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The Power of the Customer: SIIA’s All About the Cloud

May 16, 2012 By

After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Power of the Customer presentation.

Moderator: Shubber Ali, Accenture
Speakers: Todd Bursey (FinancialForce.com), Dominique Levin (Totango), Jon Miller (Marketo), Jeff Yoshimura (Zuora)

Discussion Points:
The context of the discussion is how the power of customer is changing.

  • Subscription Economy
    1. Focus changed from one-time transaction to subscription base meaning calculating the value for customer over lifetime
    2. Value of the customer is calculated based on monthly recurring revenue. Also based on influence revenue (is the customer a good referral source)
  • Where is big gap in information and who is going to fill it?
    1. People’s action is lot louder than their words. People leave digital footprint all over, in their engagement, in their transaction. Measure what people do vs. what they say.
  • How consumerization of IT changing customer’s behavior?
    1. The way people go about research and buy things have changed. People are different than they were very recently. Marketer need change their tactics to how they engage with customers.
    2. Customer know more about the companies that the companies though the customer knew.
  • How do you retain and sustain customers?
    1. Pace of innovation is picking up. If a company is not paying attention the competition will be leap frogging. If no innovation then the company will fall behind.
  • How do you build trust with customers?
    1. Trust is tied to emotion and emotion is heavily involved in B2B decision making. In B2C aspiration and positive emotion plays role is decision making.
    2. Companies are moving away from attending trade shows and creating more content to build trust with customers.
    3. The content are consumed by the customer without marketing shield, so with this process the companies can build relation and in turn build trust. Trust is super important as a marketer companies can encourage trust by building great content.
    4. Beyond content companies can build trust my giving away product
    • 44% offer free trial model
    • 14% offer freemium
    1. 3 dimension of stuffs that can be put out there
    • Expertise
    • Utilities – Free trial, freemium, free product
    • Affinity – Community, community affiliation will drive inbound marketing
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Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Software Events