Your lowest-cost and most-probable source of revenue is your existing clients. Trusted relationships with strategic accounts also translate into marquee references, positive word-of-mouth, and valuable insight into the most effective new offers. Consequently, marketers need to rethink their client relationship-building programs, from user group meetings to advisory councils to reference programs to hospitality and senior-level events. Relationship-building programs for senior executives at key (named, strategic, global, etc.) accounts can no longer be one-off or hospitality activities, but must be part of a portfolio of client engagement designed to progressively develop and nurture long-term relationships.

Key Findings

• Having a formal, comprehensive customer engagement strategy is very important
• Customer engagement objectives are to strengthen relationships, grow revenue, and provide insight
  • But amplifying positive word-of-mouth and increasing advocacy are also important, based on buyer behavior
  • Potential buyers speak to colleagues through their personal networks and inside
    their own companies, as well as councils and communities to which they belong
• Customer engagement programs that are most important to a company’s
  performance are customer reference programs, and public and private customer events
• Companies continue to decrease their use of hospitality programs
• Online Community and Social Network Programs need to be tied more directly to lead generation and nurturing

Study Methodology

• Online Web-based survey
• Survey invitations were emailed during October 2009 to contacts from the three sponsoring companies: ITSMA, CSg, and Forrester
  • 71 Respondents from 62 Companies
• ITSMA analyzed the data by:
  • Company type (sells products and services
    or primarily services)
  • Annual services revenue (< $200M, $200–999M,$1– 4.9B, >=$5B)

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