SCloud Consulting Pty Ltd, Collins Street Tower, Level 3, 480 Collins Street, Melbourne (2026)

08/02/2024

Resellers are pivotal in retail, serving as a link between manufacturers and the customer. As the name suggests, resellers typically purchase products and services from manufacturers and resell them to their customers for profit. Unlike B2B producers, resellers do not modify products; they connect manufacturers and consumers by providing finished goods to the end users.

Like other B2B buyers, identifying and marketing to top resellers can be complex. However, with the right strategies, you can partner with resellers to accelerate your business growth. Here is a proven checklist to identify and market products to the best resellers. That said, these strategies should be tailored to suit specific industry and business needs.
Identify Your Preferred Reseller
Successful businesses refrain from marketing to any reseller. Hence, companies must identify resellers that align with their specific goals and can reach their target audience. First, top resellers must possess a network and reputation in a particular market, ensuring resellers can reach businesses ideal customers.
Focus on Value
The cost of some products and services across the reselling market cannot be over or under-priced, making pricing consistent. To stand out, manufacturers must consider how the product can enhance the buyer’s reputation. As such, products should be marketed to emphasize value to the reseller and customer. Every B2B business must look beyond pricing and recognize the full range of the rational and emotional factors driving each purchase.
Attend Industry Events
Businesses should consider trade fairs, conferences, and industry-specific events for developing partnerships with potential resellers. Prior to these events, it’s best to get accustomed to attendees and identify which might make a potential reseller. Furthermore, manufacturers should take full advantage of the networking sessions at these events. Interact with promising resellers, pitch your product, and underscore its importance to spark interest.
Recommendations
A new study diminished the need for expensive advertising budgets, with word-of-mouth recommendations capable of driving sales than other marketing influences. That said, not all recommendations are helpful. Ensure you provide your connections with your ideal buyer persona to get more streamlined recommendations.
Work Towards Productive Partnership
Alliances between companies are a fact of life in business today, and this also holds between manufacturers and resellers in the B2B ecosystem. Resellers seek new vendors when they discover a new customer need. If your business can address those needs, then you should work towards developing a long-term partnership.
Please comment on additional reseller marketing ideas you have implemented. You can reach me at [email protected]
Please comment on additional reseller marketing ideas you have implemented. You can reach me at [email protected].
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01/02/2024

Product-market fit
Product-market fit describes a strong alignment between a product's value proposition and customers' needs. No matter how brilliant the idea is, how talented the product development team is, and how functional the product is – it will get you nowhere if no one wants to buy it.

While developing a product, Andy Rachleff emphasizes on "Value Hypothesis" and "Growth Hypothesis". Value hypothesis answers why would someone use a product and growth hypothesis answers how a business can scale its customer base.

There are three stages of a product life cycle:
● Problem/Solution Fit: Determining whether the problem is worth solving before building out a solution.
● Product/Market Fit: Understanding how well your solution solves the problem through experiments.
● Scale: Planning about processes, optimization, and accelerating growth.

There are numerous benefits of product-market fit. Product-market fit helps businesses identify the core audience and identifies customer’s needs and wants. Once a core audience is determined businesses can run effective campaigns rather than a spray and pray strategy. Market-fit products will also have a significant organic pull from satisfied customers, further reducing marketing costs. Product market-fit ensures that the product meets customers’ expectations, resulting in minimizing customer acquisition costs and increasing customer loyalty. Product market-fit further gives confidence to investors making it less expensive to secure funds, build and grow the product.

High growth in sustained demand is the best indicator of product-market fit. It shows intentional and authentic interest rather than impressions, likes, and shares for your offerings.

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16/01/2024

Marketing Mix

Marketing mix is to identify the fit of the various pieces, the quality and size of their interaction. In addition to this it must be relevant, example a high-quality product cannot be sold through a low-quality retailer. The irrelevancy can be communicated to the customer; however, this would not be a long-term strategy.

The next important parameter is the integration between the mix meaning all the pieces must work harmoniously amongst each other. Higher promotion means, higher price to pay for the promotion. However, this does not happen across industries and hence the marketing department must change the mix accordingly.

The marketing mix initially consisted of 4Ps also known as producer-oriented model. This model was developed by Jerome McCarthy in 1960. The 4Ps consisted of price, promotion, product, and place. Bernard Booms and Mary Bitner then added 3Ps people, process, and physical evidence to the existing model in 1981. Technology integrates all the Ps and delivers the decided marketing mix to the market.

