The Case for Investing in a Voice of Customer Program – Part 1

In B2B marketing, is your distribution channel "playing ball" with you? Reporting back the outcomes of leads they've received? Selling your products? Protecting your brand? Did I hear you say, "NO" or maybe that was a, "Gee, I have no idea!"

You spend bucks in developing ads, placing them in vertical trade pubs, going to trade shows, executing direct mail campaigns, etc. Add to that the cost for the inside/outsourced talent to pull it off. When it's all said and done, the marketing folks have quite a chunk of change they've been entrusted to spend wisely (generate sales and reveal ROI metrics).

Then, the leads come. They are distributed to the captive sales rep who owns the opportunity, and the sales rep decides to dish some of the tasty leads off to the best-suited distributor. But, really, how well-suited is the distributor?

Is the sales rep sure that the distributor won't pull the old "bait and switch?" In other words, the distributor pushes the lead to buy a competitor's product because the competitor is offering the SPIF of the month. Or, better yet, does the internal sales rep know if the distributor partner is even picking up the phone to call or sending an email to follow-up with the opportunity?

If the rep doesn't know the answers to these questions, well, isn't that a bit like throwing $100 bills out your conference room window?

We've come to realize that the only way - and I mean the ONLY way - to find out if the distribution channel is supporting your brand is to ask the customer (or lead or prospect). That's why we've developed a built-in, automated Voice of Customer application into our NitroMojo technology.

At trigger points established – such as 45 days after the lead was born – NitroMojo "auto- magically" sends an email directly to the lead for the purpose of requesting feedback on their experience. The lead clicks a link which launches into a brief on-line survey. In addition to satisfaction-related questions, the survey asks for purchasing information, specifically, "What brand did you purchase?"

If I told you that the VOC's revealed that distributors routinely sold a competitor's product would you be shocked? I didn't think so.

Marketing management needs to know what's going on in the trenches. So, in NitroMojo, we have built dashboards that will indicate, at both the distributor sales rep level and the global distributor level, what distributors received leads and what the lead said they bought or didn't buy (and why).

To take it even further, NitroMojo is pre-wired to enable the black listing of distributor sales reps that are not following up on the leads they receive or not promoting the "hand that feeds them". That is some Big Brother that makes good business sense.

Check out our Voice of Customer thinking at www.NitroMojo.com

Contact Information:

Garry Davis
Chief Mojo-ologist
Contact Us
888-471-8491

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