Finding New Markets by Tracking Channel Partner’s Customer Satisfaction Scores

It’s time to question the assumption that the largest channel partners and resellers deliver the highest levels of service.  The argument goes that these resellers have the resources, processes, systems and experience to deliver excellent service to every customer, every time. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Under attack from their cross-channel competitors and having to routinely sacrifice margins, bundle in services, discontinue unprofitable lines while attempting to stay up to speed with new product introductions and the technologies behind them, the largest resellers often deliver the worst customer satisfaction.  They have too many distractions to find new markets as efficiently as smaller and more focused resellers do.

Channel Loading Now In Progress – What about Satisfaction?

Well into the 4th quarter, these largest resellers are getting loaded up with inventory, motivated by Market Development Funds (MDF), CO-OP Programs, even cash sales incentives taken directly to gross margin, they are doing what they do best: move product. 

Nailing sales quotas is critical right now. Yet so is retaining your brand name and reputation as well, and your customer loyalty above all.  It’s time to start evaluating your channel partners for more than just their ability to move tonnage when it comes to products and more on their long-term ability to deliver solutions that stay relevant.  It’s time to see which resellers can also lead you into new markets too. 

Time to Start Managing Channels by Value
The mid-tier and smaller channel partners and resellers need to be looked at from their contribution to value-added services they add today and have the potential to in the future.  Entirely new market segments, many of them vertical, are being found today based on concentrating on nurturing and measuring channel partners on value, not sales alone.  The 20 year dominance of Printronix for example in bar coding and now RFID is attributed to this strategy.
Concentrating on the value partners are delivering can give you insights into entirely new markets – insights not possible with just a sales volume standpoint.

Getting There from Here

It seems counterintuitive to say that focusing on nothing less that sales results given the economy and all the bad economic news is foolish.  Bet remember that the best performing companies look at these slow times to aggressively invest time and effort to get stronger, more knowledgeable, more agile to capitalize on the bounce-back of the global economy.  The catalyst of this idea comes from the blog post Crisis Advice from GE's Immelt: Stay Committed to Growth. In this blog post is a great quote:

“Keep your company safe but keep building the future.”

Building for the future means getting to the truth of what your resellers are really contributing.  Sure, the largest and best financed resellers can help you slam-dunk your quarterly and yearly quotas. But what about your long-term relationships with customers?  Your brand reputation? Your ability to find entirely new solutions based on the lessons these resellers can give to you? The fostering and nurturing of customer loyalty?  

You’ll never know if your largest resellers are contributing to or detracting from your brand and customer loyalty until you start measuring customer satisfaction.  Consider these potential ideas to gain greater insights into customer satisfaction across your entire reseller base.

• Getting Your Channels Twitterpated. Get on Twitter and post customer satisfaction surveys often, solicit feedback, and track customer satisfaction by reseller and post it on your Intranet sites.  It will surprise you; often the largest resellers have the worst customer satisfaction scores.

• Facebook Applications for Tracking Reseller Satisfaction. Go after your customers using Facebook as well, and get them to opt in and provide the best and worst experiences they have had with your products and channels.

• Look To Your Resellers Who Excel At Customer Satisfaction for new market ideas.  There is an abundance of examples that show how small yet highly focused resellers can give you entirely new ideas of how to find new markets and dominate them.  The slow yet deliberate path of Printronix to dominate the bar coding and then the printing of RFID tags was a 20 year overnight success story.  It all started with resellers who found this market opportunity.

Bottom line: Get ready for the turnaround by measuring how effective your channel partners are in nurturing customer satisfaction, because in discovering that you will find new market opportunities as well. 

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

Are we at the brink of a new cross channel digital monitoring?

With the experience of working in the digital marketing space and dealing with various analytics reports over the years, an astounding fact still keeps me wondering - how can we be more effective in analyzing the marketing campaigns in the digital space & across various digital channels? Digital space does provide marketers with an enormous opportunity to dig much deeper into the marketing campaigns with the ability to analyze the “traffic”. Analytics and its ability to analyze is one attribute that always attracts me towards the digital marketing vis-à-vis traditional or print media. Mckinsey recent survey suggest that in fact, 55 percent of the companies are cutting their expenditures on traditional media in order to increase funding for their online efforts, compared with only 43 percent of the respondents whose companies don’t measure the impact.

Of course digital media has made enable marketer to build effective and efficient mean to reach its target audience. The same Mckinsey report highlights the most exciting innovations are taking place in three areas:

• In media planning, marketers have been developing analytics that allow them to compare the effectiveness of on- and offline efforts.
• They are also developing a better appreciation of how online marketing messages convert shoppers into buyers, both online and in stores, and using these insights to make specific digital-advertising techniques more effective.
• Third, to target advertising messages with greater precision, a few leaders are learning to measure the ties among people in social networks—something we call the optimization of social media.

