B2B + CX = A Tale of Two Conferences
Two weeks ago, I had a whirlwind bi-coastal travel week to two Forrester conferences. The first was the B2B Marketing Summit at the Trump (!) Doral Resort (I did not stay there, but that is a story for a different day) in Miami. The second was their CX Conference in San Francisco. After some time to digest what I saw, here are some thoughts.
Let’s start with the B2B Marketing Forum. As a VP of Marketing for a B2B digital products company, I am more than aware of the challenges facing B2B marketers, who are often the red-headed step-children (I am actually one of those in reality so I can relate) of the marketing profession. We are the minor leaguers compared to our B2C brethren and second-class citizens in our organizations to the sales team. Fortunately, for Mission Data, the sales and marketing teams are one and the same.
There was the usual talk of content marketing, account-based marketing, sales enablement, and the challenges big companies face with integrating the sales and marketing functions. One of the key learnings was that like consumers, B2B buyers do a lot of research on the products they are interested in BEFORE they even speak with a sales rep, so it is marketing’s job to educate those prospective buyers in ways that will lead them to their products and services. With all due respect to the Forrester analysts, who are no doubt smart and good at what they do, I always seem to get the most out of the practitioner presentations. For example, we had a great keynote from the head of sales and marketing at Eaton, a huge industrial company with thousands of products, about “customer obsession” and how B2B companies should learn from their B2C counterparts about a relentless focus on the customer and customer experience. There was also a great presentation from the head of marketing at Arrow Electronics, who came from the media and broadcasting space, about the importance of brand, which is usually more of a B2C marketing tactic, in B2B marketing. This is especially important given the amount of research customers are doing ahead of time and how far down the buying process they are before speaking to a rep.
The breakouts were ok — there was one that was titled “digital transformation,” but basically the marketing person from a very large manufacturing company talked about re-doing their website. Not exactly the kind of digital transformation most people and Mission Data talk about. There was a very interesting talk from a Forrester analyst on “as a service” marketing and product development. In other words, how some businesses are transforming from a product organization to providing less commoditized, higher margin services. This was more of a discussion, but positioned as an exciting opportunity for B2B companies to transform their businesses. And as usual, there was the typical Silicon Valley startup CEO who talked about a near-death experience on a surfboard that made her realize she was put on this earth to sell predictive analytics software to sales and marketing teams. But maybe that is just me being cynical.
The next event was the CX Forum in San Francisco. Compared to the B2B Forum, this was the Super Bowl versus a pre-season game. It was a sold-out event and very packed. The focus, of course, was on customer experience mostly from a B2C perspective. One overarching theme was that CX is the new competitive advantage or disadvantage. The companies who get this right will succeed while those that don’t will fail or slowly die out. There were some great talks on emerging technologies like Voice, with a speaker from the Amazon Echo team, IoT, virtual and augmented reality, including the General Manager of the Microsoft HoloLens team, and a chat about bots, or maybe it was a chat bot chat.
Much of the focus was on building a business case for customer experience investments, and several large consulting firms like KPMG and PWC spoke to that challenge and had data and slides that showed how companies that were deemed to be better at customer experience performed better financially. “Design thinking” was a big topic of conversation at the event and sort of the buzzword of the conference. We also heard talks on how machine interactions were becoming more human or in some cases, “more human than human,” as one speaker noted.
There was one interesting B2B-focused session from a Forrester analyst on how marketing and CX teams can convince their leadership that CX matters and is worthy of investment because it drives loyalty and retention and thus hits the bottom line. The exhibits were interesting — one firm had a robot they were showcasing that can deliver non-human (obviously) and effective customer experience in a retail setting.
There was also a firm that specializes in mixed reality that had an interesting B2B-oriented case study for a liquor brand. They created a virtual reality tour of the brand’s harvesting process to show their buyers that even though they had grown to be a large company, they still used the same old school harvesting methods of their raw ingredients which made the product so good in the first place. The idea was that sales reps could show this to skeptical potential clients in bars, restaurants, stores, etc. Mission Data has been experimenting with and building AR/VR products as well, and there are a lot of interesting possibilities for field sales and service teams to utilize this emerging technology.
All in all, these were two fascinating and very different events. Most of the lessons seemed like common sense, yet companies often fail to execute against them. The biggest lesson is that customer expectations and behaviors are changing very fast and marketers and customer experience professionals must not only keep up, but stay ahead of the trends and the technologies that are driving those changes. If they don’t, they risk being disrupted by smaller, more nimble upstarts with a relentless focus on the customer and the ability to make their experience as frictionless as possible.
Looking to use emerging tech to improve your CX? Drop us a line at info@missiondata.com.
