Q: What are Xerox’s goals in its b-to-b client retention efforts?
A: The focus for our company is really taking our existing clients and exposing them to the full line of business services that Xerox now offers in the marketplace who for years have just known Xerox in the technology space. This includes outsourcing services in areas like finance and accounting, as well as customer call center support. ?
Q: How do you market these additional services to existing clients??
A: Step one for us has been educating our sales force on the breadth of the offerings through a lot of training, and a lot of collateral support. But we’ve also provided a nice halo effect to this sales enablement with our brand advertising campaign. So the salesperson is talking to a C-level client about an offering that we have, and hopefully the client is remembering an ad they saw on CNBC that morning.?
Q: So it’s combining the broad marketing message with the one-on-one of the sales force. Are there any other ways you are getting your marketing message out??
A: We’re doing a lot more on the experiential side with event-based marketing. We recently signed a partnership with Cirque du Soleil, and we’re one of their exclusive partners. We typically hold a business event before a Cirque du Soleil show. We do an overview of Xerox’s business offerings and touch on a topic everyone’s talking about these days, and then engage with the client on a personal level by going to the show and giving them an unexpected, money-can’t-buy experience.?
Q: How about measurement? ?Do you have a way of tracking ?the ROI on your retention efforts??
A: It does become a little bit chall-enging to be able to track that direct one-to-one ratio of marketing dollars spent to retaining the customer, because there’s so much that happens on the sales side and the relationship side. But we do have a couple of measurements, like if we know a client has participated in one of our events, we do an extensive amount of brand equity tracking and do understand C-level’s awareness and perception of Xerox. For our current clients, the real ROI is translated into the revenue growth that we get from the client. ?
