thefunnel

NPS (net promoter score) is an interesting and somewhat popular measurement of customer satisfaction and loyalty, but does it work and what does it really mean for B-2-B marketers, and what can they do about it?

Quick definition: Would you recommend a product or service on a scale between 0 and 10. The 9 and 10 are promoters and, 0 – 6 detractors and 7 or 8 are passives. Subtract from promoters, and you have NPS.  A NPS score of 60 – 80% is considered high.

Let’s now look at a few considerations facing B-2-B marketers

• Are you going to include both customers and non customers in the metric? If you do / or not understand why.
• In your industry, does the score vary by your different product categories?
• Is it a measure on service, support or product capabilities or all of the above? How do you know which one to improve?
• What does the score mean for products for which you are the market leader versus products that you are let’s say #3 or #4?
• What do you do when scores are high, but you’re still not gaining market share? How do you reason this?
• If you have a high score can you charge a premium? What about non customers, are they going to pay a premium as well?
• For products which are purchased infrequently how do you make sure that what customers say they intend to do, is what they actually do?

An example (let’s assume small business B-2-B). I own a PC. Certain brand. Would I recommend? Yes, probably =9. Will my next PC be the same brand? Maybe, maybe not, it depends. On what? What else is out there? What the price is? Maybe I just want some variation!The fact is that I don’t consider myself in anyway disloyal, even if I buy another brand. However, maybe the third time around (5 years later), I’ll go back to my first choice, if all things are right.

It’s interesting how little things really change in marketing. New things comes and goes, but the fundamentals stays. Here’s some guidelines that are still highly relevant today, that I provided my team, a long time ago, when I was managing a European marketing communications team.

• Improve your communication with sales
• Know your stuff even in your sleep
• Manage the lead flow through a future looking lead map
• Be creative, do lots of testing, test new ways to communicate with your audience
• Train yourself, learn new capabilities, benchmark yourself
• Produce detailed,meaningful and relevant metrics
• Achieve your  lead forecast and budget plan, be in control

Here’s a simple digital marketing model for B-2-B that can be used when planning what the strategy for the web should be and how to measure this. The thinking is that the customer typically have four different types of interactions on the web, depending on where he is in the buying cycle. The customer is either in a learn, buy, use or engage phase. Learn and buy is very much at the core of a new/repeat or modified repeat purchase. Use have both a support and a service aspect to it, and engage is when the customer is idle. The idle phase in particular can be problematic for products , for which a replacement purchase only happens every few years, and the customer therefore is not a “hot prospect” and often “forgotten”. Managing the idle phase takes clever pull marketing, but correctly done, increases the likelihood of a re-purchase. The find in the middle of the chart, reflects the important of search, both external and on-site, regardless of what phase of the buying cycle the customer is in.   Digital Marketing Model