B2B Customer Retention Strategies for Marketing Professionals

In a 2022 survey, McKinsey found that B2B customer loyalty is fragile. Customers are jumping to partners that offer them fast, easy, omnichannel buying and customer service experiences. 

In this survey, when asked their priorities, B2B buyers’ key wants were highly focused on digital experiences:

• 74% product availability shown online
• 72% real-time/always-on customer service
• 72% ability to purchase from any channel
• 72% consistent experience across channels
• 68% prices available online without negotiation
• 65% ability to easily order via mobile phone

Your customers are seeking out partners that make their work life easier. They want to be able to manage a lot of the research and buying process independently, and they want to reach a human as soon as possible. McKinsey defines new customer expectations as a “rule of thirds” - a mix of digital self-service (websites, apps, chatbots), remote/virtual human interactions (phone call, email, virtual meetings) , and traditional (in-person meetings, fax, direct mail). In a December 2021 report, B2B buyers were pretty evenly divided between these three approaches. 

How can you influence these three ways of interacting? As a marketing leader, your goal is to make every touchpoint with your brand as positive and consistent as possible. In this increasingly omnichannel world, how do you manage this?

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From a branding perspective, this means that ensuring that style guide and brand guidelines are applied in all of your experiences. How are you meeting and exceeding customer expectations? 

Digital Self-Service Checklist

How complete are your digital self-service offerings? Assess this by looking at the list below and asking whether your partners can perform the following tasks independently, online, and without associate intervention:

Are these experiences branded and consistent? Do they elevate your brand?  Are the following rules adhered to:

Remote Human Interactions Checklist:

McKinsey defines “remote human interactions” as covering the virtual engagements between your customers and your marketing and sales activities. This includes:

Branding can become difficult to control as rogue salespeople modify presentations and marketers experiment with email messaging, but there are guidelines you can develop to help ensure these remote experiences align with your overall brand experience. 

Have you developed the following?

Traditional Interactions Checklist:

Traditional methods are still a significant part of your buyers’ sales process, and include:

Historically, manufacturer marketing budgets were heavily weighted to these traditional forms of customer acquisition and engagement. In your organization, your catalog and circulars may be the data and design source for your digital experience. The legacy of your brand may live in these systems, which is likely technically a headache for your digitization programs, but this can also be the historical, valuable, and differentiated brand experiences your customers and prospects know you by. 

You can keep brand consistency through:

If you’ve ever driven by a Sherwin-Williams truck, you may have noticed something. On the back of each is a logo of an earth being covered in red paint. No right-minded focus group would approve this logo, as it’s almost shockingly anti-environmental looking. And that’s because it was developed at the turn of the 20th century. That the brand has kept it is an interesting choice. The logo is easily recognizable as not of this time, and in a way that is kind of exciting and rule-breaking. Sherwin-Williams strayed away from this “red paint covering the globe” logo in the mid-1970s, and then returned to it in the 1980s.

We write this to encourage you to find the gems within your brands catalogs, print materials, and old logos. See how they can be translated into your remote and digital experiences as well.

Assessing the Need 

	Risks Partners are doing more business elsewhere.
	Challenges for Change As a marketer, you now have responsibility (and influence) into more channels for experiencing your brand. Keeping the experience customer-focused and consistent requires an upfront and ongoing commitment to understanding your customer and designing their experience.
	Opportunities Knowing that your customers and prospects are using three core approaches (digital, remote human, and traditional), you can leverage journey mapping to understand their methods, uncover roadblocks, and discover chances to make your business as easy and pleasurable to work with as possible. Creating a holistic style guide for both digital and print helps you refine and control your digital experience. From logo usage, to colors, fonts, boilerplate, and scripting, marketing is uniquely positioned to articulate and influence the brand experience in every touchpoint. Done well, this makes your creative team work more cohesively and efficiently, and enables your sales team to quickly pick up on-message scripts and templates.
	Considerations For these three approaches (digital, remote human, and traditional) what does white-glove service look like? Where are there opportunities to elevate the brand experience? Where does your team need better tooling, more training, or more resources to meet your customers’ expectations?
	Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Customer retention Market share Digital self-service adoption Revenue, margin, retention, and acquisition by approach (digital, remote human, and traditional)