Bain’s Fred Reichheld has returned to the Harvard Business Review, where he first introduced the NPS model in 2003, advocating for the new metric.

To calculate their earned growth rates, firms must have systems, process and people that will gather data on the costs and revenues for each customer over time and must ask all new customers why did they buy?

If the reason is a referral or recommendation, a customer is “earned”; if it’s advertising, a promotional deal, or a persuasive salesperson, the customer is “bought”.

Reichheld says “we realized that the only way to make the system work better was to develop a complementary metric that drew on accounting results”.

However, firms will not be able to credible calculate their earned growth rate unless they have their technology, people and process act together and most do not.

Reichheld acknowledges this issue, but states “it’s time to get serious about measuring (and reporting) the progress … and to recognize that improving the lives of the people we serve is the only way to win”.

Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

The pandemic is no doubt an accelerator, but the essential truth is that we must all be platform companies today.

During the his Q1 earnings call, CEO Mark Benioff cited the platform play that new mega customer AT&T is embracing: “every customer touch point: the AT&T truck pulls up to my office or my home, that’s going to be Salesforce; I walk into the AT&T store and that’s going to be Salesforce. I’m getting an email from AT&T and that’s going to be Salesforce; and I’m on the phone with the AT&T call center and that’s going to be Salesforce. We’re going to make sure that they have that Customer 360-enhanced data, and when we’re integrating all that data MuleSoft is going to connect AT&T’s different back-end systems, Tableau is giving them the ability to understand customer preferences and Einstein is going to help them serve more intelligent recommendations and route service cases”.

AI is a big part of the Salesforce platform story. This good blog post explains how to make AI business use case.

According to Forrester Research close to half of all CRM projects end in failure, usually in the form of a slow death of a thousand reluctant users.

The business case KPIs, built around new customer acquisition, retention and revenue growth, are never realized. And the blame game spirals in all directions.

Change management and training are recognized as essential drivers, but all too often they are starved of resources and focus. Here’s a tip: for every $ spent on the software’s annual subscription, commit $3 to change and training. And, of course, management has to lead by example.

Walker has released a follow-up to their 2013 report Customers 2020, called  Customers 2020: A Progress Report, which endeavors to answer three questions:

• What customer expectations and trends are still relevant as 2020 approaches?
• What should B-to-B firms do today to ensure they’re able to win and keep customers in 2020 and beyond?
• What are the implications for CX professionals?

Walker says “interactions at every stage of the journey are becoming more complex, presents a striking conundrum for today’s B-to-B firms”.

The winners are focused on personalization, ease, and speed. According to Walker, these companies have fundamentally changed how they think, act, and collaborate.

Here is how Walker defines the three imperatives:

PERSONALIZATION:
There is no average customer. Customers want to do business with companies that know their individual and company needs and are willing to tailor the experience to meet those needs.
EASE:
An explosion of information, connected networks, and more competitive options lead to little patience for complexity. Customers don’t have time on their side and place a real premium on simplicity.
SPEED:
The pace of business is accelerating rapidly. Time is of the essence. Customers can’t afford to wait around while their business issues are being considered. They value companies that provide real-time response and proactively anticipate their future needs.

The report highlights the real and hard work involved in changing organizations and their cultures.

Here’s how the report classified the respondents:

• 31% (14 total): Customer Naïve, the least mature
• 27% (12 total): Customer Aware
• 38% (17 total): Customer Committed
• 4% (2): Customer Obsessed, the mature category

The majority are a long way from being ready to engage effectively and consistently with today’s diverse, changing and in-charge customers.

In contrast, the best technologists are re-engineering and collaborating to co-create genuine digital businesses, not just “serve the business”.

As digital disruption accelerates, the division between front and back offices is blurring. Traditional back-office apps are migrating, one vendor at a time, to be closer to the sales-and-marketing, customer experience driven front end. The agility imperative means back and front office must integrate and synchronize

Digital technologies are transforming CRM. Tighter integration means CRM is extending from sales, service, and marketing into commerce. The long-term focus is not simply on selling products and services, but on delivering authentic brands and experiences, from campaigns to customer journeys to commerce.

