About this article

Read time:

4 minutes

Category:

Guests

B2B customer marketing – now is the time to be helpful

Continuing our series of B2B marketing expert inteviews, I recently caught up with Ruth Connor, group marketing director at Kalibrate. Ruth is a strong proponent of customer base marketing which she feels is often overshadowed by new customer acquisition marketing.

Ruth, tell me a little about yourself and your B2B marketing background.

I’m the group marketing director at Kalibrate, a global technology business supporting the fuel and convenience retail sector.

I began my career in B2C and moved into B2B marketing about eight years ago. My consumer experience covered everything from health and home insurance, to travel and holiday home mortgages.

I’m also the lead B2B tutor at the Institute of Digital Marketing and content marketing tutor at B2B marketing.

This conversation is about customer communications. What do you think matters most when it comes to defining and understanding business customers?

Put simply, understand the organisations you’re selling to – how they’re constructed, how they operate and who the players in the sales process are, so that you can build the right relationship with them.

On my B2B marketing courses we go around room and ask everyone where they work. It typically ranges from large government organisations to small start-ups and everything in between.

There is so much customer variety out there in B2B. A SME might have one single senior decision maker who is very impulsive and acts like a consumer even when making business decisions. At the other end of the scale there could be ten people as part of the relationship, operating much more formally.

Understanding is the basis for good business relationships with your customers, like any relationship.

Someone recently suggested to me that consumer organisations are increasingly trying to emulate the valued relationships that B2B organisations possess with their customers. Why do you think these personal relationships are so crucial in B2B and are they becoming more crucial?

B2C is rightly envious of B2B’s customer relationships. They are crucial because B2B is all about long term retention and loyalty, and personal connections. B2B brands that do it well ensure that everyone has a customer mindset, whatever their touch point with the customer might be, from sales or account management to accounts and legal.

Marketers mustn’t forget just how personal these B2B relationships are. One damaged reputation can put careers on the line.

I think existing customer relationships are becoming more crucial. There was a time when the obsession was about acquiring new customers rather than improving relationships and increasing the lifetime value of existing ones. In some ways COVID has rescued us from this. It reminded us all how its vitally important to keep hold of existing business and protect recurring revenues.

Want to find out more about Skout but don’t have the time to scroll through the website?

Here’s a two minute video that tells you all you need to know.

Do you think B2B has got the customer journey model wrong then, given that so many of them are funnel-shaped ending in ‘sale’?

Absolutely – according to the Content Marketing Institute’s latest research there’s still a huge focus on top of funnel content to build awareness and brand trust. In contrast, very little is created specifically for influencing existing customers.

We commonly see the pre-sales lifecycle segmented into lots of decision stages but then post-sales it’s just ‘customers.’ Marketing seems to forget that customers are divided over many stages of the journey, or maturity, and must recognise and act on that to really help those relationships work.

Given there are so many players in the B2B customer journey game, who do you think should own it?

I think it should be marketing who takes the lead in coordinating the customer relationship. There needs to be some form of contact strategy mapped across the customer lifecycle. This should be documented so it’s clear what needs to be done, when and by whom. This requires someone used to the process of managing sustained communication and perhaps a step removed from the personal relationship itself.

What challenges do you think B2B marketers encounter when it comes to working on customer communication with colleagues?

Firstly, businesses generally aren’t very customer led. This results in them seeing communication as one-way or transactional, rather than conversational and supportive. Customer communication should focus on being helpful, not on selling.

Secondly, if there’s no CRM in place or single customer view (which is more often than you may think), it’s very hard on a practical level to see who has been in contact most recently and why.

Finally, some people are incentivised for revenue generation from existing customers, but others aren’t. This sometimes divides the pack and gives different parts of the workforce conflicting agendas in terms of the customer.

What do marketers like you think about the division between sales and marketing?

Click here to read the opinions of 100 senior marketing professionals.

Where does martech succeed and indeed, fail, when it comes to supporting the customer relationship?

Obviously, data is crucial. It is the foundation of customer understanding and marketing technology enables us pull meaning from data far more accurately and quickly. It is also important in helping to understand where a customer is in the lifecycle and to measure KPIs such as lifetime value. Martech such as CRMs or MA tools also align and connect the workforce, spreading the communications load but ensuring the approach is consistent, cohesive, and correctly timed. Finally, tech also allows customer communication to become more personalised at scale.

However, one big limitation for me is that tech often assumes the B2B customer relationship is linear. The reality is far more complex, with parallel communication tracks for different purposes. Technology needs to evolve to view the relationship as a matrix connecting different actors and internal stakeholders, with communication channels, actions, tasks, information and more.

Can you share any personal anecdotes of where you’ve seen great customer comms success, or where you’ve improved on poor customer communication yourself?

