Tag: SAP

CMO Insights: Providing a Meaningful Customer Experience

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP, sees innovation as absolutely mandatory, to be approached by organizations in leaps and bounds rather than baby steps. In his world, ROI means “return on innovation,” and the culture of innovation at SAP is an essential foundation for providing an innovative, meaningful customer experience.  Its little wonder that Jonathan won The CMO Award for Innovation from The CMO Club.  Here’s our interview:

Drew: In your presentation at The CMO Club Summit in April, you mentioned that innovation isn’t a buzz word; it’s an imperative for marketers. Can you explain why innovation is so important, particularly for CMOs?

Jonathan: For all good business leaders, there comes a day when you realize: “what got us here, won’t get us where we need to go.” We all know that the way customers consume information, products, and services has completely changed. It follows that the way we need to engage with customers must also change. However, incremental changes will not be sufficient; we need to innovate the discipline of marketing.

Drew: Real innovation requires organizational change. Can you talk about the changes you made to your marketing organization to institutionalize innovation?

Jonathan: A few years ago, I created a group called “Innovation Marketing.” The charter of that group was to try new things, break rules, make people uncomfortable, and change the status quo. The team generated tons of ideas, many of which were very interesting and impactful. However, it didn’t accomplish what I expected, as we were essentially segregating innovation to one small group. In fact, it created some resistance to change and innovation. We disbanded the group and focused on creating a culture of innovation instead. Now, we highlight efforts throughout marketing that push boundaries and embrace change, even ones that are not completely successful. In some sense, we’re reinforcing our corporate motto of “Run Better” – the quest for relentless improvement.

Drew: Marketing seems to be getting increasingly complex in terms of ways to spend and ways to monitor. Has it gotten more complex for you and, if so, how are you dealing with that complexity?

Jonathan: Luckily for me, I run marketing for a company that specializes in using technology to solve complex business challenges. For example, I have a mobile dashboard where my leadership team and I have real-time visibility into all parts of our marketing business. We can see what’s working and what isn’t, then redeploy resources and budget as necessary.

Drew: Have you been able to link your innovative marketing activities to the kinds of business metrics favored by CEOs?

Jonathan: Innovation is an investment, so you need ROI for it as well. Return on innovation.

We try to run marketing like a business, which means that we need to be able to prioritize between all of our initiatives. From an analytics point of view, we distinguish between the macro view (crunching data on a scale unheard of a few years ago) and the micro view (data equivalent of a focus group).

At the macro level, we apply marketing-mix modeling to get a holistic understanding of marketing performance across channels. We can then tie marketing investments directly to corporate objectives, and reallocate the mix accordingly. Based on this type of analysis, we have shifted unproductive spend to tactics where we have seen higher ROIs.

At the micro level, we’re constantly trying to optimize each interaction with our customers. Whether it’s an outbound marketing campaign, a customer event, or an inquiry on our Web site, we apply statistical analysis to the wealth of information we have about our customers to predict what’s relevant to them and to personalize the engagement. This level of customer-centric targeting, along with a test-learn culture, allows us to measure the effectiveness of everything we do and maximize ROI at the micro level.

Drew: SAP seems to be in the midst of a brand transformation. Can you describe that transformation?

Jonathan: I’m not sure whether you should call it a transformation or a brand expansion. For many years, our approach was talking about how big, successful companies run SAP. You didn’t know what exactly we did for the companies, but you knew we were somehow linked with their success.

Now, we’re taking a much more human approach that’s closely linked to our company mission to “help the world run better and improve people’s lives.” We’re telling stories of how we create value, not only for our customers, but for our customers’ customers. For example, rather than talking about how a big bank benefits from an SAP deployment, we talk about how a man in a very rural area who can’t physically get to a bank is now able to bank on his mobile phone. This access to banking opens up entirely new economic possibilities that weren’t previously an option to this man and improves his life. SAP makes that possible.

It’s not just “business runs SAP”; it’s also “life runs SAP.” You can sum up the change as moving from B2B to P2P – people to people.