The current economic condition and squeezed marketing budget has also been instrumental in leading marketers into this space. Of course by no mean I plan to discount the value of digital marketing space by the economic situation but highlight the importance of building a “window” to effectively monitor & especially cross channel.

The rapid increase of marketer’s dependence on the digital space and enormous growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. Hence would like to recommend a more integrated reporting mechanism or even a “unified” view of traffic. We have been working over the years in the CRM space to build a unified view of our customer, which is wonderful. However with the increase in spending ,and above all the dependence on the digital marketing; are we at a brink of a new stage of evolution in the digital media and its analytics ~ An integrated or unified view of our traffic across channels?

We have various mechanisms to monitor our website, advertisement, registration, incoming/outgoing traffic, regions, and so on. With the explosion of Web 2.0 platforms such as blogs, discussion forums, peer-to-peer networks, and various other types of social media, all of which continue to proliferate across the internet at lightning speed. Now we (marketer) even have to monitor this space. A tool that has really attracted me in the Social Media Monitoring space is Sentiment Metrics . SentimentMetrics locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites, and then cleans and analyses the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs. Hence for companies struggling with monitoring the social media, this tool is a recommended try.

Coming back, this forces me to think that marketer spend on digital media is increasing every minute however it surprises me when the same marketers does not understand the value of analytics. Still they are happy to see Click through, webhits and so on. But does that provides enough information where you can take or implement decision based upon some serious quantifiable analysis. Unfortunately based upon my recent research and interactions with marketer, the answer is still no or not clear.

We really need to think quick and hard to how we can firstly build an effective mechanism to track and analysis the traffic, because apparently that is the fundamental to any customer, sales, and so on. Secondly we truly require a technological integrated approach to a unified view of our traffic and measure the RCQ (for reach, cost, and quality) of the same. Being hypothetical but optimistic to see the ability of analytics to track the traffic, cross channel and in an integrated manner, not matter is the ads runs on google, yahoo, facebook and so on.

Some think to ponder this weekend. Have a happy weekend.

**The article takes pointers from Mckinsey article ­– “How poor metrics undermine digital marketing” by Jacques Bughin, Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, and Marc Singer.

Twitter and personal branding:

This is an interesting article by David Scott about the phenomena called as Twitter. I echo his opinion about some good practices while twitting. His article…

I've been enjoying Twitter and (so far) have managed not to become obsessed. I'll tweet a few times a day and check out others now and then throughout the week.

As you probably know, people use Twitter to keep their "followers" (people who subscribe to their Twitter feed) updated on their life. For instance, you might tweet about the conference you're attending, the project you're engrossed in, or you might ask your network a question. Users can choose to follow the Twitter updates of anyone they want to hear from: family members, colleagues, or perhaps the author of the last book they read.

Twitter has been a valuable personal branding tool for me. I've connected with people who read my stuff, met new contacts, pointed people to my books, and promoted speaking engagements. All for free and in just a few minutes a day.

Many people ask me about Twitter and it's use in personal branding and marketing. But they immediately dive into stuff like "how often should I tweet", "what should I tweet about", "is it cool to DM people" (send direct messages), and other details of using Twitter. Well, that's all fine, but the vast majority of people miss the most basic (and important) personal branding aspect of all.

Interesting?? read more

Who is the 44th President of USA?

Barack Hussein Obama II is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and President-elect of the United States of America.

Obama is the first person of African-American descent (he is of multiracial parentage) to be nominated by a major American political party for President, and the first person of African descent to be elected President of the United States of America. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.

As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. Obama announced his presidential campaign in February 2007, and was formally nominated at the 2008 Democratic National Convention with Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate. On November 4, 2008, Obama won the 2008 presidential election and will take the oath of office and become the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.

Read more

Further links to know who Mr. Barack Hussein Obama or the new President of USA is :-

• Who Is Obama?

• Barak Hussein Obama - Who is he?

• Obama Scrapbook

• Just who is B. Obama and what does he stand for

• Who Is Obama? What Is He Hiding?

• Who Is Obama — Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress

• Obama Blog

Congratulation to Barack Obama for winning the 44th Presidential Election. I hope to add onto the above list after couple of years is - “Barack Obama” report card as President so far?

