Frontline Perspectives

A colleague contacted me the other day and asked if I had observed any shift in the market of B2B companies moving from indirect to direct sales.

The short answer to his question is yes. Read more »

…and hire a customer experience manager.

While this may sound like a play on words, it is a serious problem for many B2B companies today. Think about it: as you read this, your customer service team is down the hall answering calls and e-mails about orders, account issues, product problems, pricing questions, etc., right? Most customer service managers can tell me what percentage of their calls fall into each of these categories and how quickly the team can “resolve” these problems. Customer service is designed to react to each person who raises a hand with an issue. Read more »

As global sales continue to rise for most of our clients, the need to translate (and localize) has become increasingly important. It seems like a daunting and expensive venture. As with most marketing efforts, walking before you run will help you make the right decisions and keep information about your company’s solutions from getting lost in translation.

First, what do your international customers look like? It is not uncommon to find that the size of the company, the titles and functional responsibilities of decision maker(s), and the buying cycles are different from your customers in the U.S. You can’t effectively target new business without understanding who’s buying.

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In May when Microsoft announced their new search engine, Bing, I wondered whether they could possibly make a dent in the Google fortress. Google is my personal preference, and the more relevant search tool for our B2B clients. That being said, we watch all the search engines to keep on top of optimization, and PPC opportunities.

So, I’ve been test driving Bing. I don’t love their interface (it’s too busy for me). I have been impressed with its results – and have been comparing it’s with results with Google (there is a difference). I haven’t been that impressed with their photo search – I like seeing the url displayed with the photo (perhaps just because I’m used to having it that way on Google?)

But here’s the real kicker… I’ve been watching the analytics reports for our client websites to see if/when Bing would show up. Sure enough, Bing was there in the July reports (less than 3%, but still there). Read more »