Drew: As CMO, have you been able to address the entire customer experience? Were there any organizational challenges you needed to overcome? 

Jonathan: In my view, the customer experience is the responsibility of every single employee at SAP. That said, marketing must be the champion of the overall customer experience across all channels.

While marketing doesn’t own all the customer experience channels, it can help make the experience consistent. For example, we know that, if we invite a group of executives to one of our briefing centers for a day of meetings, we’re obligated to deliver a consistent experience – from the messaging on the invitation to the car ride from the airport, and everything else until our guests are back in the airport to go home.

Marketing doesn’t manage the briefing centers, but we provide counsel to the facilities managers and the sales teams that run the meetings to help them understand the story they want to tell and provide them with the right assets to help them tell that story.

B2B ≠ Better to Bore

Posted on by Drew Neisser

stay-normal-and-be-boringOnce upon a time in the realm of corporate America, there lived a stalwart named B2B. His purposeful walk and confident grin belied his unwavering subservience to all the almighty Sales King, who demanded daily tribute in the form of leads, leads, and more leads. Then one day, quite without warning, B2B died. No one mourned. The end. (Note: If this article seems familiar, then you read it first on FastCompany.com).

Or was it?

Okay, enough with the fairy tale, but here’s the truth: Long synonymous with “better to bore” communications, B2B marketing is in the process of being reborn. Leading this rebirth is a new generation of marketers like Jonathan Becher of SAP and Trip Hunter of Fusion-io, who are overturning conventional wisdom and establishing four new B2B marketing decrees that just might stand for years to come.

Culture Trumps Strategy
When he became the new CMO of software behemoth SAP in 2011, Jonathan Becher (pronounced Becker) was keenly aware of the imbalance of power between Sales and Marketing. Sales demanded leads and Marketing kowtowed. To make matters worse, his team battled internally about metrics, tactics, and budget, not to mention the overall strategic approach.

To fix this, Becher eliminated departmental silos, moving staffers around every six months and committing all to the same primary goals. Staffers no longer just had “majors” but also “minors” that broadened internal expertise. As Becher explained recently at The CMO Club Summit, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so fix your culture to make your strategy work.”

The focus on culture went well beyond reorganizing his staff. Becher banned empty adjectives from internal documents in an effort to eliminate “SAPanese” and other self-indulgent communications. Applying this same “eliminate barriers” mindset to SAP’s external activities, Becher encouraged his team to get to know their customers as individuals, reminding them that “big glass buildings don’t buy products–people do!”

Pursue Hearts, Not Just Minds
When your product is truly disruptive and offers significant price and performance advantages over entrenched competitors, the conventional wisdom would be to focus on rational, feature-heavy messaging. As VP of Corporate Marketing for the rising tech star Fusion-io, Trip Hunter has taken an entirely different approach, finding uniquely “emotional” means of connecting with his targets.

Following the highly successful he engineered in 2011, Hunter has taken Fusion-io marketing to the top of the world–literally–by partnering with mountaineer and U.S. Memory Champion Nelson Dellis, who is currently making his second attempt to summit Everest. Along the way up, Dellis is also testing his memory and raising money for Alzheimer’s research.

Chronicled on a Fusion-io microsite, Dellis’ climb is a multi-dimensional metaphor for the new era of B2B marketing. Explains Hunter, “The Everest Memory Challenge is about getting to know us a bit better, beyond bits and bytes, by sharing something that we think is worthwhile, compelling, and has an emotional connection.” (Proud disclosure: My agency, Renegade, LLC, designed and architected this microsite.)

Less Really is More
As companies grow and products multiply, there is a tendency among B2B marketers to carve up budgets and splinter messages. When Becher took over as CMO, he heard from customers that they received as many as 50 different emails about SAP events and products in any given month; at one point, Becher even realized that multiple events were scheduled in the same week within a few blocks of the same customer. As you might suspect, this marketing onslaught did not endear SAP to its clientele.