The product must solve some problems or provide convenience to the customer. The product must aim not only to meet the expectations but also exceed the expectations of the customers.

Price primarily is the value the product or service offered by your product. However, prices can be determined based on a business strategy. Discounts are offered to capture market share.

Place refers to the locations where the products or service are manufactured, distributed, sold, and supported. The place can refer to a physical location or a digital presence.

Promotion is to communicate about product to target customers, partners, distributors, and employees. This can be done using channel mix.
People refers to all humans that interact with others or systems while purchasing, manufacturing, or reselling. Customer experiences, employee experience and partner experiences are key to manage.

Process refers to all the activities involved in delivering products and services. Important things to consider is repeatable and consistent experiences. The process must be scalable to meet demand and be efficient to minimize costs. Automations through technology play a key role in process to manage efficiency and consistency.

Physical Evidence builds trust with all the people engaging with the product or service and is tangible evidence. This includes physical and digital presence, branding, interior design, online rating and review uniforms and services rendered by employees, partners and others involved in selling your product or services.

Marketing mix modelling will be different for B2B and B2C. Salesforce is the only technology that has different marketing tools for B2B marketing and B2C marketing. Salesforce Pardot is used for B2B marketing and Marketing Cloud for B2C.

Please share your views in the comments. You can reach me via email at [email protected].

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10/01/2024

Key Characteristics-B2B Marketing
Presently when one googles "marketing", the tops search results show businesses doing digital marketing, and courses for digital marketing. Marketing set of processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The two types of marketing are Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumers (B2C). We will explore the key components of B2B marketing. The purchasing pattern between B2B and B2C have been blurred completely and the differences are not cut-and-dried. However, there are still fundamental differences between B2B and B2C.

In B2B Marketing, we target and employee or a department or the entire company. In B2B marketing the following are key:
1. Derivative Demand: Business Customers need will be directly dependent on their end customers.
2. Complex Transactions: There will be a buying committee or a purchasing department. There will be larger deals, and this will result in longer timelines.
3. Evaluation Criteria: A methodical procedure to evaluate the product/services.
4. Relationship: You need to come across as a trusted partner across your network.

Derivative demand is the demand that springs from, or is derived from, a source other than the primary buyer of a product. During Covid there was a great demand for housing in more rural areas. This is a great leading indicator for construction jobs, building materials and white goods. Any business supplying parts to appliance makers can expect an increase in demand.

Purchasing Committee typically consists of Influencers, Evaluators, Decision Makers, and Executive Sponsor. Influencer is an individual who is responsible for seeking out new products or services that can help make the company more efficient and scalable. The evaluator will look at that grouping of products/services and do the actual evaluation to identify the best fit for the company. The decision maker has the authority to say yes or no to the specific product/service that will be purchased. Finally, the executive sponsor is the person at the top of the company who were also getting buy in on the fact that this product or service is going to be useful for the company in the long run.

The evaluation criteria are the criteria used by the customer organization to rigorously evaluate the product or services. HBR research indicates considerations such as whether a product can enhance the buyer’s reputation or reduce anxiety play a large role. Recognizing the full range of both rational and emotional factors behind business purchases is important. Once the factors are identified the tailoring of value propositions to the factors is critical.

Relationships in B2B typically means a cultural fit, shared values, and seller's commitment to the customer organization.
Please share your views on key characteristics of B2B marketing. You can reach me via email at [email protected]

18/10/2023

Five Star Rating
In my previous posts, I had mentioned about three different customer service metrics namely, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Experience Score (CES). In this post I would discuss about another rating the 5- Star rating.
5-Star Rating is to gauge the experience of customers with a product, or a service. CSAT measures a specific interaction or transaction; however, 5-star rating is used to measure the different stages or end to end customer experience. 5-star rating is measured across the different stages.
Star ratings are also used to compare organisations across sub-categories. Department of Health and Aged Care, Australia Government have used the 5-star ratings to compare the quality of residential aged care services, to provide transparency to older people and their families.
It has been identified that customer trust reviews between 4.2 and 4.5 rather than a full 5. A rating between 4.2 and 4.5 indicates that it a mix of positive and negative review showing transparency. A five-star rating is visually appealing and provides customers with a quick understanding of the organization.
Not all 5-Star rating indicate customer experience. An example is the 5-star rating on the food products in the supermarket. These rating are used to provide information about the health index.
To measure the rating, the number of stars represent the score. 5-star calculations are a simple average — adding all the individual scores and dividing by the number of individual responses.

