Browsing Category Communicate B2B Value

How do you find out what your customers really want? How do you tell your customers about your innovations in a way that makes them understand why you’re the best company to help them solve their problems?

This is maybe the most fun part of what I do. I use my technical background in engineering and software development, put it together with my marketing and product management experience (not to mention many hours spent studying great short stories) to translate your innovation into communication, and make your benefits clear to your customers.

Contact me to find out how I’ve done this for other B2B companies.

The videos here capture my conversations with B2B execs about these questions.

What Are the Benefits of B2B Social Marketing? – with Palomino System Innovations’ Markus Latzel

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Markus Latzel of Palomino System Innovations tells us how their community helps them build a better product and tell everyone about it.

“They help us get a fresh set of eyes on how we’re presenting our work.”

Markus is CEO of Palomino System Innovations. They have developed B2B software marketing tools for enterprises. Their solutions include the WebPal system, which is “a suite of products designed to centralize control, enhance communication, and facilitate workflow management.”

“One of the efforts that we’re making is to showcase our existing work as much as possible. And that is something where social marketing tools, and potentially external marketing groups, I feel, can actually help out in a very significant way. They see what we’re doing, we can explain to them the type of work that we’re doing, and they help us get a fresh set of eyes on how we’re presenting that work and are giving us feedback on how we can better position the messaging, how we can better position those cases, test cases, that we have previously developed.

Social marketing at this point, in the last year, we have started using for building a bit of a community around our software system, the WebPal content server, and using that community to gain feedback on the functionality of the system. The social marketing and the community is giving us exactly that. It’s allowing us to really understand some of the concerns of some of the users that are looking at our tools, and are saying hey, this is a great tool, I want to start using it, I just need one extra feature in order to make it work for my scenario. And social marketing in that sense is really to reach out to a community of developers out there. Other solution providers that can use that tool, provide us feedback on it and can again engage with Palomino in order to build more complex solutions on the WebPal Server platform.

That is something that is working out really well. We’re getting some of that feedback now, whereas before we were only working with clients directly.”

Does Your Company’s Culture Matter to Your B2B Customers? – with KMI’s Matt Airhart

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Matt Airhart, CEO of KMI, talks about how his team shares their company culture with their prospects and customers, and what this means to their customers and prospects.

“We find that the more our employees engage with our clients, the more our clients understand what KMI is all about, and see why we’re so much different than anybody else in our industry.”

Matt Airhart is the CEO of KMI. They create employee health and safety software solutions. To quote from their website, they create “web-based software solutions that help companies operate more sustainably, safely, and efficiently” and “enable companies to reduce injuries, increase the effectiveness of regulatory compliance initiatives, perform audits and inspections, manage Greenhouse Gas reporting, and initiate or improve corporate sustainability programs.”

“We have a company newsletter that we put out once a quarter, and we look at it differently than, I think, the newsletters that I get, certainly, by email from other companies. For us it’s more about engaging with our user community, with our clients, and also with our internal employees.

We try very hard to have a company, and a company culture, that’s very positive. The people who work at KMI don’t just work here because it’s a software company, they work here because it’s an opportunity to make the world a better place. We say right in our vision statement that what we’re trying to do is make the world safer for workers, more sustainable, less environmental impact from industry. We’re actually trying to help companies do that by using our software to make a difference…and we find that the more our employees engage with our clients, the more our clients understand what KMI is all about, and see why we’re so much different than anybody else in our industry.

So the newsletter is an opportunity for us to provide clients a snapshot into what it’s like in KMI on a day to day basis. So rather than have it be, you know, links to industry articles or technical information that they can already get from our website or anywhere else, for us the newsletter is at least 50% geared toward what our employees are doing, so the volunteer work that they’ve done, either individually, or we’ve done, you know, we’ll take a day off as a company, go plant trees or go clean up a park…

We really try to give our clients an opportunity to get to know us better, at least once a quarter. Anybody who is a user of ours is basically automatically signed up for it. I think our unsubscribe rate is next to zero, so it’s obviously well-suited for that group.