In response, Becher and his team created a new evaluation process for events that emphasized quality of engagement over quantity of attendees; in doing so, SAP ultimately reduced the number of events around the world from 3,500 to 1,200. The event overhaul proved its success: A tiny 10-person event led to two deals valued at 70 million euros.

This process of optimization, Becher argues, is a marketer’s best friend, and he practices what he preaches by placing a small number of bigger bets in each of SAP’s communication channels. This also means avoiding what he calls “ego metrics” such as Facebook “Likes” and instead shifting to outcome-focused KPIs that also acknowledge the lengthy sales cycles that are inherent to many B2B efforts.

Content is the Message
Much has been made of content marketing as a powerful new discipline and complement to traditional messaging approaches. Inspired next-generation marketers aren’t bothering to make the distinction between what they say in their ads and the content that they create. For them, this “content” is in fact the message–a message they consider just as effective, if not more so, than traditional ads.

This is certainly the case with Fusion-io’s two-year partnership with Nelson Dellis. Hunter notes: “The Everest Memory Challenge represents qualities that Fusion-io values and embraces. Like Nelson, the Fusion-io team and our customers are people who are adventurous, and take calculated risks to overcome obstacles.”

Prior to his climb, Dellis also appeared at several Fusion-io customer meetings where he could demonstrate his astounding memory skills, including one stop in Japan where he remembered the names of over 70 attendees after meeting them just once two hours earlier. Hunter concludes, “Attaching ourselves to something that is inspirational and representative of who we are as a company says much more about what drives us and our business.”

Final Note: Becher, also known as the “Social CMO,” delivered a keynote at The CMO Club Summit that was well-received by fellow CMOs and well-chronicled by other bloggers (link here). For more on Hunter, see my complete interview with him right here on TheDrewBlog.com.

Cultivating Customer Communities

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of the disadvantages of writing an article like 8 Bold Resolutions for Marketers is that you simply can’t go into detail on each of the topics covered.  The 5th resolution, “I will carefully cultivate my customer community,” was based on my extensive interview (below) with Mark Yolton, SVP of Marketing at SAP.  Mark is in charge of the extraordinarily successful SAP Community Network and not surprisingly, can and does make a great case why other marketers should cultivate their own customer communities.

DN: What do you think have been the keys to SAP’s success with the SCN to-date?
First, we began with a targeted audience and a focused mission: to help developers achieve success with SAP’s platforms and solutions. Only after we had critical mass in that audience did we expand to include a broader base, with the expansion of the target audience driven by the community itself, and features and functionality prioritized based on what our target community members wanted or needed.  Essentially, we were pulled along by serving them, rather than pushing them into new directions we thought interesting, with the success of our community members always as our guide.  Over time, we expended from the base of developers, to sysadmins and IT professionals more broadly, then to business process experts and project managers who straddle IT and lines of business, to business analysts and dashboard designers, and then to include university students and professors – all drawn by community member and market needs.  We moved from basic discussion forums which were appropriate for basic Q&A, to longer-form blogs, to a wiki which is more flexible for projects and work groups… and included aspects of gamification, a career center with job board when the economy took a downturn, to an outside-in innovation crowdsourcing space. Constant evolution through monthly updates and larger advances, based on active listening and responsiveness to community feedback.

DN: What are the real advantages of having a user community?

The advantages depend on your vantage point…

Our individual members report that they are more productive, finding answers and solutions faster, and of higher quality, by being able to consult with other customer and partner members of the 2 million-plus SAP community.  Individually, they elevate their expertise, and put it on display where the quality of ideas – rather than other factors – helps people rise to the top and get positive attention.  Their careers accelerate, their professional horizons expand beyond their city, or country, or industry.  On a more visceral level, there’s also an energy that comes with connectedness; members are energized by each other, the back-and-forth of interaction, the excitement and enthusiasm, and the feeling of being part of something bigger and more important than each of us individually … it’s a contagious excitement and an immeasurable but palpable sense of belonging and shared value.

