IMV9 : Relationship Marketing

The following is a transcript for IMV9 : Relationship Marketing. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 9. It's Friday. With me today is Paul Lewis. He is the Senior V.P. of Sales and Marketing for MindComet. Welcome to the show today Paul.

Paul Lewis:

Good to be back, Ted.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, I'm happy you're back to buddy. Hey! We are switching the format of the show up today and we are looking for your feedback. We want to say you know, do you like the more fun shows? Do you like sometimes a little bit more serious? Are we boring you to death? Do you want a little bit more excitement? We want to hear, so send me an email to ted.voodoo@mindcomet.com. We've been getting tons of feedback from users and some of the people have said that they want to spice it up a little bit, so we're going to get a little caliente. All right Paul, so we're here to talk about relationship marketing today, all right, what the hell is it? Tell me what relationship marketing is, get into it. Let me hear the spiel.

Paul Lewis:

Well simply put, relationship marketing is the combination of marketing tools and strategies developed and maintain relationships with both prospective and existing customers.

Ted Murphy:

What the hell does that mean, relationships – like what are we talking about? How we – what are we doing with relationships?

Paul Lewis:

Well I think if you contrast it to traditional marketing it will kind of help a little bit, so in traditional marketing it's all about broadcasting your message, your branding out there, and a very mass market appeal, and so with relationships we're talking about individual dialogues, actually reaching out and touching people uniquely in a way that is built upon over time.

Ted Murphy:

So we're trying to build something long term with people that is a little bit more intimate with them, and people feel like they're a little bit more a part of a family or they have a closer association with the company?

Paul Lewis:

That's exactly right. I think that one of the key elements is that people try to use all these databases and these tools that are designed for dialogues and personal communication and they try to use it as mass broadcasting, as traditional advertising. So they send you an email when you've already bought that product.

Ted Murphy:

And now – or even – they send me an email and they think that personalization is Dear Ted, I'm like wow –

Paul Lewis:

Yeah.

Ted Murphy:

– that is personal. They've been doing that a while with the old ‘mail’. Have you guys heard that? – Heard of that where I get the mail that's addressed to me? That's personalization, fancy stuff.

Paul Lewis:

Exactly, that's a good point.

Ted Murphy:

So I think that what you're kind of talking about is taking that to the next level and saying, hey you know I shouldn't be getting – if I just bought a new Ford F-150 I shouldn't be getting something that is asking me – or telling me about the new Ford F-150, it should be telling me about the new box that I can put in the back for my tools.

Paul Lewis:

Absolutely, the dialogues have to build on themselves. They have to learn about what the customer wants. It's not enough just to send a series of messages out. If you're marketing message doesn't change based upon the events and the feedback that the consumer has given you, then you really have a monologue that you're just broadcasting it over a series of time.

Ted Murphy:

That is what we want to say and we want everybody to hear the same thing.

Paul Lewis:

Exactly.

Ted Murphy:

So it should really be personalized and you should approach it from what does my consumer want to hear and that's how I'm going to talk to them. So I kind of look at it, it's almost like dating right? Like you – well if you go out on a date with a chick and you're like going out and she's like telling you how much she likes cats and – oh my gosh girls that like cats, that's a whole other story. That's going to be another show folks we're not going to get into that today. But let's that a – you're out with a girl and she's talking about cats and you go home and you send her a little postcard or something like that from – that has dogs on the front, it's like you haven't listened to her. She was telling you what she wanted, all's you had to do was listen and then respond to that, and if you ultimately want to take her home or marry her or whatever else, you've got to send the cat postcard Paul, you know what I'm saying?

Paul Lewis:

I think the cat analogy is pretty good. I like to use another analogy when we talk about where does, where does relationship marketing fit into all this and if you think about – this is what I call the sandwich analogy, and so –

Ted Murphy:

A sandwich?

Paul Lewis:

The sandwich.

Ted Murphy:

Everybody loves a sandwich Paul.

