 something. So eventually we moved on and did a video with this customer that they hadn’t really done with many vendors before. It was all around them storing the Rio Olympics, all the footage was being stored on one of, well, actually not one, many of our hardware servers and they ended up doing a video with us, telling us, you know, how they could get that real-time and then back out to all the studio locations where they were airing the Olympics, and they allowed us to launch that video the night of the Rio Olympics opening. So again, you’re attracting way more viewers to your vendor site because you’re not just talking IT, you’re now talking the Rio Olympics, for example.
So you’re getting the Joe Public to know who you are, as well as then your IT crowds to have the hardware-type story. I think it’s constantly thinking like that when you’re dealing with customers. One important aspect I think is listening and taking that time to really understand your customer, to work out what is a win-win for them versus what is just a win-win for your company.
Margot Leong: I absolutely love that. And I think that you really touch upon a very fascinating topic, which is the relationship management piece of this. You know, it’s something that I’m super fascinated by is this idea about attitudinal loyalty versus behavioral loyalty, right? So behavioral loyalty, meaning I’m just using this service because we’re sort of locked into a contract and maybe I’ll start looking around when the contract ends, but I have really no affinity towards it.
You’re thinking outside of the box to develop this attitudinal loyalty, which is developing more loyalty to the brand as a result of your personal interactions. And so the fact that you’re so focused on helping the customer be successful, not just in the sense of, because often customer marketing, what we can dangle in front of them is, “Oh, be a thought leader.” but we’ve talked so many times about how that is not the main motivation for a lot of the people that we talk to.
And so it’s really understanding human nature, but also understanding what does wild success mean for this company and how can I leverage the resources at my disposal to help you achieve that?
To get into some of the other examples that you have would be great. The one that you just spoke to around the IT piece is super interesting.
One question for you there actually is how did you even learn, that something that they were struggling with was hiring for that IT talent? Who did you talk to you to, to get that intel?
Julie Ilott: The point of contact was in digital. So when we were introduced to this particular point of contact to talk about things like, “Hey, let’s create a video, would you be a speaker?” She actually stopped us and said, “Well, actually one of the biggest issues that we have that we’re trying to get over and we think you might be able to help us with this is we’re struggling to attract IT and you are an IT organization – how do you do it? So the conversation kind of went down that path and then we came up with the idea that, you know, every year we run a hackathon to attract the engineers and IT talent that we want in our company. So why not help them have access to that? So we paid for the hackathon. Like I said, we did it jointly – they didn’t do any work around it. We advertised it all, but they allowed us to use their logo so that when we advertised it as a joint hackathon with our company and their organization, and it was, you know, if you win this hackathon, it was to spend a day with this large media organization in their new digital area.
So they got a chance to showcase what they were doing. And then of course, that is advocacy in itself because that person who wins the hackathon that comes into the media organization and has a look at what’s going on will then tell their friends about it, will then tell their other work colleagues about it.
They’ll say, you know, “Hey, this company has an amazing IT department. We all see it on TV and we know the productions and movies that they create, but they have this amazing IT department that I really want to be a part of and so would lots of other IT people. So that again, is advocacy in my opinion.
But yeah, it just came up through a conversation, just around taking time to listen versus just going in with your pitch or the short list of items that you need to achieve. It is about taking that step back and just trying to work out what the customer’s doing or what they are maybe having challenges with – something that’s going to appeal to them.
Another example is, when I was back at Oracle, we were promoting the cloud platform. I was working with a key account director for a large German car manufacturer, and they’re inherently very protective of their brand, but they also didn’t ever want to really speak to the sales person about expansion. And they certainly didn’t want to talk to us about the cloud platform.
Again, I took a moment to chat with the key account director. He then introduced me to the customer. I said to him, let’s try and offer them something that actually appeals to them before we then start going down the path of other activities that we want to do.
So, they had one advocate in their organization that was going around and talking about the success that they had had with one part of our cloud platform and it was all to do with their car servicing department. And they were using text messaging and allowing people to book services through mobile and it was working really, really well.
And I asked that particular advocate what would help her promote, and she mentioned maybe some kind of collateral that looked like the large German car manufacturer the way that they would do it. So we ended up creating a really polished video clip. It didn’t look like ours as a vendor, and this might sound a bit strange for some people, but we had our logo on the mobile app and you saw somebody booking a service through the phone in the video clip, but that was it. It was super subtle. And then the rest of it was like images of their cars talking about the service that they offer. It was their clip that we created for them, and it started to, again, really change the relationship for that key account director.
So he had started to have conversations with people about expanding what they had first initially bought into much deeper areas of the company, which he hadn’t been able to break into before. It’s a long road sometimes with customer advocacy, but it can yield really good results at the end.
So, you might start with that, which, what is that gonna really give you as a company? It’s not going to give you views. It’s not going to give you new customer references in your pool is, it’s not really going to do anything like that, but it’s going to allow you access to a massive brand that has never wanted to work with you before and again, then we started to talk to them about creating another piece of content that talked a little bit more about what they were doing with us.
Margot Leong: Yep, absolutely. And I think that part of this is when you join an organization, right? Even getting the lay of the land and understanding what are the resources that you have at your disposal, what are the teams and relationships that you can build internally to help promote that customer and help that customer, you know, in any way that you can.
And I think that thinking out of the box in this way perhaps can seem a bit daunting when you haven’t really had this approach before, but when you start opening your mind up to this possibility, there’s so many things that you can do with it. One of the examples at a smaller company is when I was at Gusto, we’re rewarding our customer advocates with other customers’ wares. We worked with such attractive small businesses, and so in some of our welcome kits for our customer advocates, we would send them, um, a gift box filled with a pie from a local small business, with coffee from one of our favorite advocates in Washington and then like, socks from a cool sock manufacturer in Portland. You put in a note to that customer and you say here’s some gifts from fellow customers at Gusto.
That kind of thinking really can help pay dividends because you’re helping to reinforce to the customer that you’re sending it to that we really care about our customers, and of course the customers that we’re helping out by putting in their stuff. It’s not even that much money to, to pay them for what we’re doing, but we’re helping them with promotion as well.
Something that I’d love for you to talk about as well, as you mentioned to me previously around this idea of customer microsites.
Julie Ilott: Yeah, sure. When I was at EMC, which got acquired by Dell, there was a really passionate CMO there at the time, and he had this idea to create microsites that were dedicated to the customer. We hadn’t launched any, it didn’t exist. I was brought on board to roll out this large global brand program. And the reason we were doing it was because EMC’s brand wasn’t well known. It was a 60,000 people organization and yet hardly anybody knew it and I think it’s because it is hardware, it’s quite dry, it’s a bit dull. This CMO came in and he