Our SAP customer companies who have employees participating in the SAP community gain open access to subject matter experts for fast implementation and issue resolution so their projects are completed faster, and with higher quality, which helps them reduce their  operations costs and total cost of operations.  From the connectedness across industries and across global commerce, they are able to increase their business and technical knowledge and insight, make business connections within the vast SAP ecosystem to expand their market influence, and have an easier time discovering, evaluating, and accessing SAP and our partner solutions for more advanced implementations. They even have a greater ability to keep up with emerging trends, and to influence SAP and its ecosystem through participation and connections.  And prospective customers in the solution evaluation cycle have the ability to interact with active SAP customers to get their unfettered feedback and advice – and to get a sense of the extraordinary value and unique benefit the SAP community provides.

SAP partners have the opportunity to establish themselves as subject matter experts, and to gain access to the entire global universe of more than 170,000 customer accounts in our installed base for more fine-tuned market insight as a way to focus their solution offerings, and to keep an eye out for sales opportunities.  They can forge relationships with other SAP partners for solution co-development and joint go-to-market, and even post-sale they can call upon a wider set of experts to help speed problem resolution.   We can also demonstrate SAP’s unusually strong commitment to the SAP partner ecosystem through all of these efforts, as well as our work and investments to generate and pass along leads to partners – it strengthens those partner ties with SAP and the value of partnering with SAP, so we gain more of the best partners to augment and extend SAP’s core.

For SAP as the host of the community, we gain faster adoption and ramp-up whenever we introduce new or upgraded products and services to the market, since our reach and influence are huge and immediate.  As a company, we gain speed, agility, better decision making, and reduce our risk because we gain rich insights into what our customers really want and value, gleaned through our direct connections and fluid feedback loops and listening posts.  We can improve  product and solution quality through our customers’ direct outside-in feedback on our products, services, processes, and  customer experiences.  We reduce the cost, complexity, and time to provide core support while maintaining high quality – and can plow those savings back into better community mechanisms and product innovation.  Those and other forms of interaction lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, better customer retention, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities on the top line, and efficiencies through cost savings on the bottom line.

DN: Would it be as useful (to you or your members) if it wasn’t so large?
There’s a certain critical mass that needs to be built in order for a community to be vibrant, diverse, distributed, and valuable.  If we had a very simple product or a homogenous market, we could deliver benefits with a small member base.  But SAP is a global company, with a vast array of products and solutions, operating in nearly every country and territory on the planet, every industry, serving every aspect of global commerce.  In order to serve our diverse market, we need a very large member base to gain access to experts in everything from Finance to HR lines of business, banking to mining to consumer-goods industries, in Europe and South America and Asia, and across every solution and sub-module of SAP’s portfolio.  We hit the tipping point at about a million individual members several years ago, and we continue to grow at about 40,000 new members each month.  Those kinds of member numbers give us depth and diversity of expertise in just about any relevant topic of interest to our SAP community.

DN: If you were advising a fellow CMO who was thinking of setting up a community today, what would tell him/her? Any shortcuts?
Without hesitation, I would advise any other CMO to lean forward and start building their community without delay, because the value far outweighs the cost, and it is the future.  However, it’s not easy, simple, or inexpensive, and it’s not something that you can build, launch, and then let go.  Community is part science – the platforms, plumbing, apps, and underlying infrastructure – and part art – the policies, practices, programs, and people-oriented components.  It’s uncharted territory, so you’ll need to navigate areas of company rules, emerging legal precedents, daily new learnings, and plenty of antibodies.  It’s not something that you can short-cut; authenticity and transparency and long-term relationships and commitments are key. Get an expert on board who has experience, form a core team to execute, and be personally involved.