We also send it to people that we consider to be leads, and for us, we’re not a sales heavy organization, we’re not cold-calling people trying to force our solution down their throats. For us it’s more about getting the message out through creative marketing so we want people who are looking for a software system to help them make a difference, to help them be safer and more sustainable.

We want them to find us, and then we want them to learn as much about us as possible, and have us learn about them, and then determine that it’s a good fit. That they do actually have the same goals as we’ve designed our software for and as what we in the company want to do.

So those people, the leads we have are generally a little bit better known than in a traditional cold-calling or outbound marketing organization. So we’ll typically sign them up for the newsletters as well. Again, with the understanding that the newsletter is not really designed to sell, explicitly, but because that we think that our culture and our passion for what we do and the personality of our team members is a big selling point for us, we want our leads to see that, to recognize early on that we’re a different kind of company.”

How Do You Help Your Customers Search for You? – with KMI’s Matt Airhart

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

KMI‘s Matt Airhart tells us how they make it easy for their customers to find them through online search tools, and some of the challenges they’ve overcome in getting noticed on terms that are important to their business. One of the lessons learned: quality beats quantity.

“The harder ones are…the medium sized companies who haven’t put a system in place before and don’t know what to search for.”

How Do You Build a B2B Social Marketing Community? – with Palomino System Innovations’ Markus Latzel

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Palomino System Innovations’ CEO, Markus Latzel, talks about the tactics needed to build a social network of customers and prospects, both online and in the physical world.

“You should do more than just the virtual social network building you should actually create a real social network in the community.”

Markus is CEO of Palomino System Innovations. They have developed the WebPal system, which is “a suite of products designed to centralize control, enhance communication, and facilitate workflow management.”

P.S. Why does it look like Markus’ video was transferred from an 80’s VHS tape? I had a problem with the exposure meter that day. Just imagine he was sitting next to the sun when we did this interview.

How Do You Define B2B Marketing? – with The Mezzanine Group’s Lisa Shepherd

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Lisa Shepherd tells us the 3 areas of a company’s activities that she sees as defining the marketing function.

“…You’re not going to face the same kind of commodity hell, or the same kind of battle, over responding to an RFP.”

For more of Lisa’s insights into marketing check out her blog on Profit magazine’s site. She has a lot of interesting articles there.

Lisa is CEO of The Mezzanine Group.

They provide marketing outsourcing and consulting to B2B companies and professional associations.

From their website:”The Mezzanine Group’s mission is to make our clients recognized leaders in what they do.”

Almost all my conversations here are with CEOs of B2B software companies, but Lisa is so knowledgeable about B2B marketing in general that I had to ask her to share her insights with us.

“So, what is marketing? It’s a classic question and I get asked it probably every week. What marketing will do for a company varies based on the company, but broad-based ‘What is Marketing?’, I think it’s three things.

One, it’s market definition, so marketing is, and this is strategy, it’s a company’s decisions around which market are they going to pursue. And that means ‘who’s their target market?’ Are they going after a high end segment? Are they going after a cost-conscious segment? So it’s those decisions. Are they going after a particular geography? So that’s part one of marketing.

Part two is…I’ll use the old analogy of the funnel. It’s not a great analogy anymore, but everyone gets it. Marketing is all of the stuff that happens to get things into the funnel. So it’s above the funnel, if you will, or at the top of the funnel. All those lead generation activities, going to trade shows, doing pay per click, sending out direct mail, whatever the tactics are, it’s all that activity that gets leads into the sales process.

And then the third part of marketing is all of the activities that go almost alongside the funnel, that support the business development process. It’s things like brand. Having a strong brand really makes your sales process, can make it, a lot more efficient, if you will, because you’re not going to face the same kind of commodity hell or the same kind of battle, over responding to an RFP.

To me, marketing is those three things.

Defining the marketing you’re going to play in
Getting leads into your funnel, or into your sales process
And all of the support of the sales process in order to convert leads into revenues”