Business to Business Marketing: Case of Cloud Creative Solutions - Term Paper Example

?Cameron [Manager] 24 November CCS Company Analysis Cloud Creative Solutions a well established and full service agency offers a full range of services that include design, online marketing, media planning, internet marketing, direct marketing, public relations, and traditional advertisement. In today’s global economy firms such as CCS must look at new ways of expanding their business through business to business and client relationships by utilizing more cost effective ways of promoting their business. Peter and Sarah Wang, the partners of CCS, have been faced with turmoil of the economic recession and budget cuts. Client retention and client expansion should drive the center focus of the business as they strive to generate new commercial leads in a highly competitive market. A highly fragmented corporation can often lead to disarray in corporate structure even in a small business such as CCS. Peter and Sarah must leverage their small team to be more effective in driving business to CCS. CCS prides itself on its ability to deliver on customer client’s expectations, and still must compete aggressively against locally based companies. Business to business relationships differ much greater than traditional business to customer relationships in that much more time and effort must be emphasized on the client to ensure greater customer satisfaction and retention. Businesses to business sales often generate greater revenues per client than the traditional B2C sale, and therefore require a more focused marketing approach and contract close. Peter and Sarah must evaluate the products they offer, their media services, advertising, managerial services, prices, market location, promotions, customer relationships, and current economic client in which they are operating. It is a unique characteristic of the IMP approach to place emphasis on the in-depth description and efforts to understand the underlying processes underneath the interaction between organizations and networks. This process specifically focuses on the rational approach and strategy behind business-to-business networks. Peter and Sarah must strategically rationalize and position their marketing and communication skills to attract new business. (Baraldi, strategy thinking and the IMP approach) There are three distinct areas of account management that CCS must take into consideration. The first is the salesperson’s role in long-term relationships. Secondly, a more specialized area is the key management of the account. Thirdly, they must consider Global Account Management. In order to generate new business Peter and Sarah must expand far beyond attracting business in Barnet, North London. The Global Account Management approach will force them to understand cross-cultural issues, managing logistics competencies, and the management of complex internal and external networks. (Holt, Sue p. 2 Managing Global Networks). The Key Account Management roles that they must take into consideration will be to not only act as a relationship builder, but also as the negotiator, consultant, interpreter of customer values/needs, and also as a an advocate/friend. This Key Account manager should be comprised of not only Peter and Sarah but of their sales force team as well. The overall business goals should be consistent with the firms’ overall growth objectives. Some of the competencies they should emphasize are building global team leadership, and management skills; business and financial acumen; strategic vision and planning capabilities; cultural empathy; selling skills (internal and external); industry and market knowledge; and product service knowledge. (Holt, Sue p. 3 Managing Global Networks). Peter and Sarah must look at the buyer-seller interface as one extensive network, comprised of several different individuals at different levels and functional areas. They must develop relationships while keeping in mind that there are gatekeepers, influencers, specialists, sales reps and ultimately decision makers. There is a personal contact model that involves buyer-seller interface, and interpersonal contact that must be clearly understood. Personal contact can be considered as a means of which inter-company relationships are developed and maintained. First Peter and Sarah must give an information exchange; next there is a transfer of hard and/or soft data, then an assessment of the facts. During all of this time they must understand their customer’s objectives and subjects and maintain formal and informal interaction. From this point there will be a natural progression of negotiation and persuasion over general topics. They must understand that when developing these relationships there are two types of roles: the social role, in which people meet other people that they like; and the ego-enhancement role, where one individual deliberately establishes the contact with a senior person in an organization with the direct intent to enhance their status. (Holt, Sue p. 4, Managing Global Networks). Due to past reliance on just a few large local clients, it is obvious that CCS must expand into the Global network. The upside to business-to-business service is that one large contract can lead to great amounts of generated revenue, yet they must think out side of their area and attract new clients that would often be overlooked. Aside from personal selling they must also consider new ways to generate business. This may include advertising their services through means such as Internet sources such as the social web, billboards, technological communication devices, radio, etc. They may also want to focus on their integrated marketing communications through public relations efforts such as: public appearances by Peter and Sarah, news/press releases and/or event sponsorships. This will build trust and good will by placing CCS in the public light allowing for new market visibility. Secondly, they can offer certain incentives to their current business clients for referral-based business in order to accelerate short-term sales. Whether Peter and Sarah use personal selling methods or some of aforementioned approaches they must keep the key IMP aspects of B2B in mind. They must expand their current client database globally, train their staff on the relationship dynamics of key account management, and they must integrate other marketing solutions such as PR, incentives, advertising, and new market visibility in order to remain competitive. Peter and Sarah are considering hiring 6-8 new employees to