Following are highlights of the perspectives and insights offered by some of our senior marketers, representative of leading technology B2B companies; interviews were conducted during recorded telephone interviews

What do you think most impacts customer perceptions and predispositions about companies in the technology sector?

“Their experience, the customer experience, whether it would be their own personal experience or the experience of their peers.”

“From our experience it is going to be the customer relationships the company has with existing customers. In the technology sector, it is no longer about how good is your technology and how well you sell it, but more about do your customers support your value proposition and show support via some sort of renewed partnership.”

“I think there are multiple factors. One of the most powerful is word of mouth and what other customers and influencers say about a particular technology company’s capabilities and the experience they have had with that company.”

How do companies go about gaining better customer intelligence and analytics?

“If we believe what customers care about today is what you are doing for other customers, you have to have a direct tie-in. We use our technology for our data integration, analytic capability, and marketing automation. We also have a very large, long-standing user group community and our annual user group meeting.”

“We use research to determine how customers get their information, which is most often through their peers. The influence and information they get from their peers is significant so we focus on information touch points, especially Internet searches.”

“We have a really large customer base and we mine that information and continually add more data to it by engaging with the customer, profiling new programs, and the history of what they have recently purchased.”

What should BtoB technology companies be doing to better understand the needs and requirements of customers?

“I think we need to listen better. You don’t form a technology strategy based on transactional feedback, that is what an individual has to say, but through market feedback. We need to involve them earlier in the lifecycle, not just when we have products in the market place, but earlier when we are considering solutions.”

“Talk directly to the customer. We can gather tremendous amounts of information off the Web, through electronic marketing tools that we all leverage, but it all boils down to one-on-one engagement with the customer so you can get past the walls that are put up, instead of hitting them superficially.”

What is essential to retaining and growing the value of customers?

“We need to show them they are important to us and we have some skin in the game as to whether they succeed or not. For retaining customers, it’s ensuring that the needs they are trying to fill through technology are actually served through technology and the services they purchase.”

“First, you have to acknowledge that your initial transaction was just that, an initial transaction. A lifetime value approach relies more on how you are going to help clients leverage and extend their investments they have made in you.”

“Understanding how their problems evolve over time and thoroughly understanding the categories or spaces that you serve.”

What types of marketing and communications investments are essential to advancing customer affinity and attachment?

“Customers want to know they are attached to someone who is a leader in the industry and someone who is going to be providing additional knowledge to them, a thought leader. We focus on marketing and communications programs that reinforce our thought leadership.”

“We have shifted our resources to our online presence and our online service center portal, which allows customers to view their licensing, renewals, software they own, etc… making it easier to interact with us relevant to their relationship with us. We didn’t absolutely increase the dollars in marketing, but we shifted some from offline to online.”

“We have added more electronic marketing capability via the Web, tools, etc…so we can communicate more broadly.”

“Our investments at this point are more in the analysis and analytic side to improve our ability to both understand our customers better and communicate to them more effectively.”

In what ways should technology companies embrace customers in the co-innovation process?

“Where we are today is focused on key verticals and industries. All vertical line software has been developed with development partners driving the way. We also have formed customer advisory boards for CIOs, chief risk officers, and people like that, 10 to 12 senior people within large companies that can help us drive the feature set in our products.”

“We have a few that we co-innovate the creation of a solution when we think a solution has marketing applicability beyond the company. At the other end of the scale we invite clients to both customer councils and advisory boards and other traditional means so we can get feedback on our strategy and product plans as well.”

“We have product planning and engineering people directly interact with our prospect or target customers in specific industries. It has helped us launch products that have been fairly revolutionary for our industry, not necessarily from a technology standpoint, but from an overall meaning of value and cost.”

What systems and solutions do you recommend for better planning, managing, optimizing, and tracking customer relationships?

“We try to track what share of wallet we have in the account to determine our opportunity in our specific space. So for managing the accounts we use the Siebel CRM system and are building an entitlement system and a system that tracks our support relationship, which are all now tied together.”

“Frankly, we have been struggling with this. We have multiple systems that are not properly connected tracking different facets of the interactions. We are trying to get better and what is driving us is the need to have a single customer repository database.”

How would you recommend companies go about integrating, coordinating and harmonizing cross-functional and channel interactions with customers?

“We have channel advisory boards that we use to have discussions less around products and more around partner programs and whether or not they are serving the needs of our channel and partner community. So, they are less about business function and more about business model improvements.”

“We use customer councils. We have periodic meetings with select customers and key individuals and functions within those customers to represent their cross-functional needs.”

“One way to do it is to take advantage of your field employees, your trainers, your merchandisers, and your detailers out in the field. They provide us with the information we need to market properly to particular segments.”

What criteria would you use to audit, assess and monitor customer affinity and intention to do business?

“For me, I think there is a correlation between customer affinity and intention to do business and continue to do business. You can look at many things but I think it is the extremes that matter. Customers who are in the middle of the bell curve don’t interest me as much in terms of likeliness to retain or leave. What I am interested in is getting customers to feel 5 on a 1 to 5 scale. I worry about the 5s and the 1s, who are extremely valuable and vulnerable, respectively.”

“For us the Net Promoter score is the only criteria we are currently using. It’s very simple, very thorough, and very clear.”

Where and how should BtoB technology companies control, manage and evaluate customer touch points and experiences?

“We have global account managers who are accountable for every touch point, so no one can really touch a customer without having been a part of the overall orchestration. We put one person responsible at the very top.”

“I really believe there are so many touch points it has become difficult to get a handle on it. That’s why I like the idea of consolidating the number of and the types of programs because it gives us the ability to get critical mass behind the most important programs. That way we don’t have to measure 50 different activities, just one or two big ones.”

“I think it has to be driven out of the marketing department. It will depend upon the segment you are going after and the profile of the customer. This impacts the online/offline mix, the frequency you touch them, and since it involves long-term relationships, part of it is keeping that communication going over time so that once they purchase a product you can continue to communicate with them in a more thought leadership approach.”