I hadn’t quite cottoned on to the fact that we’ve been in this market for over a decade, until a friend told me so! We were working together with an enlightened client in the North West, facilitating a group of their customers discussing sustainable finance.
They call this one of their ‘customer communities’, where they engage, discuss, gain feedback, float new ideas, conduct research, and more.
In consumer, it would be called a loyalty scheme (although the techniques are completely different in B2B).
The problem is that – aside from account management or implementation engineers – most B2B organisations do not have a systematic approach to customer engagement. The only place this really occurs is when the customer is a national or an international account, with a whole team servicing their needs.
Largely speaking, B2B customers are only meaningfully contacted when the organisation wants to sell them something.
Yet building a B2B customer community isn’t that hard.
First, you have to offer something that customers actually want, or would find valuable. This can be as simple as the occasional chance to talk to one another (most of us businesspeople have little opportunity to talk to your peers).
Over the years, we have acted as the third-party facilitator who hosts online or in-person customer groups, mediates relevant discussions, gathers inputs, manages discussions in which the sponsor company (“the supplier”) also takes part – without trying to sell.
The insights from these discussions, at the very least, provide the sponsor/supplier with an enhanced insight into customer issues – what’s really important to them, what they are prioritising for investment, how they think they will solve their challenges. That’s really valuable business intelligence.
It’s also intel for the supplier that’s not available to competitors. And it genuinely benefits customers who participate in those discussions – to get hints and tips from their peers.
Finally, the outputs from customer communities helps make understanding of those customers and their concerns fully visible to everyone in the supplier organisation. This is good for the customer, good for the supplier.
It stops R&D developing products or services that the market doesn’t want. It stops individual account managers, engineers or salespeople keeping customer intel too close to their chest. It makes senior management aware (sometimes painfully) of how the customer’s world really works (rather than their possibly insular vision of the market).
According to my friend, the customer community work we have been doing for years is at last being recognised as the new wave in B2B marketing.
I’ll drop a few more nuggets from past experience into the mix over the next few weeks.
Watch out for more!