Too blind to see the writing on the Social Media wall

Wikipedia defines Social Media as primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

With its emergence, and high speed evolution has forced marketers worldwide to amplify the growing importance of this new age marketing. I kudos Peter Kim’s work in identifying 300+ organizations and their initiatives in the social media space. Peter’s work could be found here. Additionally Social Media seems to be an evolution that began with a revolution. Authors has already started penning down the idea of next generation social media

Even the current US election was not able to miss the Social Media trail in their campaigns. According to Amnesiablog there was an awesome live integration between Twitter, the US debate and Current.com. During the live broadcast, user comments on twitter were fed live to the video feed. Each tweet then animated subtly and dissolved into the background. Fascinating and a great sign of the future of traditional broadcast and social media. Martin Bowling at search engine people articulates that even the CNN team has several anchors who are & will routinely look to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for comments, questions, segment ideas or even feedback.

Things like Twitter, a simple yet a powerful tool seems to have provided a new paradigm to how we communicate within a community. Twitting phenomenon seems to be catching like a wild fire. Another example of Twitter and US election is - Zdnet reported on how twitter benefited from US presidential election debates. Twitter usage and sign-ups received a healthy boost during last Friday’s first presidential debate for the 08 campaign. The official Twitter blog reports that, despite Friday traditionally being a slow traffic day:

• Friday updates jumped 18.5% from previous Friday.

• Updates during the debate increased 160% compared to same time last week.

• Signups on Friday were up 23%.

• Signups during the debate were up 135% compared to same time last week.

This may even forces us to wonder about How social media can help shape society, How Social Media Can Help Your PR Efforts, How Social Media Can Help your Business, Social Media Can Help You Build Better Blog, Social Media Forums Can Help Solve Common Ecommerce Problems, even how Social Media Can Help You Land The Job and so on. The answers are just click away.

Chris Brogan new ebook - Fish Where the Fish Are- Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle, on tying social media to the marketing buying cycle provides some interesting aspect for marketers venturing into the social Media space. He has further articulated 25 Ways Social Media Prepares You for the Downturn.  Louis Columbus at Cincom articulates the growth of social media and the proven ability to educate and inform more members of a team than ever before through Wikis, blogs and all other forms of social media needs to be tapped into to make call centers more effective than they are today. His take on mergence of a contact center into the social media stream can be viewed here.

Other attribute that I would like to highlight about Social Media is its ability to connect people without any boundaries, color, creed, religion, rank and so on. Not going much in philosophy, and just to highlight about how Social Media connect - I wrote a post on the weekend, INDIA Calling….are the Marketing Writers listening?, highlighting  about India’s importance for Global Marketing writers. I did mentioned about David Scott’s book and there he was commenting and comforting me with his following comments :

Hi Shiraz, I'm listening.
Wiley India Pvt. Ltd. is publishing a version of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" for the India market. It will be paperback and at a much more attractive price than the USA import. I am not sure when it will be out.
I have been to India to speak once before and hope to come again upon the launch of my book in India.
Take care.

This not only demonstrates that David does believe and live what he writes but additionally the value of social media. Hence, kudos to him and his book – “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. It’s surely a good referencing point for all new age marketers.

I am sure the above mentioned example does simply amplifies the importance of Social Media. But as a popular movie saying goes “this is my gift and this is my curse, who am I – I am Spiderman”, similarly this web of Social Media comes with its own set of problems and ramifications. It a true sense, any initiative(s) in the social media evolution, much like any other evolution requires an attribute of being persistently patience by company(s) or individual(s) driving it. However with its emergence on the marketing horizon, can we marketers still afford to blind fold ourselves from the phenomena known as Social Media Marketing?

Why Managing Contracts Is Essential In Channel Management

With so much pressure on marketing departments to generate positive returns on the investments they make in channel marketing and channel programs, getting the most out of managing contracts often gets forgotten about.  There is no clear return on investment calculation for contract management, and as a result it gets ignored.

Yet contract management needs to be the basis of any multichannel management strategy today. It’s not enough to just rely on the outbound marketing strategies anymore; looking instead at how to better use pricing discounts, arbitrate on pricing strategies, and how to better manage resellers to performance levels and goals all can be tied to the better use of contract management.

Looking at how Cisco was able to capitalize on putting contract management at the core of their channel management strategies is a case in point.  Instead of allowing pricing discounts and opportunities for cost savings to expire, Cisco has create an enterprise-wide contract management system that is now core to their multichannel management strategies.  Their ability to manage pricing, analyze contracts down to the clause level and also increase the profitability of their channel partners and in so doing add to their own is evident in the latest fiscal year figures reported.  An astounding $4.8B backlog and 7% revenue growth illustrates how critical managing contracts with their many channel partners. 