Yes – and this example reflects my earlier point about B2B customer communications focusing on helping, not selling. In a previous role we established a successful weekly customer newsletter. The whole purpose of the newsletter was to help customers get more from the data and insights they bought from us. We started it because we knew that customers tended to use certain aspects of our platform but missed out on other valuable insights. The open rates and click through rates combined with the anecdotal feedback from customers demonstrated just how much they valued the insights we were sharing with them. More recently, this summer at Kalibrate we held our first virtual user conference. Like many businesses we couldn’t meet our customers face to face this year, so we turned our user conference into a virtual event.  Over 200 clients attended more than 20 sessions over three weeks . I had a really clear goal for the event which was to be helpful – to show our customers that we were here for them whilst they were trying to get grips with the impact of COVID-19.

Enjoying our blogs?

We can deliver a monthly round-up straight to your inbox

Thanks for your time Ruth! If you had one piece of advice for B2B marketers facing a customer communications challenge, what would it be?

For me it would be that “now is the time for us to be helpful”. Our job is not just about selling but helping customers get more value from the products that they have bought from us. Being helpful will ultimately help the business sell more and as well as increase customer lifetime value for the long term.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

About this article

Read time:

4 minutes

Category:

Guests

Celebrating 15 years of Skout – people, purpose and plenty of laughs

A leggy display: the role of clickbait and its impact on journalism

Browse more blog posts

Team image for 15 bday
Posted on
byRebecca Brown
This year marks a milestone for Skout – it’s our 15th birthday! What began as a leap of faith from our founder Rob Skinner has grown into a thriving B2B communications agency built on authenticity, relationships and a healthy dose of workplace humour. In celebration, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect back on our history including how Skout...
An image of the actress Millie Bobby Brown, a centerpiece of a blog about the role of clickbait and the impact on journalism
Posted on
byClaire Lamb
What started as a simple lunchtime read today ended up down a rabbit hole. It all started with Millie Bobby Brown. Like many women, I applaud her for calling out the media on their response to her appearance. I’m not going to go over it as it’s a tale as old as time, and it has been covered by practically...
Copy of International Women's Day template (1200 x 500 px) (2)
Posted on
byRebecca Brown
Did you know that as an agency we have a strong female presence across all roles within the business? In fact, two-thirds of our senior management team are female – this exceeds the global PR industry average of around 30%! That’s why we never miss the opportunity to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) and recognise the achievements of the inspirational...
A group of three women in a podcast environment with microphones.
Posted on
byHonor Williamson
Launching a podcast involves more than just hitting the record button. From selecting the right equipment to securing guest speakers, the early planning stages shape everything. But before considering the logistics, there’s one crucial question you should ask from day one: How will I engage my audience? Without a clear engagement strategy, even the most well-produced podcast may struggle to...
A visual image showcases tech trends for B2B marketers. The graphic displays icons signaling tech trends such as AI.
Posted on
byJames Weaver
Things change quickly in the world of B2B marketing. With every ‘eureka!’ moment for new and disruptive technologies that herald to change the game, staying ahead of the curve is vitally important. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been used by businesses for decades, today the technology is plastered across the news agenda. There’s also a swathe of other transformative technologies...
An image of a woman reading a business, financial and fintech newspaper
Posted on
byIsobelle Yoxall
It’s a new year for your FinTech business, and there’s big news on the horizon: a new product launch, exciting partnerships, or innovative features to announce. This makes for the perfect time to share your story with the media. Or perhaps you are just seeking fresh opportunities to make a new impact. Whatever the reason, there’s no better time to...
Fintech megatrends featured image - 2025
Posted on
byRob Skinner
Woah fintech, slow down! Of course, that is never really going to happen – so PR and marketing professionals, how are you going to keep up? The fintech landscape is evolving at lightning speed, driven by groundbreaking innovations and shifting consumer expectations. Projections show that the market could reach a size of £1.2 trillion by 2030. To put that into...
A graphic displaying five stars with a finger pointing to the brightest star, reflecting the ambition to be a premium brand
Posted on
byClaire Lamb
Building a premium brand doesn’t require a limitless marketing budget. In fact, some of the world’s most respected B2B brands have built their reputations through strategic, cost-effective marketing and PR, rather than block busting spend.   What do I mean by quality brand? I’m referring to brands that position themselves as delivering a high quality product or service, which is often...
An image of the Skout team at the 2024 Christmas party
Posted on
byRob Skinner
It’s common to hear people say, “Hasn’t this year gone quickly?” But this time, when I reached into the loft, it seemed like the fairy lights were still warm in their box! 2024 has been a busy year for me personally, so it’s perhaps no surprise that it has flown by. Between my wife and me becoming empty nesters, moving to...
A collection of headlines showing influential people who influenced the news agenda throughout 2024
Posted on
byRebecca Brown
2024 has certainly been a big year for the news agenda. From a change of government in the UK to the US presidential election race. CrowdStrike causing a mass IT outage due to a faulty update. Climate disasters such as Hurricane Milton and the flooding in Valencia. The return of Celine Dion at the opening ceremony of the Olympics. And...

Get in touch

Skout
11 Market Place
Macclesfield
Cheshire
SK10 1EB
Send us a message
Name(Required)

Send us a message