05/10/2023

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the effort placed by the customer on purchasing a product or using it services. CES score helps in identifying issues in the process and reduces the negative word from spreading across. Research has proven that delighting customers doesn't build loyalty, solving their problem and reducing the effort of the customer builds loyalty. This is because it provides customers with a postive experience which increases brand loyalty. Customer's impusle to punish bad product than service is far greather than rewarding good service or product. Airlines who lose baggages, Telcom businesses which keep their customers on hold for long times are immediately punished. Additionally businesses' unending quest for operational efficiency is prioritizing automation over customer empathy leads to a low customer effort score. An high effort means the customer has to repeatedly call back, or go through different gates such as move between phone, email or social media to get a resolution.

There are many ways to improve the CES. One way to increase customer effort score is resolving issues in the first call rather than expecting the customer to call back again. A good score of First Call Resolution (FCR) helps improve the Customer effort score. Another way is to anticipate the downstream issues and "forward resolve" the issue. Existing service requests data can be mined to identify downstream issues and train employees. Bell Canada is a perfect example. Bell, mined its customer interaction data and then trained it employees to anticipate issue. The company’s service reps now give a quick tutorial to customers about key aspects of the feature before hanging up. This sort of forward resolution enabled Bell to reduce its “calls per event” by 16% and its customer churn by 6%. Businesses can also implement callback facility for their customers preventing their customer from waiting on the call.

There are multiple ways to measure Customer Effort Score. Sending a survey is the traditional way of measuring the CES. The survey answers typically range from Strongly Disagree, a rating of 1, to Strongly agree rating of 5. Please view the picture attached for a sample CES survey question. It is important that surveys are sent automatically and immediately after the interaction. The survey must be optimized for mobile and must be simple with a maximum of two questions. Another way to measure the CES is immediate prompts and pop-ups. Immediate prompts or pop-ups following a customer action is modern, accurate and an efficient way of gathering CES.

To calculate the CES score, sum all the ratings from the survey and divide it by the total number of surveys.

Please comment on methodologies/suggestions to improve CES.

01/08/2023

The cost of living has been growing consistently since the pandemic (aggressively since last year in November) and has already touched peaks (in the last half-century) in 2023. Businesses are identifying new avenues for increasing revenue, customers are looking to get more from their existing services. Increased expectation from customers have also ensured that sufficient stress on business employees.

In order to meet customers expectations, productivity of the employees must be increased. Productivity can be increased by automation and new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bots.

We have done multiple automation projects for improving the productivity of employees and proposed metrics to management for measuring this change. This enables customers to self-serve, employees to serve customers efficiently and increased customer and employee satisfaction. This in turn helps business become market leaders in their respective industry and employees happy which would help them through the current cost of living crisis. Please share your plans and strategies at work to address the cost of living crisis using technology. We are happy to share our experience and address your business challenges using technology.

About us - We have successfully performed multiple digital projects within a duration of a few weeks to 6 months. This includes using no code methodologies. We are happy to share our expertise and participate in your digital story. Our contact [email protected]

26/07/2023

Digital route from Boardroom to server room : Aligning Business strategy with IT strategy

Business plans and digital strategy alignment requires going the extra mile for leaders and can cost 25% of revenue loss for this strategic misalignment according to some studies.

Entrepreneurs and business leaders are doing their best to achieve business targets, grow business amid rate hikes and low economic growth in Australia during 2023. In this adverse scenario, it becomes very critical for businesses to align mission, vision and organization values with digital strategy to deliver value to customers, organization and minimize no-value adding activities.

We are continuing from our previous post where we shared our tried and tested 4-D model for formulating a digital roadmap for an organization. Today, we focus on sharing mapping for aligning business goals and metrics (profit, cost, expense, growth) with digital strategy.

Define – Boardroom leaders and CIO collaborate to define expectations from each other to map business goals and technology (digital) capabilities in a workshop. Often the technology team has less experience and involvement with business problems while engaged in expansion and operations. Strategic alignment between management and technical team on goals, metrics, priorities and budgets is a strong foundation step.

Decide – Technical experts take leadership here and propose enterprise digital roadmap to achieve business metrics spread across 5 layers i.e. business process, choice of applications for each process, data storage and primary keys, IT infrastructure (servers, network etc.) and cyber security layer. This helps in optimizing usage of resources like user time to interact with applications, data redundancy errors, IT cost, business experiences (customers, vendors etc.).

CIO / IT team presents this to boardroom and agrees on path that suits business goals and enable timely decision making by hassle free reporting. We are happy to further help through our experience and participate in your digital route from board room to server room.