Paul Lewis:

If you think about your traditional marketing as the top layer of bread and if you think about your sales team or your direct sales force as the bottom layer of bread, you need to create that conduit, that sticky peanut butter in the middle that holds it all together.

Ted Murphy:

Is that going to be like a chunky peanut butter or that like just a regular peanut butter?

Paul Lewis

Well I think you can use chunky or regular, depends on your preference, but it really creates a big gap from when you use mass broadcasting and mass appeal of your brand to when you get all the way down to the sales team, there's this gap and you hear about – when you talk to sales team they talk about it all the time. Yeah, I don't know what marketing's doing, they're doing that fu-fu stuff that is about – all about the brand but it's not generating new leads, it doesn't give me any actionable information and so what relationship marketing is really trying to do in that sense, and in the prospect sense is taking people from brand awareness and moving them through the buying decision process and getting them to the point that the sales team has enough information to act effectively and that also the consumer is already primed and ready so that they're investment time makes a lot of sense.

Ted Murphy:

And really I think when you look at it, it's like you know you're – a problem that a lot of organizations face that don't have direct sales people is that – the great thing about a sales person is that they create that relationship, right? If I go out with you and you know you tell me you're married, or you tell me that you just had a daughter, I might go out and buy a little something for your daughter. I may send you a card that says congratulations, you know it's her first birthday but when you – when you're a company that's mass marketing a product or service it becomes very difficult to have that type of relationship and to be able to – you know it's not just – it's that you can go directly to sending that card, you have to somehow gather that information and than it has to be personal also, so it's not weird. You know it's like why am I getting this? This is just weird that these guys are sending me this, or it's freaking me out that they know this much about me. You need to figure out how to create that relationship and how to do it over time.

Paul Lewis:

You've got to plan out your dialogue. I think – you make a good point. For companies that are advertising centric, relationship marketing is like that next stair step level of allowing them to develop a more personal and intimate relationship with their prospects and their existing clients, and for organizations that are much more sales centric, it allows them to begin relationships and learn about their prospects and customers much more effectively which maximizes their sales teams effectiveness.

Ted Murphy:

So everybody needs to get some peanut butter is really what the bottom line is?

Paul Lewis:

That's it, peanut butter's good by itself, on the spoon, or in the sandwich.

Ted Murphy:

Or with fluff, everybody loves fluff.

Paul Lewis:

A little fluff.

Ted Murphy:

I guess it – you know the big question is who – you have to determine as an organization what your peanut butter is, you know how do you get people – how do you create that bond between those two pieces of bread, and I think that's different for every company of different sizes that are trying to sell different types of products and services.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, that's exactly right. You have to custom design, unfortunately, just like with your advertising or your sales relationship marketing isn't cookie cutter. There's no one size fits all, one right way to do it, you have to analyze your market, where you're positioned and come up with a strategy that's going to be effective.

Ted Murphy:

So how is relationship marketing different than other types of marketing? I mean we talk about this all the time and we say transactional marketing and it's like what, what's the difference? What makes it so unique and what sets it apart?

Paul Lewis:

Well, again, I think that to start with to contrast it to traditional marketing and advertising. You have very broad messages that are sent across mass communication channels. So, one of the immediate definitions is that you use personalized communication channels and the next element is that –

Ted Murphy:

What's a personalized communication channel? Give me an example.

Paul Lewis:

Telephone is the perfect example, and an example of marketers misusing that is when we have the – you get those automated calls where it's a computer trying to talk to you and there's nothing more frustrating for end consumers when they get that computer call, because you're using a personal communication channel in an automated amass way, and so it's important – and it's the same thing that – when you're frustration you mentioned earlier about getting the email to buy the F-150 after you just bought it. It's – email is also a personal communication vehicle, so it's actually –

Ted Murphy:

You're invading my space.

