The fast lane The new DNA of B2B Stephen Yeo, Panasonics marketing director, Europe B2B, explains how the global technology company used tools and techniques from the B2C sector to create a seamless and unified customer management system interview: James Richards A s one of the largest tech companies in the world, we at Panasonic think a lot about improving the customer journey. Its no small undertaking considering that, just within B2B, we offer 13product categories, including everything from projectors, displays and security systems to broadcast equipment. Panasonic employs a quarter of a million people worldwide. Each of our products has its own manufacturing line, sales teams and point of origin usually one of our Japanese factories. The most important recent evolution for the customer journey is that marketing has become responsible for removing all of this complexity from the customers point of view. For us, the customer journey is a seamless experience that crosses over from the call centre, the salespeople, to the individual channel, to when customers register their product or download the latest firmware, or arrange for a product to be repaired. We provide customers with a single portal and a single user interface, so they dont have to re-learn the process with a different access point. This is how they engage with us as a company, regardless of the product they use. As well as detailing a comprehensive history of purchases, for example, our optional product remote monitoring service can predict when a customers goods will require service or maintenance. This pre-emptive approach is, we feel, the future of the customer relationship. Technology at the core Technology is crucial to this proposition. In order for us to handle the operation smoothly, we use a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system, ensuring we dont treat people like strangers when they contact us. Essentially, CRM should extend beyond sales and marketing, all the way through to customer support an approach I call 360 CRM. To support this, you need a strong, unified web presence underpinned by solid infrastructure. By design, customers only see our portals, which give information in the customers own language, and work responsively across devices. As a global company, there are potentially thousands of employees involved in the customer journey. In order for this not to descend into chaos, we need to use what I refer to as a common system of truth. Our Product Information Management System (PIMS) is a database of digital collateral organised around the customers needs. This is something weve pushed from Europe, and now our colleagues in Japan upload product assets directly into this system. Its also invaluable in helping us to manage product life-cycles. To get more technical, within our PIMS, each product is at one of five stages: engineering, prelaunch, production, end-of-life supported, and end-of-life unsupported. In Europe B2B alone, we have 1,500 stock-keeping units (SKUs), which undergo 17,000 collateral and web page changes a year. Meanwhile, we are selling products from Turkey to Russia, from Sweden to the UK and Ireland across 20 countries, in 20 languages. This adds up to 120,000 webpages on the European B2B websites. Our challenge is to ensure customers are presented with the most up-to-date products at the right time with the right assets, and can download these easily in their own language. With a single click of a mouse, you can find all these assets on our websites and digital portals, which are updated automatically. A new customer journey You could say that what we are aiming at is an automated customer journey, so that all our staff have the same information. It helps us to understand customers needs in the moment. For example, when dealing with a customer, we would always fix a support issue before pressing ahead with a planned promotion with them. Furthermore, because we are selling through channels, were exposing a lot of this technology to our channel partners, and training them up accordingly. We only give sales leads to partners who are certified, which means they have passed the training on the portal. We also contact customers to check whether theyve had a positive experience with the partner to whom we give the lead. The partners with the most positive satisfaction scores automatically move up the list on our where to buy pages,ensuring were always putting our best partners in front of customers. Im a manufacturing engineer by training, but I also have a Masters degree in marketing and IT. As such, I tend to apply quite a lot of technology to the role. After doing my job for 25 years, Ive seen how much B2B and B2C have to learn from each another. For example, the technology available to B2B marketers now allows us to move beyond the acquisition stage, to make the customer experience totally smooth and integrated. A new type of marketer Traditionally, you had two types of marketer: the marcomms/demand-generation people, and the product marketers, who know the item specifications inside out. Today, there is a third branch emerging, one that specialises in technology and customer journey management. This marketer is architecting the whole marketing process using technology, with the end goal of improving aquisition and retention. Instead of customers seeing a host of departments, they perceive one unified company, and have one unified experience much like the brand-customer relationship in the B2C world. This third type of marketer is hard to find. They must have a feel for communications and product marketing, as well as technology and the customer journey. We must also ensure that senior managements understanding of our function keeps pace with the development of modern marketing. Many organisational leaders still see marketers as the people who make the golfing umbrellas and the brochures. Really, our industry should focus on upskilling people and recruiting different types of individuals. Marketing courses today often emphasise communications, perhaps at the expense of technology or measurement skills. As marketers, we must all learn to demonstrate the relevance of what we do for the business, and prove our value, otherwise well just be viewed as a cost centre. To sit at the top table, you need to bring numbers that show what role youre playing. Senior management care most about pipeline, and how much revenue youre generating. One of the most important KPIs we use is campaign contribution, which measures the share of the total pipeline over time that was assisted by a marketing campaign. Last year, we managed 52 per cent, or 300 million. Once again, this shows how important it is to measure; unless youve got the ability to gauge your performance, you simply cant demonstrate your usefulness. Doing so creates a virtuous circle, because it will help you achieve buy-in for further transformation. To respond to the challenges of the new customer journey, organisations have to shift up a gear. For me, it was about using what Id learned and combining that with my experience to reinvent the rules. Once again, measurement helps you: when you let the water out of the harbour, you see where the rocks are. Key to our project is that were constantly looking to improve our metrics. Winning hearts and minds Every marketer in every sector is going to face budget and resource constraints. For us, the biggest obstacle was winning hearts and minds. After all, were talking about changing the organisational culture, and re-establishing the company DNA. Training has been a key part of this, and that goes for everybody, no matter how senior they are. We found that actually spending time with colleagues was the best way to explain how everything worked. As soon as people see the improvement in the performance of their departments, they get switched onto it. I liken it to medicine; it might taste bad at the start, but it actually makes you better. In the future, marketing will be very different, with new skill sets and technologies, new thinking and even new organisational structures. However, in my view, the business has to match the sophistication of the tools it is deploying otherwise it wont be effective. Companies must be ready for it. But above all, they must want it. cim.co.uk/exchange Senior managements understanding of our function must keep pace with the development of marketing Stephen Yeo, marketing director europe b2b, PanasoniC