DN:  Lots of communities are started (like LinkedIn groups) but very few gain traction.  Why do you think that is?
Communities take work over the long-term, and it’s clear that not everyone who starts one is expecting, anticipating, or willing to put in the time and effort to make them work.  There are hunters and farmers, and communities require aspects of both … hunters to undertake and execute big but limited-time and scope projects, launch them, and move on … short bursts of energy, big pay-offs, motivated by the adrenaline rush of achievement and covering alot of new ground fast; farmers who will toil day-after-day, pruning, nudging, nurturing over the long-term… almost imperceptibly small moves but with staying power, persistence, and timeframes of months and years.  I believe that some communities fail because they don’t take the longer-term view, expect results too fast, and don’t deliver enough value to their target audiences to warrant their members’ continued attention and deep engagement.

DN:  How do you see communities evolving in the next few years?
The platforms and tools have evolved, now, to the point where almost anyone can participate; you don’t need to be a tech guru to participate.  This means that for companies like SAP, we can move from technologist-based communities, to business-oriented communities, right on to communities of c-level members.  We will see both public and private areas where open discussions can occur, whether shared with the world or with a select group of trusted members.  We will see more companies hosting communities of their customers and partners, where those groups really set the agendas, guide the company to build products or to set standards that better suit the needs of the customers.  We will come to expect, as consumers and customers, that the brands we do business with provide the benefits to us of online communities.  And companies will see that the benefits of hosting customer communities will differentiate them, and then will be an expected way of doing business, with tremendous value to everyone who participates.

The Anatomy of a Social Business Community

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Most brands dream of having a vital user community that creates on-going dialog between the brand and its customers.  But few have succeeded on the level of the SAP Community Network which is led by Chip Rodgers.  I interviewed Chip for an upcoming case study on FastCompany.com and in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit September 28/29 in Philadelphia.  The following is my Q&A with Chip. Admittedly, it is long one but well worth studying if you are thinking about creating your own community.

DN: Can you give some background on the SAP Community Network?
The SAP Community Network actually started about eight years ago, and so we’ve had a little bit of time to ramp up. We currently have about 2.5 million members, and it’s a very active community. We get between a million and a million and a half unique visitors a month and about 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day in discussions and blogs and wiki pages.

DN: Tell me about the membership of the SAP Community Network.
It’s about 50% customers and then another probably 30% partners and then we have a large group of employee members as well. There are also independent contractors, developers— just people who are interested in the SAP ecosystem. It’s open to anyone that wants to join. There are a few core pieces of information that we ask for and obviously unique email address.

DN: From a content standpoint, with all these members, are you constantly feeding this beast yourself or is it somewhat self-sustaining?
I have two teams. The content team works with about 400 SAP experts to feed the community with a lot of our formal content: white papers, articles, solution briefs, eLearning, videos, etc. I have a team of about 12 working with a group of stakeholders that are SAP solution managers or folks from support or people in solution marketing that have all the actual information, the expertise and are actually the ones that are building the content.  I’ve also got a group of six that are managing the community-generated content, so that’s our blogs and forums and wikis, and similarly they’re working with a group of about 700 moderators that are in the community.

DN: You know the scale of this community is kind of mind-boggling. Can you draw a direct line between your activities and your ROI?
More and more we’re able to show that there is a connection. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re running a lot of webinars on different topic areas, different product areas. We’ve really cut back with list-buying and some of those traditional marketing costs to get people to come in and listen to a webinar, learn about a new product area, and then take the next step as a pipeline opportunity.

Drew: You started this in 2003, which predates Twitter and Facebook, and I’m curious how you brought [them] into your community. Are they adjuncts or are they truly integrated into this?
Having this background of engaging with the community, when Facebook and Twitter came along, they were natural extensions and ways of engaging with the community. We now have a group that is really focused just purely on social media. We work together to leverage the community and our social media activity. A little bit more specifically, we do a number of things like, if you post a blog in the community, we have an RSS feed to a Twitter account so it automatically tweets the title of the new blog that was published. We think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even YouTube, as kind of extensions— concentric circles around the community— to reach community members and try to get the word out.

