Marketing Profs

Over the past 15 years, business-to-business marketers have focused on the pipeline—leads converting to opportunities converting to wins. The reason was simple: Pipelines are a measurable construct that brought discipline and financial credibility to what had been a "fuzzy" and much-maligned corporate function.

However, when one looks past the standard milieu of CRM system installations, pipeline dashboards, and lead-scoring models, the idea of marketing to enhance relationships among networks of decision makers, influencers, and users has remained alive and well, particularly at companies pitching complex products or solutions to large enterprises.

Relationship marketing (RM) emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction over short-term transactions, with the goal of developing and maintaining a base of committed customers that generates profit for the organization.

Unfortunately, while RM organizations are common in B2B marketing organizations, marketers have been slow to implement the same rigorous, data-driven approach to RM as they have with "pipeline marketing." Some organizations thus have trouble understanding and optimizing their ongoing interaction with customers, leading to more guesswork than understanding when it comes to building an enterprise RM strategy.

With this in mind, and based on years of working with RM organizations in many of the world's largest B2B companies, we've identified four key steps that marketers can take to improve both the analytic rigor and ultimate effectiveness of their RM efforts.

But, before we go through these steps, it's important to lay some important theoretical groundwork.

Line-of-Business Influencers Are Key

While functional managers—IT Directors, Office Managers, Controllers, and the like—often sign purchase orders, it is the line-of-business influencers who are most effective in driving demand in large accounts.

These "LOBs" are the individuals with business problems who need real solutions to their issues. In many cases, they won't show up in pipeline reports or end up as qualified leads, but they are in the lion's share of cases the ones driving the really big deals.

Furthermore, LOBs are far more likely to have many connections in the enterprise (and outside of it, for that matter). Positive attitudes or recommendations will be amplified, along with negative ones.

LOB Engagement and Advocacy: The 'Pipeline' for Relationship Marketing

In our experience, two objectives are most important when building relationship marketing strategies: (1) maximizing ongoing behavioral engagement with LOBs, and (2) driving toward advocacy for a firm and its offerings.

Engagement can be defined as a "give-and-take conversation" between a LOB and the company. Advocacy is, simply stated, the willingness to recommend or "go out on a limb" for a company, product, or idea.

Engagement and advocacy are linked: Proactive engagement of line-of-business decision makers (LOBs) at client accounts is a fundamental driver of these individuals' perceptions of your brand and their willingness to advocate continued and expanded business with your firm. Thus, one could say that the fundamental job of the relationship marketer is to encourage LOB engagement and promote LOB advocacy—ultimately generating incremental value for your business.