Targeting small businesses employing primarily one to 10 people, but with some reaching 50, her department is responsible for marketing Sage’s range of business management software and services, designed to make it easier for companies to manage their business processes. Under Baker’s leadership, the past year has seen the division working behind the scenes alongside McCann Erickson Manchester on clustering its small business customers. Although this in itself isn’t new, what is different is how the company is using the information. Once the owner of each one has been profiled and divided into sectors, each individual within Sage’s sales team of 200 is also being profiled into a personality type with a view to matching them up to individual customers.
Some people immediately click with each other and some don’t and it’s not always clear why that is, says Baker. We’re trying to put some science behind what’s driving these similarities and differences between people. It works a bit like pyschometric testing and we look at a number of different factors. For example, one customer might be driven by a quick deal or a bargain, so we would match them against a sales person who’s a bit of a deal-breaker or another customer may need more reassurance and more involvement in a dialogue. In which case, we’d match them with someone who is more nuturing. She adds, laughing, We don’t go into quite as much detail as to whether they like or dislike football, but conversations may well end up going that way.
It doesn’t just stop there. Once the marketing aspect is underway, this will lead to further developments on the commercial side, with the team looking at software and service packages it can put together to more accurately reflect the requirements of those businesses at various times in their lifecycle. This plan doesn’t only involve the marketing team, but also the sales and commercial team, which is a different approach for us, says Baker. We’ve been testing, trialling and experimenting, and bringing in as much external data as we can from our agency as well as working with a data supplier to overlay consumer data. And once our sales people have been profiled, they need to be trained appropriately too. It sounds simple, but it’s a huge piece of work.
She says that the project will continue for another 18 months with further testing and evaluating, although Baker adds that it won’t ever really be ‘finished’. Even further down the line, we’ll engage the huge numbers of people who support our customers on a daily basis and answer thousands of calls every day. To keep this live, we need to capture what’s happening on a daily basis and bring it back into our systems and add it to our knowledge so that we can grow, develop and improve what we’re doing for our customers.
The other interesting aspect is that the team has also worked with McCann Erickson Manchester to produce a visual representation called ‘Sage Town’. This depicts where the division’s customers work and operate, with some in smaller offices based in the middle of town, others in modern out-of-town offices while others are in small manufacturing businesses.
Connecting with customers is something that Baker feels is vital to the success of her department and says that results from Sage’s recent annual ‘Heartbeat’ survey conducted amongst its small business customers revealed some interesting results that help go some way to do this. Three broad themes came up: firstly, that there is too much red tape to cope with; secondly, 80 per cent of small businesses say they ought to be doing something about the environment, but a much smaller number actually have a policy in place; and thirdly, 80 per cent felt that women weren’t as high profile in UK boardrooms as they should be. This is all really helpful to us. These are clearly issues for our audience, so for us, it’s a case of listening to what they say and finding ways to make managing all that red tape easier, Baker says.
With a career that spans running her own small business to working as general manager for Spitting Image Projects, Baker’s background contributes to the sense of empathy she has with the audience she is targeting, always looking from a customer’s perspective.
Having worked in small businesses has been invaluable. My boss would openly say it’s one of the reasons she employed me, she says with frank honesty. I know that when we bought in a piece of Sage software, it really helped our business, so I believe in what we’re doing, which is really important to me. I also understand you have to make monthly decisions based on cash flow. So, often an owner of a small business will be faced with the dilemma of whether to take £100 extra as a bonus or use it to buy a piece of software for the business. When we are formulating a campaign, I’m thinking all the time, ‘does this make sense for our customers; does it have integrity’?
This attitude is behind Sage’s small business division’s other new marketing strategy, which sees it pilot a loyalty scheme with partner health insurance company AXA PPP a step in a new direction for the business. We wanted to find a way we could bring added value to our relationship with customers and give them better value for money, as well as leveraging ourselves alongside another B2B brand, explains Baker. The upshot is a promotion that offers money to any customer buying an AXA PPP product, redeemable against a future purchase of Sage software or service, whether it be software, stationery, support service or training.
This works well and although there’s no material gain for either of our companies, the compatibility between the brands is good and the benefits to our customers are excellent, says Baker.
If a customer of ours is in the market for this kind of healthcare insurance product, or they are looking to switch companies, it can only be a win-win situation as they get something they were probably going to get anyway at a preferential rate, plus money-off a product or service from a company they already have a relationship with. It’s been so well received that after getting a letter about it customers have been checking back with us to make sure it’s true. The first step was a telesales initiative at the end of last year, with a joint branded website on the cards for this year. It is still in the testing phase, but Baker is excited about the prospects for the brand.
Marketing to small businesses means her department also has very direct contact with its audience, which she says is very different to how marketers relate to larger companies, which aren’t as direct and have more people involved. We talk to our customers and have close contact with them on a fairly regular basis, she says. It means that it gives us more insight into how important our products can be on their daily lives. It’s much harder to do that at a higher level for example, with mid-market level companies, there is more verticalisation in terms of messaging. The marketers have to have a more detailed knowledge of the sector they’re working in and they often work more with events, seminars and specialist advertising. With us, it’s more about direct mail and email.
So what is the future of communicating to small businesses? We need to dig deeper and find out how they actually want to be marketed to. We really want to get under their skin. We need to find out what they want from us do they prefer digital communication or direct mail? The answer to that isn’t so straightforward. So although customers say they want more online communications, when we send emails they are not nearly as responsive as when we send a piece of direct mail. Then, the phones ring much more prevalently and there are more visits to the website. How they respond is still very much rooted in the traditional space. The clue is establishing not what they say they want, but how they behave and what they respond to. What we then need to do is to get there before they do.
To get on top of this, the department has ‘future meetings’ once a month where the managing director and her direct reports talk about what’s coming up in the future. The idea is that the direct mail team for example, may not know everything that’s going on in digital, so it’s important to share the information. There are no actions planned at the meeting, we just talk about what we think is coming up next what’s the next Facebook? Where’s mobile advertising going? What’s going to happen now that Skype is free on phones? It’s very healthy for us as a team and it keeps us on our toes. It’s our responsibility to be there before our customers. And if I have to go for an investment case I’d rather start doing it as soon as possible, rather than waiting for something that’s going to happen in nine months and for it not be in the budget.
When it comes to the future of small businesses, Baker says that like in the consumer world, there are some business people that are further ahead than others. She predicts that perhaps in the distant future, we’ll be working to a virtual model, with the concept of a bricks and mortar office becoming a thing of the past with the inevitable impact on how businesses are marketed to.
At the moment though, I think it’s about giving the customer choice, she says. Although customers are enjoying venturing into Web 2.0, they are still responding to a letter. We can be as out there as we want in terms of digital communications, but it’s about going back to basics: our customers want safety, reliability and simple solutions, and someone at the end of the phone if something goes wrong that is integral to their business. They are still anchored in core, traditional foundations and it’s up to us to make sure they feel as safe and secure as possible. However, change is unavoidable and we know we need to be one step ahead, so we can be there when it happens.
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