify key decision-makers and influencers and give them tools to help them grow their businesses.

Use Web 2.0 tools—but warily.

One in three small-business owners now cultivate leads and choose suppliers based on recommendations from social-networking web sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn.”Increasingly, small-business owners are getting referrals and searching for supplier recommendations through their networks. Direct mail, newspaper and broadcast advertising are becoming less efficient mediums for reaching small businesses.”

UNDERSTAND: It’s the database, stupid

Once you have identified your sweet spot of small-business customers, the next step is to spend some time understanding their current behavior and comparing it to that of your best customers. Your goal is to isolate behavioral gaps that can be overcome with the right offer.

Treat your database like an asset.

B2B data degrades much more quickly than consumer data. While a consumer might keep the same email address for most of her adult life, a small-business buyer might change jobs, get a new title or return to the corporate world. That makes data refreshment a continual challenge.

Thou shalt not live on transactional data alone.

A 2008 Marketing Leadership Council study found that, because the cost of switching suppliers is higher and more complex in B2B, “attitudes”—in other words, the customer’s emotional connection to the brand—are often better indicators of B2B loyalty than pure transactional behavior. Small-business customers can look loyal in the transaction file, but a survey might find pockets of disgruntled customers who could benefit from an intervention.

Become a data conduit.

In the consumer world, data tends to flow one way, from the consumer to the database. B2B marketers, by contrast, can also learn a lot about their small-business customers by reversing the data stream. Small-business credit cardholders who lack accounting departments, for example, can benefit from information on their business purchases. AT&T Universal Business Rewards cardholders not only earn Citi ThankYou Rewards points on all purchases, but also gain access to a wealth of tools to help track and analyze business expenses.

Source: Colloquy