About us - We have successfully performed multiple digital projects within duration of few weeks to 6 months. We are happy to share our expertise and participate in your digital story. Our contact [email protected]

18/07/2023

4 steps to successful digital transformation

Digital transformation has potential to USD 44 billion in annual economic value by 2023 as per expert reports. Majority of digital transformations have helped organizations in improving (sales, profits), savings (of manpower, cost etc.), reducing (waste, wait time etc.), improving (profitability, customer satisfaction, service quality etc.) by changing the way an organization operates. In fact, digital transformation as a term has gained exponential popularity over Google over past few years.

We want to share our winning strategies (4-D framework) adopted for digital projects across processes and organizations in Australia. Successful digital transformation projects have served well, however as per few studies around 1/3 of digital projects succeed.

Define – Because we can’t manage, what we can’t define, hence as a first step, we start with mix of qualitative and quantitative evaluation of current state, for our project (without being paranoid about perfection). This timebound exercise helps us plan and prioritize digital roadmap.

Decide – Once we agree on current state and proposed state of business, our experts work with stakeholders on shortlisting right technology and partners that suits project budget, value, priorities and other commitments.

Digitize – This is step involves managing the project and customizing for any unforeseen / new cases to meet stated objectives.

Develop – We closely celebrate success with our partners while reviewing and realising project benefits and often decide next phases.

We have successfully performed multiple digital projects within duration of few weeks to 6 months. We are happy to share our expertise and participate in your digital story. Our contact [email protected]

03/05/2023

Am I B2B or B2C? Short answer, I’m both:

Salesforce helps over 150,000 customers across a myriad of businesses, nonprofits, and institutions to connect with their customers, and I’m a trusted advisor stewarding successful Salesforce implementations.

People around the world rely on CRM to drive success, and a key part of that is the Salesforce Consultant by your side navigating implementation.

My primary responsibility is to recommend the best solution for a given set of requirements, and to articulate the trade-offs involved in choosing one solution over another.

I bring technology, people, and processes together using my skills to ensure custom solutions truly meet the needs of your business. I’m the trusted technology leader at the table and an expert on Salesforce product capabilities, at a time when demand for Salesforce technical skills continues to grow - and I’m looking forward to designing solutions for you.

Ac

01/05/2023

How much does your business really benefit from digital transformation?

If you’re still sitting on the fence about the decision to go digital, then I see you and I hear you.

Surrendering your business to the digital world can be daunting, I know. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it comes with so many benefits that will absolutely transform your business.

In one of my recent videos, I spoke about the ‘customer lifecycle’, so let’s unpack that a little more today.

If there’s one thing that the customer lifecycle embodies, it’s ensuring the best customer service that guarantees customer loyalty which makes them come back to you time and time again.

So how do we achieve this?

To improve your customer experience, I truly believe that incorporating the digital world into your business is the answer.

Recent findings from Salesforce show how significant the benefits of leveraging technology, data and AI solutions really are.

Through these technologies, companies found that, on average, there was a:

- 20-30% increase in customer retention and satisfaction
- 10% revenue increase
- And faster delivery timelines

After seeing the real-world statistics from Salesforce, it’s no wonder that businesses are going digital. The results really speak for themselves.

So, are you still sitting on the fence or are you ready to take your business to the next level?

27/04/2023

There’s an art to designing winning B2B marketing strategies and the key is to include these 3 principles:

1. Maintain accurate user personas
Cultural shifts like hybrid working and digital HQs have changed everything about how your customer now behaves, and the tools they use day to day. So, before you reach out, look at the data, analyse the customer journey, and factor in whether your target personas’ behaviours are changing.

2. Create FOMO in the workplace
Fear Of Missing Out is a phenomenon we associate with our personal lives. But it exists in the workplace too and it’s a great opportunity to promote events and conferences where not being present could put them at a disadvantage. Think of it as playing your part in helping customers get caught up on the potential gaps in their knowledge, with valuable content only you can deliver.

3. Leveraging CRM data across your organisation
Not just your marketing team — and capitalise on every possible contact with your customer. From social media posts, to webinars and blogs. Featuring content that aligns across the board, throughout the year.

Marketers who use tools and streamlined methods position their campaigns for optimum performance that helps to raise awareness and nurture demand.

Which of these are you and your team already working on, and what else would you add to my list?

SCloud Consulting Pty Ltd

08/02/2024

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16/01/2024

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27/04/2023

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