In my company we get 3 kinds of clients/propects. The first are the large B2C targeting clients which are multinational technology, FMCG, Automobile, Beverages companies etc planning to establish a presence on social web. The second kind of clients are the large B2B targeting companies in similar sectors. The third kind are the small and meduim sized companies, startups and miscellanous sectors (which sometimes include SaaS, movie directors, game developer companies, product marketplaces etc). These three sectors effectively look for presence in social media for purposes like marketing, operations (support, innovation, increasing productivity etc), establishing relationships among a target group of clients, vendors & prospects, HR (enterprise 2.0 and internal collaboration) and similar others.
As I look after the third category where CXOs, promoters of such startups either contact us via mail/ contact form or simply call us; I have learnt that these cases involve a lot of direct calling to understand business needs and objectives before taking things forward to meetings where there is a higher investment of time and resources. If you are looking after client engagement/pitches in social business consulting you get to face the following challenges:
1) Who is the prospect: Whether the client heads the business or is a middle manager. Is he a 55 year old coming from a company culture that might demand to be called 'sir' or whether he is a 25 year old entrpreneur guy who might be thinking that since you do something online you might come pretty cheap. ( As a disclaimer a large part of things we do have online-offline integrations) This can anyways be found out from basic searches, linkedin profiles etc.
2) Where is the prospect: You never know how much the client knows about social media and social technologies. He might be following your company/consultant blogs and completely understand what you do or he might be very naive to social media and end up asking you to explain facebook!! But then most of these interests fall under four categories depending upon how aware they are about the business objectives and benefits of a social web presence:
4) Where do you take it from here: How do you take this forward from this first direct call. What is the next best step?
A a disclaimer I am sure that there cannot be a rulebook to guide through a client/prospect conversation. Also it is best that each client engagement manager uses his/her own way of contacting. However there can always be a mental checklist so as to find out where are you on the conversation.
I generally follow a BNPO model which is sort of inspired by the POST model described in Groundswell by Charlene Li (of course there the reference is slightly different). Here BNPO stands for Business, needs, people and objectives. The model is described below:
a) Business: In most of the cases you will be having a fairly good idea about the client's businesses before the call. This is about asking those details which generally are not clear but are required in our business:
i) What are the client's products/services
ii) What are the target clients/customers
iii) How have they targeted them in the past
iv) How do they position their brand/product (current campaigns they are running/planning to run)
v) What are their major cost & revenue heads in the business
b) Needs: This is mostly the trickiest and the most important part of the call. In many cases if the prospect is aware about social media and the benefits of a social web presence then he knows what are the business needs that can be satisfied. But there are some cases where the prospect also says, 'We hear a lot about social media and plan to explore it for our business. How should we do it?' Generally the needs can be derived from the various business objectives we explore in social business strategies:
i) Reducing costs: Try to understand if the client spending too much on customer support, on market research for understanding the customer opinion, on PR agencies to generating a good word.
ii) Increasing sales/promotion: What fraction of the prospect's target customers are on social web, does the brand exclusively target youth, what is the existing position of their social media efforts, what are the problems they are facing in their present marketing campaigns.
iii) Increasing relationships: Is the client focussing on a niche sector of industry as clients/vendors/partners/customers. Can providing them a community or a business network for engagement help . Do they need leveraging conversations on such communitites.
iv) Increasing innovation & ideation: Is the client looking for more ideas for his brand or product, a repositioning or customer feedback. Does it position itself as a customer focussed company.
v) Increasing internal collaboration: Are there internal communication, workflow, employee moral or productivity problems.
Of course you have to get a feel of these problems from the conversation. You won't be ticking a checklist of these large number of probable situations :)
c) People: When you know the needs you will know the people to target. Understand where are these people on social web. Are they just surfing random sites, do they have their own blog, are they on facebook/twitter/Linkedin/forums etc
d) Objectives: This is different from needs as in if needs are the starting point of your conversation with this prospect, the objective is the final outcome you achieve from the project. So for example the need might be to position your brand as a youth savvy consumer company but the objective might turn out to be a contest module running series of user generated contests targeting youth.
This came out in a discussion with Dave Evans. Generally it is difficult to understand objectives in the first call itself. In some cases when the client is clear about the objectives then you can directly move on to preparing the proposal. Or if not, then set up a meeting or the next call with more relevant people. If the prospect knows that you understand his/her needs, any time invesment is worth it.
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