An Emerging Contract Management Maturity Model

The majority of companies rely on intensive contract management systems to manage their procurement and supply chain contracts, yet this same level of concentration and intensity needed for sell-side contracts as well.  From several companies in the discrete manufacturing, high-tech, and process goods industries relying on contract management in their sell-side and multichannel management operations, the following maturity model has emerged from the companies spoken with:

Level 1: Stand-Alone and Siloed.  The majority of these companies use sell-side contract management only for managing pricing exceptions and as a database for re-evaluating selling contracts.  These databases often reside in Microsoft Access databases and also in Microsoft Excel.  As a result, there is often a lag in terms of the accuracy of the data that leads to lost profit opportunities as well.  From the research, approximately 70 – 80% of the companies researched are in this category.  There are major opportunities for increasing contract management performance in multichannel management strategies.

Level 2: Minimal Integration leads to Margin Loss.  This is the middle ground of the contract management maturity model, and is populated by companies who have integrated their sell-side contract management systems with sales operations, Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), and in the case of distribution-based businesses, their pricing and forecasting systems.  On average these systems have two to four system integrations, most often through internally developed adapters or connectors their IT departments have created.  Companies in this level of the maturity model have the ability to forecast and plan out the impact of taking discounts across their reseller base, create specific programs to help resellers get to their specific performance goals. 

Level 3: Contract Management Platform. In companies including Cisco, Ingram Micro, Intel, GE, Microsoft and others, channel contracts are managed more as part of the broader Master Data Management (MDM) strategy, which are what SAP customers commonly use for managing their Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) contracts. Forward-thinking companies spoken with during a series of sales calls on sell-side contract management want to move their dealer and distributor contracts into their SAP MDM warehouses as well.  Companies who have done this are capable of managing their multiple channels more profitably because the contracts can be accessed and used by anyone completing a marketing plan or evaluating a new marketing strategy.

Bottom Line: Instead of filling up filing cabinet with contracts, get them automated so they can be used for better managing your resellers and creating incentives for your channels to seller higher margin, more profitable products.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

INDIA Calling….are the Marketing Writers listening?

India consists of 28 states and 7 union territories has the world's 12th largest economy at market exchange rates and the fourth largest in purchasing power. Economic reforms have transformed it into the second fastest growing large economy. As per last census conducted in 2001, the overall literacy rate of India is 65.38%. This is a big number when you consider the current population is 1,147,995,904.

So are we a good market for the marketing gurus, writers or publishers from the west. Unfortunately I am still force to say NO. Surprising to my knowledge there seems to be an underlying negligence by marketing writers and publisher from the west on the Indian Market. I wonder what could be the reasoning for marketing writers of not considering India as a market to distribute their work or get reviews and so on. However I would say that India portals like rediff, Indiatimes, etc and bookstores like oxford are doing a decent job in getting the international work to India. But it surprises me when I see that Amazon does not deliver to India. It forces me to wonder that are Indians considered to be somewhat of not “considerable importance” or thought of  as unable to spend on quality work? Through this post I would love to have feedback(s) to clear my misconception(s).

Books like “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”, “Tuned –In” are some wonderful work by David Scott, and are surly a recommended read for all marketers specially in India, who are exploring or transitioning towards the “new age marketing”. This is a wonderful piece of work by David that would enable young and old marketers to leverage the new age marketing including digital marketing, especially in the current situation of economic slowdown where we all marketers are or can expect squeezed marketing budgets. David brings his experience and expertise to his work in such a simplistic form that attracts or rather forces me to recommend his work in nearly in all forums that I attend. Another good work that comes to my mind is – “All Marketers Are Liars” by Seth Godin. Having mentioned these examples, by no means I plan to discount or neglect the work(s) of other authors that I am been privileged to read.

However I am still forced to wonder when I see its unavailability of similar work(s) at the local sites and/or book stores. Are the marketing writers or even I would say their publisher in west feels that India is not a big market for them. Similarly few days ago I noticed couple of people from India on Twitter requesting their “followers” in US to courier marketing books to India due to their unavailability. This is a similar case in local marketing forums that I attend. Hence this is one of the reason that I was carrying a pile of 10+ books from my US trip.

Surprisingly I even had a not so good experience once I tired connecting with one of the renowned marketing writers in US for his latest release. I wrote an email requesting him to guide me to an Indian publisher from where I can buy his newly released book, and got a reply - “well, the good news is that my site has literally thousands and thousands of free posts”. I kept on wondering that what made him think that I am trying to get some freebies out of him. Is it the way I wrote the email, was it where I was writing (country) or is it something else. Nevertheless the book is still not available in India. I would not like to name the author as I truly likes his work.

The aim of articulating this post is to encourage writers and publishers in west to see the importance of India as a market. I am marketer by profession and try to follow marketing & strategy writers all across. Hence would thought of making an attempt for writers in the west to ensure that their work should also reach the country known as INDIA.

Have a happy Sunday!