DN: Was it tough in the beginning to get management behind the community?
We laid a lot of groundwork for social media within SAP. We were fortunate that we had a board member that thought it was the thing to do and defended it every time. When we first opened the communities with blogs and forums and wiki, some executives were nervous – saying, “why should we create a place just for people to complain?”  But our feeling was that there are plenty of public places for people to criticize the company, why not create the place where we can be a part of the conversation?  And fortunately, our board defended it.

DN: Has the community ever defended the brand?
What we’ve found is if you work with the community and build trust, and you’re open about how you engage and you answer questions and address issues that come up, the community will support you. It’s not always SAP that has to defend [itself] when someone goes haywire.  We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky in the community, and your knee-jerk reaction might be, we have to answer that. And what ends up happening is a lot of other community members come in and say, “Well you might have a point here, but this is way over the line.”  The whole group kind of comes together.

DN: What are the other ways that you report on the success, or what are the metrics that you guys look at to rationalize your existence?
We actually have a few metrics. One is just purely in terms of activity and contributions in the community, page views, member satisfaction, things like that. We do those transactional kinds of things with the community to makes sure that we’ve got good content that people find interesting, so that’s one level of measurement. One of our KPI’s is driving activity to those webinars that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars. It’s traceable back to activity in the community.

The third is a part of the community called SAP EcoHub (http://ecohub.sap.com). It started as an online store for our partners to set up storefronts and sell their products.  We’ve expanded it to include SAP products as well. It is connected to the community so that if there are conversations going on about certain product areas, we have links in those conversations going back to EcoHub. If you happen to be on a conversation you can see the product.  That is an increasing channel for us, for our partners and for SAP to drive revenue directly.

DN: You have a few people that are in the conversation, how do you make sure that they are all on brand?
We do have a social media corporate policy, guidelines, best practices case stories, and training courses.  We have an active internal social community, so there’s a lot of discussion and activity and assets [and] resources available to people when they start to put a toe in the water in social media.  A lot of those principles are similar to when anybody goes for media training, for example.  There are a few guiding principles like, “Don’t talk about things that you don’t know about.” And stay away from forward-looking statements like, “We’re going to do this,” or “We’re going to do that.”  But otherwise I think a lot of it is just common sense.

DN: You have this substantive, meaty community where people are actually participating, and you’ve already proven its worth and along comes Twitter and Facebook. Has there been conflict because [social media] is a separate group, and it’s not part of your group?
There is a social media group driving policies, best practices, training, reporting, and other aspects of social media for SAP, but we’re all part of marketing. It’s interesting because community and social media are somewhere in the middle of several traditional corporate groups.  It’s a little bit of marketing; it’s a little bit of communications; it’s a little bit of support, there’s an aspect of listening for product roll-in, and there’s an aspect of sales channel. So there are always discussions about where does it really belong. But community and social media are about people connecting – so if you’re doing it right, the entire organization is responsible for connecting with customers and partners in their respective areas.  So yes, we are separate groups, but we have a communities and social media council of leaders from each of those groups as well as social media ambassadors embedded throughout organizations and geographies at SAP.

DN: With 2.5 million community members, your activities are dwarfing anything SAP might have on Facebook [or] Twitter. How as the marketing/social team dealt with this?
We actually work very well together and leverage each other’s strengths on a nearly daily basis.  But it’s interesting that when we were first having discussions about Communities joining marketing, our CMO was saying “There’s an opportunity to learn from what Community Network has done.   We need to have more conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and offers.”  It’s been a cultural change within the company.

DN: Have your content development efforts had a measurable impact on SEO?
We are very much SEO champions, and it’s been through experience. We had to figure out what to do on all those pages to do better with search engine: where things are laid out; how are we tagging pages; what are the titles in the pages, how are URLs formed. So many things factor into it. We had this three-month project just to go through everything and then get the word out to all the stakeholders and get everybody to update all their pages. I mean it was dramatic; We were bumping along at around 400,000 unique monthly visitors, and all of a sudden we shot up to like 900,000. It was unbelievable— just blew me away.