Paul Lewis:

This – that is the immediate impact that consumers feel.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, and then that's – I think that's where you get the feeling of Spam and junk mail and everything else like that. If all the messaging was relevant to you and you actually said, hey this might be something that I'm interested in, you probably wouldn't be as upset. It's the problem – the problem is, is when you're getting all this crap that you have absolutely no interest in, like if you sent me something for cats.

Paul Lewis:

Exactly.

Ted Murphy:

Right, I'm going to get a little upset because I don't like cats; no offense to the guys from Whiskers or any place else.

Paul Lewis:

Right. Oh, well I think that there's a great example of that. I remember back in the 90's, the magazine may still be out today, there's a magazine called Computer -

Ted Murphy:

Paul is really old by the way.

Paul Lewis:

Thanks. There's a magazine called Computer Shopper and we all used to buy that, us IT geeks, would buy that because we wanted to build our own computers and the magazine was about as thick as phone book and it was a huge – it was like 11 x 17 format.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, it was like you know 40 pounds. I remember that.

Paul Lewis:

Right, right you could hurt yourself, you could get a hernia picking it up and it was solid advertisements; cover to cover, no articles, nothing but advertisements and we would go down and plunk down four or five bucks to buy the magazine. The reason was those advertisements were incredibly relevant for what we were trying to do. I needed to buy a hard drive and I needed this monitor type and this and this because you were buying all your computers and components. So advertising is Spam, you know people fast forward on their TiVo's for advertisements when it's not relevant. But when you understand what the individual is looking for all of sudden you go the whole other spectrum of the value scale where they actually want it, are looking for it, and may even be willing to pay for it.

Ted Murphy:

That's the crazy part.

Paul Lewis:

The crazy good part.

Ted Murphy:

The crazy good part. So I think that you've done a pretty good job of explaining that. Tell me who's doing a good job right now with relationship marketing? You know give me some examples of people that you think – not clients of ours, just people that you think are touching you the right way? Whoa, maybe we don't want to know that but –

Paul Lewis:

Well I think there's a lot of companies that are doing a good job with relationship marketing today. I think rather then maybe pull a specific example of a company, maybe I'll give an example of how you can be effective with relationship marketing and just try to walk us through a way that that could be done with a fairly standard type of company situation. So, let's take a business to business example, let's say we sell trucks to businesses so we're very interested in helping them buy trucks and service their fleets of vehicles. So maybe today our current marketing is all focused on combinations of magazine ads, direct mail, and personal selling. Okay, so what can we do to create a value equation that gets people to want to enter into a relationship with us? Well, maybe what we would do is offer a proposition that they can get a free white paper that gives them top ten ways that fleet managers can save money on their fleet costs or a discount, give them 75% off their next truck service if they're a first time customer. What we want to do is get them to something that can collect the data.

Ted Murphy:

So I use those things as kind of – I'm not going to say bait, oh yeah I'm going to say bait.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah.

Ted Murphy:

To basically bring them to some sort of online form or some sort of other data collector that allows me to then gather some information that's a little bit more personal about them. You know there's nothing really personal about save $75 off your next oil change or whatever it may be, but there is something – you know there may be something personal there where maybe now I can gather what their birthday is and then now I can hit them in a more personal way on their birthday.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, I mean we use all kinds of, to use your technical term "bait", but you know it could be free information, it could be entertainment, it could be an online game, or information that people are interested in. Sweepstakes, polls, people love to participate in surveys, especially if they'll be getting the results as well as participating in it. You can have discounts, coupons, special access to different areas or an event that you're having –

Ted Murphy:

I am still amazed by how many people actually participate in surveys. I – you know it's not something that I've really ever partaken in, but you'd be amazed at what type of information people are willing to give you in a survey.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, it's been incredibly effective for a lot of our clients to start with that survey information. Not only does it already give you a lot of great information on your prospect, but it also gives them the opportunity to learn how other people in the marketplace share common problems with them. So back to our example, let's say we throw some of that "bait" into our offer, so we put that into our magazine ads, but let's go a step further.

