For Bryan Pearson, best-selling author and president of LoyaltyOne, his first book – The Loyalty Leap: Turning Customer Information into Customer Intimacy – allowed him to attend a promotional tour. What he quickly learned was a sequel – emphasizing the B2B world – was in order.
As a result, Pearson’s latest book -- The Loyalty Leap for B2B: Turning Customer Information into Customer Intimacy – was just released and focuses on how to use customer data to create emotional brand loyalty, and build customer-engagement initiatives that benefit business clients.
The e-book includes case study examples from American Express, Teradata, and others.
“Most corporations have the tools to identify their best customers and understand their buying habits,” Pearson told Loyalty 360. “But few know how to use these tools to build a loyalty or customer engagement program that can be used, with equal advantage, by their business clients.”
When Pearson started speaking top audiences to promote his first book, he was constantly greeted by the same question: “This is great, but what about the B2B environment?”
Pearson considered the question a bit funny because “I had extended most of the content and thinking could be applied in that space. I decided nine months after the release of the book that the natural next step was to answer the foundational question.”
Pearson’s latest book reveals the required principles for making the Loyalty Leap in B2B relationships across the small business, large enterprise, and channel marketing segments; the key differences between B2B and B2C loyalty initiatives and how to use customer data to support a company’s goals.
He supports that with best-practices case studies from companies that illustrate the Loyalty Leap’s six steps and principles in practice.
“A lot of it (the differences between B2B and B2C) is around the buying process and that’s often hard to distinguish from consumers,” Pearson said. “There’s a very different sale structure for people who would buy product as opposed to who would make the product. There are different dynamics in how you structure the buying process. And there is usually some form of governance over the buying process in B2B that isn’t necessarily in B2C.”
B2B may have similar information as B2C companies, but might not “think about using it beyond the sales part of it. They have to rethink the way they analyze the business to structure rewards and recognition.”