Michael Scully, who is the new Chief Marketing Officer for Beanstalk Data, told Loyalty 360 that loyalty is about relationships and to attain those relationships, brands – whether they are B2B or B2C -- must know something about their customers individually and then act on that information to increase the mutual value for both sides.
“Intelligent actions need to be triggered immediately in order to influence behavior,” Scully said.
Beanstalk Data is a Big Data marketing firm and Scully said the company platform – which has been a large tool for B2B marketers for some time – is now being applied in the B2C world. Scully offered an interesting analogy when he described Beanstalk Data’s platform.
“We have a platform built to drink from the firehose of consumer digital footprints, make sense of it, and act in real time,” he said.
Scully said in a B2B environment the idea of a CRM is more widely understood, as well as marketing automation. There is a finite number of contacts, activities, and actions to take.
“But when you take that to B2C, there are now millions of contacts, each with thousands or more digital touch-points,” Scully explained. “There's insight in there somewhere, but the haystack is piling up so fast that it's nearly impossible to find the needle. We construct insights from the data and use those to setup triggers for various marketing activities.”
The methods for handling and analyzing this volume of data from different sources are still fairly new in the past few years, Scully explained.
“We're taking those methods to marketing in ways that allow B2C marketers to unlock new value in Big Data marketing that hasn't been available to them before,” he said. “In some ways, we're like Salesforce.com for B2C businesses.”
In the B2C world, there is a need for instant insights.
“Consumers don't make decisions by committee or after long negotiations,” Scully said. “Our suite of tools does just this. By applying big data and cloud technologies and techniques, we provide real-time tools for loyalty and base management to enterprise B2C organizations.”
Scully explained that B2B businesses have refined many marketing methods that would, in theory, be similarly valuable to B2C companies.
“But cloud technology, Big Data techniques, and enterprise acceptance of SaaS solutions are all just starting to come together in a way that enables these methodologies to work at the scale and speed needed by enterprise B2Cs,” he explained. “This is our sweet spot, and we get fired up every time we're able to further empower our clients to benefit from these capabilities in new and valuable ways.”
Depending on the client and industry, key metrics vary across Beanstalk Data’s customer base.
“However, since we deal in data and analytics, we're fundamentally very well positioned to measure the impact of marketing activities,” Scully said. “Knowing what doesn't work sooner is just as important as knowing what does. We can enable our clients to continually optimize their marketing mix based on the dimensions most important to them.”
Scully described the biggest challenge his company is seeking to solve.
“Data generation is increasing at 40% per year, while IT budgets to manage that growth are only growing at 5% per year,” he explained. “Traditionally, data captured in most organizations is not captured or organized for marketing uses to begin with. Companies increasingly have Big Data, but are lacking big insights and the problem is only getting bigger. Connected consumers have growing expectations in terms of customer experience. The companies that win are the ones that can drive actionable insights from the deluge of data from their customers and respond appropriately to deepen individual relationships at scale.”
Beanstalk Data differentiates itself because, as Scully said, “we're not tied up with legacy technology or infrastructure and so we are able to move quickly. This frontier is moving too quickly for the slow to survive. We layer in just the right amount of services and education with our technology. We deliver real value at the core of our customers' customer engagement ecosystem, and quite frankly, our clients and partners enjoy working with us and our team enjoys what they do.”
Scully acknowledged that behaviors are important attributes of customers and, with the right underlying data model and customer profiling tools, behaviors are the way that customers signal their propensity to act, try, buy, advocate, abandon, or churn.
“Understanding behaviors and what they mean for particular customers is how we build our customer models and, ultimately, how we are able to deliver deeper relationships at scale,” Scully said. “Data is fundamental to the customer. Loyalty is ultimately about the relationship. Behavior is the link between customer and relationship.”