Ted Murphy:

Now we're going fishing.

Paul Lewis:

That's it, we're going fishing. But let's put it on the business cards, when our sales people are out there in the field, they're talking to these people, say hey what – why don't you come and register on our website and you can get this discount on your next service or you can get this white paper, or again, whatever we're using here.

Ted Murphy:

The business cards, you know that's a great example is that people often overlook how powerful a business card can be and the type of information that you can put on there. You know it's 2 x 3.5 inches that can actually fit a good amount of information on there and you can drive people to a website or to some other promotion or whatever it may be through that business card. Another thing that I think people often under utilize is their signature in their email. You know a lot of people – I mean that's a great thing. A lot of people actually read those things and they – you know it's – becomes a permanent part of that person's inbox. You know you should use that and be switching out the information on that on a regular basis to do promotions or to – you know to drive those people to get more information from them.

Paul Lewis:

Absolutely, I think one of the things about being a relationship agency is our clients are often surprised as we come in and we talk about all these things. They're like well that's not online, we're like of course because your relationships are both online and offline and we have to touch it on all those points.

Ted Murphy:

Only really scary people just have their relationships online.

Paul Lewis:

That's another good point.

Ted Murphy:

And I think we might have some of those people working here. I don't –

Paul Lewis:

So – okay, back to our example, when you get your – those fleet managers to actually come to your website at that point to register, you may ask them a few questions. Again, you don't want to overwhelm them, but maybe five simple questions to get started and get some basic data about them.

Ted Murphy:

That seems pretty straight forward.

Paul Lewis:

So from that how do you build on that? Well, it depends on what kinds of questions you ask and here, here's where I get so frustrated with so many marketers.

Ted Murphy:

Paul's grabbing his head right now. It's true frustration.

Paul Lewis:

It is, it is true frustration and it's because they've been conditioned. They have been doing marketing so long that the mass media outlets have conditioned them that the questions they want to ask are things like age, sex, income, you know demographic data which interesting and its to how they buy mass media in many cases, but isn't really the – that really questions, the driving questions that can help them develop a dialogue and develop a deeper relationship with their customers.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, so instead of asking something like age and sex, you may say you know what interested you about our trucks or what is the biggest feature you would like to see in upcoming models?

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, exactly. You know what are your buying needs that are coming up? What do you hate most about buying vehicles today? You know you're trying to find their hot buttons and their pain points and by doing that then you can change your approach and your ongoing dialogue with them to accommodate those points. And not only can it be questions about your product or service, but it can be relationship questions. You mentioned before, you know what's your birthday, what's your favorite sports team?

Ted Murphy:

Those are the easiest ones. It kills me that so many people forget to collect that information. I mean the – what's your birthday? Everybody likes to receive birthday cards, well unless you get to your age and than it probably gets a little bit more difficult. But –

Paul Lewis:

Then it comes in black.

Ted Murphy:

I still like to get them.

Paul Lewis:

You've got two more years.

Ted Murphy:

So the other part of that though is you know let's not forget – I mean you mentioned the offline and the online right? You know your sales people especially for you companies out there that are using CRM systems, your sales people should be putting relationship data into that sale system. It's not just about you know what their address is, what their phone number is, what was the last order we shipped to them, you know a lot of people look at that CRM system and their like, oh no that's a customer service function. You know we're going to record every phone call that they come in when they're making complaints, but what about when they're not making complaints? You know that's the best time to get them. We should be asking them things and we should – you should create fields in your database that have everything to do from what shirt size are they? You know are you going to send them a t-shirt for something? What shirt size are they? You know you don't want to – if this person's a XXL sending them a medium or an XL that's not going to help them. Great, you sent me a t-shirt that I can't wear. You know it's simple things like that that your sales force can do on a day-to-day basis, they go out to a meeting, they get information about that client that you should require that when they get back into the office that they're entering that information into your system. That way when your sales person leaves, you know they get a wild hair and go to your competitor or whatever else; they're not taking all that relationship information with them because right now for the majority or organizations out there all that relationship data resides in the head of the sales person.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, exactly and it's really just to sales either. I mean marketing still has a responsibility to also drive additional data and what we see with a lot of clients is we might define a 100 data points that they – over time – and the important point is over time want to capture about their customers. If your sales person calls up and reads –

Ted Murphy:

I'm going to need the next hour of your time asking these questions.

