The usual starting point for social media analysis—whether you're more interested in the monitoring or measurement variants—is to ask, "what are people saying about us?" That's a reasonable starting point, but if we take a few steps around to other parts of the elephant, we discover other applicatons. Today, for example, I talked with a marketing exec at a capital equipment supplier who was interested in consumer intelligence as a major account sales tool. I can think of quite a few companies who could do what he described, but I couldn't think of any who have.
The idea is simple. Use a common snapshot report to generate insights about a major customer account, based on what their customers have to say about them. Package the results for your major account team. You could also use a more general view of your customers' industry for your entire sales force.
What are my customer's customers saying?
Start with a typical reputation snapshot report—volume, sentiment, leading topics, trends. Instead of focusing on your own company, focus on your customer (bonus points for finding trends that mention both your customer and you or a competitor). It's a simple keyword substitution away from the traditional question: "what are people saying about them?"
When you get the report, the first benefit will be in growing your understanding of your customer's business. But the eye-openers will probably be in a leading dissatisfiers list (top issues filtered by negative sentiment). How would your sales team like to know about your customer's issues with:
- Problems associated with your products
- Problems associated with competitors' products (bonus!)
- Problems your products can help solve
- Emerging opportunities for your customer supported by your products
I did a lot of this kind of demand-chain analysis in my previous career—looking at consumer trends and their impact on customer demand for my products. This is valuable intelligence for any company whose customers use their products to deliver their own products or services. If you do this for sales, just remember to share the results with your marketing and product groups.
(Update: It may be more accurate to describe this as industrial marketing, as opposed to B2B.)
Nice theory, but who's doing it?
I suspect I could dig through my files and find examples of vendors who offer this type of report, but off the top of my head... nothing. The usual, $10–15K report is overkill, but a package of basic customer snapshots focused on identifying sales opportunities might have potential. Is anyone doing this with clients now?
I'm also curious what this topic does to your comfort meter. Does the thought of running analytics on your customer's market make you uncomfortable?
For those of you in the business, this came out of a casual conversation, but if it were a live request from a client, it's the kind of question I would send out on my new mailing list for vendors. If you don't have your invitation, drop me a note and I'll add you. And yes, I do plan to follow up on today's conversation with what I learn.
Nathan,
We did some custom work for a company a few years back. We integrated our anayltics with their sales automation tool (ACT). Seeing our online system leveraging their legacy sales automation tool was something astounding. Each record now dynamically invoked (as you described it) a real-time snapshot of online mentions, complete with sentiment/geo/source analysis, trending and reporting - seemingly being performed as an inbuilt feature of the legacy sales application.
The real challenge was costing this solution, as our systems are priced according to company/brand, and their database consisted of thousands of companies. Despite this, the project gave them a window not only into what people were saying about their customers (and conversely, sparking their reps to make phone calls they might never have thought to make), but it gave them a deeper understanding of perception value, and whether it was worthwhile continuing to do business with those who had fallen out of favour with Web audiences.
We've been doing this with a few of our enterprise software/hardware clients for some time.
While the main thrust of the monitoring/response is driven by PR, insights are passed along to the sales team, who then use the information when pitching new business or trying to close deals.
One of the primary things is looking at perceived problems or negatives about the products, which are often unfounded or are very case-specific. We know that potential customers who are doing searches online for product information will most likely come across the same content.
Now the sales force can be more proactive, or quickly address any concerns a lead might have.
Joseph, that's a big step beyond what I was describing, and easy to see why they'd like it. I was thinking of a basic report on a short list of major accounts, probably because in the context of the lunch discussion, the first question was how to demonstrate the value of the technique. As a first step, I think the report approach would be easier to sell in.
Josh, I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing (although I certainly agree with your use case). I get the impression that you're talking about arming sales with customer insights on their own products. What I'm looking at is one step removed: give sales teams information based on online opinions of the company's customers' products or services.
Just to tangle the language a little more, from an agency perspective, we're looking at the opinions of your client's customer's customers and giving the information to your client's sales team.
We're having fun with possessives, aren't we? When I need to spend much time in these models, I usually go with a picture. :-)
Hi Nathan,
I am working for Deloitte Consulting in the Netherlands.
We are doing this for some time now. We do it ourselves to target prospects but also to find opportunities at customers.
We also implement social web analysis at our customers. We do not mainly implement it for pure marketing purposes but more for internal feedback on processes, organisation and strategy. In this way they can optimize their business to the customers perception.
Greetings,
Nick
Hi Nathan:
We have done several projects like you describe. In one case it was for a healthy food ingredient supplier who depends on their clients launching new grocery products but was having trouble getting traction.
Typically food ingredient suppliers are strong on providing their clients with the technical, nutritional, economic and regulatory information to make a launch decision - but it is rare for them to also provide the consumer/marketing positioning support required.
Our work was used to help their major accounts team round out the offer with new product positioning and marketing support.
Interesting stuff.
Tom O'Brien
MotiveQuest LLC
Nathan,
We are specifically doing work like this for clients in the B2B space--primarily technology enterprise sales. I will drop you an email with some examples of the product offering.
I recently found your blog in a quest for social media metrics ideas and I am enjoy it as a great resource.
Best Regards,
Bill
Nathan,
Further to your comments, we have learned over the years that social media reporting is most effective when it functions dynamically. Whether that be for sales automation, or leveraged as a PR device.
For agencies, the advantage with online reporting tools means that any postponed meetings with clients won't require placing a second order for our custom reports, or showing them a week-old report absent of incidents which may have happened in-between rescheduling.
The same applies with our experience in sales automation - the "freshness" factor is where the aforementioned client found the real value of using SM as a sales tool. Again, this may appear to be going above and beyond, but there was one incident where a rep had won an account when he passed his tablet around the meeting room, revealing a timely blog incident that the prospect knew nothing about.
Nick, Tom, Bill - Thanks for the examples. No surprise it's been done, but it's good to know a few specific examples.
Joseph - The reason for the focus on services in this example is the readiness of the company. I agree with your point on the freshness of live data, Actually, I think I'll make it a new post to bring it up out of the comments.