help increase revenue. In order for this team to generate company dollars they must be effectively organized with set goals in mind. Peter and Sarah will need to focus on the key areas of selection and training of the sales people, performance measurement, and motivational methods. There is one easy way of defining the sales force organization and that is to break them down into two categories-hunters and farmers. The hunters can be considered the new business development reps or the sales force, and the farmers are Peter and Sarah. They need to organize the 6-8 employees to work mostly at the beginning of the sales funnel by both prospecting and qualifying potential sales opportunities. These so called hunters should seek to find a solution to the qualified clients’ expressed needs and wants. They should want to take the sale to closure but should not be responsible for the post sales activities. The Farmers (Peter and Sarah) should work largely towards the back end of the sales funnel. They are responsible for dealing with existing customers and identifying new sales opportunities with their existing clients. (Gillroy, Eric Hunters vs. Farmers-How to Organize Your Sales Force). The new sales force team must be emotionally resilient and be able to deal with a high number of rejections that come as the result of prospecting. The sales team should be able to regain their confidence quickly and reach out to new potential clients immediately. At the same time Peter and Sarah must be aware of how to use their sales team and must be emotionally in-tune with their team. The most important factor that Peter and Sarah must be conscious about is their customer satisfaction. Growing revenue is one of the center focuses of the business, so a sales team is certainly needed. As sales increased so should the sales team. The most common mistake that businesses can make is to under invest in their sales team. As the client’s increase their will be more opportunity for the initial sales team to move into the so called ‘farmer’ position and Peter and Sarah will need to hire more front line sales individuals. There is one aspect of separating the groups into two that should be taken into consideration. This comes at the transition of the account to the account managers. This should only take place once the client has approved and feels comfortable. This can require a lot of managerial expertise, but the team should be aligned so that their competencies are utilized and expressed to put the customers in for the long run. Aside from recognizing the individual members skills as lead openers or sales closers, Sarah and Peter must be very clear on the overall objective to be achieved. The sales objective should be considered the ultimate base of the plan. The current account department is not responsible for any sales activity, but this is ultimately leaving a void. Peter and Sarah should continue to take an active role in the management team by allowing themselves to be both visible and approachable to employees. They do not necessarily have to work side by side with the other employees, although this may help, but they should at least check in once or twice a day to see if anyone needs anything. One point that the manager’s may overlook is that their sales team is a direct reflection of themselves. If management is unclear about the global expansion and need for more sales than ultimately the sales team will suffer as well. This will also continue to affect their bottom line. It is pertinent to stay aware of what is going on with the team and their personal interactions with the client’s in order to keep increasing profits. (Johnson, Emjae about.com) When setting the organizational structure and sales mission it is important to understand the difference between a business-to-business company and a business to consumer sales company. Business-to-business sales involve many people in the purchase decision as opposed to one individual in consumer sales. Therefore, new potential employees must be aware that their individual interactions with one person can sway a deal for better or worse. They may make a great introduction with the gatekeeper; yet blow the deal with the influencer or the decision maker. That is why it is extremely important that the sales team be organized to utilize their skills at the appropriate times. These interactions and boundaries can be considered linking pins between salespeople and purchasers. It is through these individual actions that an organization will either adapt or fail to adapt to the current environment. Each member of the sales process is a sensory organ that controls the motion of the purchase from existence to non-existence. Although there will always be a sense of ambiguity in the roles as they are defined, it is up to Peter and Sarah to oversee the boundary roles of the employees to effectively guide the sale. A conceptual framework for global account management can be broken down into four basic categories: goal focused roles, internal focused roles, costumer focused roles, and account planning roles. The first and foremost important are the goal focused roles which are the profit and loss of the corporation, the strategic orchestration of the company, and lastly to create value. The internal focused roles are driven by: the team leader, the communicator, information broker, the negotiator, and lastly a culture manager. These roles can be taken on individually, but really should be incorporated by everyone in some form of fashion. The account planning actions consist of analyzing the current and potential portfolio and planning for the short and long term accounts. Customer based roles are also important to consider. Who is going to be an advocate for the customer? There also needs to be a problem solver, communicator, business consultant, information broker, crisis insurer, value creator, culture manager, and negotiator. The Global Account Manager should master these techniques, so that they are embodied by the entire corporation, and not just specific to one individual in order to generate a corporate makeover. Relationship marketing is a relatively new term although relationships have always been valued in business. However, the concept is said to be as old as the history of commerce and trade itself. Even in ancient times sellers knew all of their buyers individually and made suggestions based upon custom product offerings. This later changed as we moved into the industrial era, where marketers began to shift their concerns towards sales and the promotion of goods instead of highlighting relationships. The individualized practices and specifications were being replaced by mass marketing. However, it wasn’t too long after in the post-industrial era that ‘marketers’ began to realize the limitations of their transaction-based strategies. They fell under pressure by intensified competitive pressures in saturated markets and purchase decreases. This is when information technology came into play, and marketers began to identify less well-known, or at least somehow identifiable customers and niche markets. Although there are several conceptual categories of relationship marketing, no one has yet to clearly define the term. A scholar Berry once defined relationship marketing as, ‘attracting, maintaining, and enhancing customer relationships.’ Someone later defined relationship marketing as “marketing based on interaction within networks of relationship”. The IMP Approach serves to understand how relationships develop and exist between organizations at a dyadic level in a network perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the relationship between the individual customer and the marketer, the approach serves to examine the exchanges between suppliers and buyers of various types, and also between several actors at one time. (Fernandes, Teresa and Proenca, Joao 3). Just as previously mentioned Peter and Sarah must examine the inter-organizational relationship strongly independent of the surface network. There are several factors that impact potential struggles of power that must be taken into consideration since neither Peter nor Sarah have any formal background in marketing. They may begin to see power struggles and negotiations not just with clients but also within their own organization. The Interaction Approach takes the relationship as a unit of analysis as opposed to one individual transaction. Each transaction or reaction is affected by and affects the entire relationship. One thing also to keep in mind is that these relationships evolve over time and adapt. They can either adapt to increase commitment and reduce distance or do the adverse. If CCS notices competitors taking a portion of their market share it may be time to reevaluate their entire relationship from the Interaction Approach perspective. Another relatively new concept from the 80s onwards has been information technology primarily in regards to customer relationship databases and direct selling activities. As we exam strictly the customer relationships it is important to note that CRM can still play a role in the business to business realm. In fact customer relationship marketing has revolutionized the relationship customization to quite an extent. The intention with customer databases now is not to treat them like one big homogeneous market but as specific individuals. This will carry over in the relationship model as services are provided to other businesses with the end-user in mind. In the case of business to business, the client will have the expectation of the servicer to develop an appropriate campaign for the end-user in mind. People have often argued that this approach is just best characterized as practice, and that there is a limited conceptual effort when dealing with relationships. However, with new software such as Google analytics, and other CRM databases, we are now finding out more specifics on the potential end-user and therefore the client. The only problem with this from an ethical standpoint is the intrusiveness of the technology when developing relationships in consumer markets was inappropriate. (Fernandes, Teresa and Proenca, Joao 4). Essentially what CCS aims to accomplish is to identify the behavior of not only their clients but also of the consumers. Both of these relationships must be evaluated simultaneously to be effective. The questions of why consumers seek and value ongoing relationships are relatively still unanswered, but we must try to understand what makes consumers loyal. If CCS is going to remain a global player Peter and Sarah must determine their long-term orientation, and their plan need to incorporate their relationship efforts. They must come up with new schemes of loyalty rewarding and personalization of service as a product. What makes CCS different? They have obviously been successful up to this point. These are the questions that Peter and Sarah must ask themselves. Maybe, it is that they did not originally have a background in marketing that gave them the edge in developing personal relationships. It could be that their clients prefer to work with them for the fact that they are not business minded and maybe less formal than their competitors in their approach. They must identify their consumers’ characteristics and pass down their corporate culture unto their new employees. CCS’ nature of object exchanged will also affect the interaction process. The product category of media is also important. Enhancing relationships is generally easier in high involvement such as media as opposed to low involvement products where the clients may not be as passionate about the outcome. It must be known that it is impossible and not necessarily profitable to create close, personal long-term relationships with all business consumers in all product markets. This is the theory of social exchange and it should be evaluated when determining the amount of involvement per project sold. After evaluating the ways in in which the IMP approach affect marketing in business relationships- a few thing are evident. Corporate culture will flow from management down and the dynamic between business-to-business clients is vast and vague. CCS must make a conscious decision to participate in the global market efforts and guide their team to incorporate high client involvement. This will allow for customer retention and continued word of mouth business. They must also increase their visibility through PR efforts and bring on their sales team to funnel more contacts into the pipeline. Reference: Fernandes, Teresa M. & Proenca, Joao F. “Relationships and Relationship Marketing: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.” IMPgroup.org 27 April 2011. Gilroy, Eric. “Hunters Vs. Farmers- How to Organize Your Sales Force”. Ezine Articles.com 27 April 2011. Johnson, Emjae. “Managing a Sales Team 101”. About.com. 27 April 2011. McDonald, Malcolm. “Managing Global Networks: The Role of the Global Account Manager”. IMPgroup.org 27 April 2011. Moore, Kym. “Integrated Marketing Communications- 5 Primary Communication Tools”. Selfgrowth.com. 27 April 2011. Conclusion Conclusion Read More