Paul Lewis:

You know so you have to have a plan, you have to have a plan of attack and you need things so you're like okay when my next marketing message goes out I'm going to see if I can get two more data points filled in, and the data points might not be the same for every customer. So when it comes back it may actually call your CRM system and say, oh I noticed they haven't filled in fields 23 and 29, I'll ask those two questions.

Ted Murphy:

And I've had some great exchanges with the guys at Blackberry. We were at a conference with them last week and they mentioned that they've got all sorts of new integration technologies that allow these sales – you know a lot of these sales guys are armed with these mobile devices that allow them to sink back into the CRM systems so they can do it on the fly. There's really no excuse they shouldn't be doing it and when the sales team and the marketing team are working together, the type of information that you can gather and the way you can use that information is amazing. You know what if I'm a sales guy and I'm able – you know somehow I'm able to figure out you know what type of drink this person likes and I go into the meeting and I say, hey you know I know that we're going out to dinner can I buy you a – you know a Jose Cuervo margarita? It's like wow you remembered.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, exactly. It's –

Ted Murphy:

Well I remembered but it was a little assisted.

Paul Lewis:

Right, you know that's the thing is you got to have the last part of the plan which is how you put together, how do you take advantage of this information? I mean so many times we see this data, because it's very basic data in these CRM's just sitting relegated in IT or relegated into customer service and you've got to pool all this information back together, so you know going back to our truck offer, what if you either had – is it your sales person who calls, is it a post or a personal letter that's delivered? Is it an email? But it comes back and it's –

Ted Murphy:

Is it a pajamagram?

Paul Lewis:

Is it a pajamagram?

Ted Murphy:

You always forget about the pajamagram.

Paul Lewis:

That's always a big seller. But it's – you know it's something like Mr. Smith I know you maintain a fleet of over 500 vehicles and that's a big responsibility for your service costs, right now we're running a special where you know if you buy 15 new vehicles this year we'll include the service costs for the next three years at no additional charge. And you know maybe he mentions he needed two and a half ton pickups, we happen to have last year's model, brand new, I've got 15 of them on the lot. I can make you a good deal. You also mentioned the thing you hate most about buying is haggling with the dealerships, what if I was willing to give you just a bottom line, best price that I could do it for, would you go and insert their favorite sports team here you know, go to the Knicks game and I'll give you my best bottom line price, would that be worth your evening? Little fun, honest business, what a great appeal and so you can use it, integrate it with your sales, integrate it with your email offers, there's so many ways you can go with the data.

Ted Murphy:

Well Paul I appreciate your time. I hope everybody's enjoyed the crazy format we've had today. A little bit more fun and definitely want to get your feedback on that. Again, send me an email to ted.voodoo@mindcomet.com. Love to hear your feedback on this and hopefully it'll influence future shows and we'll be – maybe we can actually start drinking for these things. It could be – it could get really crazy.

Paul Lewis:

I think the Jose Cuervo was a – is a pretty good idea.

Ted Murphy:

I'm thinking dancers, we could get some music kicking, it could get a little crazy in here. Anyway, everybody have a great weekend. I know that we're going to definitely have a great weekend. The Cuervo does sound like a good idea, and we'll see you all – we'll see you all next week. Actually, you guys are going to get this on Tuesday. So – well we had a good weekend.

Paul Lewis:

That's right.

Ted Murphy:

We had a good weekend. Until next time, I'm your host Ted Murphy and with me was Paul Lewis, have a great day.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.


[End of Audio]

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