All businesses either will be digital platform businesses or they will be out of business. As we transition from transactions to conversations, we need to urgently consider the critical role our platform strategy must play.

Rather than making and selling products and services in a series of transactions with individual customers, we must view our customers as partners who should be integrated into a flow of value within the context of a connected, collaborative and scalable platform. In this environment, value creation is not linear. It is two-way and continuous.

MIT Digital Economy fellow and Boston University professor Marshall W. Van Alstyne in a recent Harvard Business Review interview said that with platforms, the rules of strategy change.

“Strategy shifts from controlling to orchestrating resources; from optimizing internal processes to facilitating external interactions; and from increasing customer value to maximizing the value of the ecosystem,” Van Alstyne said

“The failure to transition to a new approach explains the precarious situation that traditional businesses find themselves in. For traditional firms, the writing is on the wall: learn the new rules of strategy for a platform world, or begin planning your exit.”

What do we mean by platform? MIT Professor Michael Cusumano provides this definition: “A platform or complement strategy differs from a product strategy in that it requires an external ecosystem to generate complementary product or service innovations and build positive feedback between the complements and the platform. The effect is much greater potential for innovation and growth than a single product-oriented firm can generate alone.”

The importance of platforms is linked to the concept of network effects: The more products or services it offers, the more users it will attract. Scale increases the platform’s value, helping it attract more complementary offerings which in turn brings in more users, which then makes the platform even more valuable.

Accenture’s Tech Vision 2016 report makes it a point that a platform doesn’t just support the business, the platform is the business. The report also quotes Marshall Van Alstyne: “Products have features. Platforms have communities.”

The Accenture reports cite estimates from IDC, which predicts that within the next two years, a majority of large enterprises will create or partner with industry platforms. IDC also predicts that the number of industry clouds will reach 500 or more by 2018, up from today’s 100-­plus.

For marketers focused on ensuring that their customer experience is the decisive differentiator, they must start considering how best can they integrated their systems, processes and people into an integrated customer-facing marketing-and-sales front end, which must also be synchronised with the transactional front end.

For example, a website content management system, integrated with a marketing automation application and a CRM-ERP solution, plus a powerful analytics tool is a force multiplier of genuine significance. Operate those solutions individually with limited integration and their collective value to the business is inhibited and not the game changer it should be .

Best-in-class B2B marketers are doubling down on marketing automation and performance metrics, according to the 2016 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey conducted by the leading digital marketing agency Green Hat and developed in conjunction with ADMA (Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising).

Overall, budgets are on the rise. Of the 448 participants, 40% said their dollars are moving up. In comparison, 9% said their numbers were heading south.

However, the perennial problem of lead follow-up remains, with only 36% stating that their marketing-sourced leads were being effectively followed up their sales organisations.

I joined ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster, Telstra Wholesale’s Marketing GM Glenn Flower and Green Hat’s CEO Andrew Hausegger for an engaging discussion on the survey’s results:

Watch the Webinar Recording

The carnival that eats San Francisco for a week, produced yet another impressive set of numbers:

• 170,000 registered delegates (one fifth of the host city’s population)
• 2600 speakers
• 1600 sessions
• 400 exhibitors
• 10 million online viewers

With program sessions devoted to “wellness” and “inspirational leadership”, Dreamforce can be described as “the Burning Man festival but with everyone wearing clothes and talking all day about cloud computing”.

The core message was that companies must be committed to capturing, connecting and acting on customer data across the engagement spectrum with a dynamic, agile customer management platform.

SFDC is now the fourth largest software company in the world, after Microsoft, Oracle and SAP and is on track to become the first Software-as-a-Service subscription company to hit $US 10b in revenue.

None of the annual customer conferences organised by SFDC’s currently larger rivals _ Oracle’s OpenWorld, SAP’s SAPPHIRE Now, or Microsoft’s Convergence events _  go close to matching Dreamforce’s numbers. Customer management or what founder Mark Benioff describes as “customer success” is generating all the momentum and energy:

If your CRM _ meaning analytics, sales automation, marketing,  service, collaboration and mobility _ is not pivotal to your company, then you have a major structural deficiency.

This old-school configuration, with CRM disconnected, does not work: