When PowerObjects thinks about modern marketing, they think through a lens of adding value for their customers and prospects. PowerObjects produces regular webinars through their own production studio in house, consistently pushing out content designed to educate potential buyers while also adding value for their current customers.

Lifetime value

As CRM experts, PowerObjects has developed an approach to CRM that emphasizes 4 pillars: Service, Education, Support, and Add-ons. PowerObjects’ approach to marketing mirrors the spirit of these pillars – their education department consists of over 13 dedicated resources that conduct trainings around the globe, strengthening the value of their customers’ deployments and forging lasting relationships that lead to upsell and cross-sell opportunities down the road.

The relationships PowerObjects forges with their customers feed back into their marketing engine, as they then leverage their production team to work with their customers to generate references, case studies, and testimonials that can be repurposed to their website as marketing collateral. This requires a dedication to customers’ lifetime satisfaction coupled with an investment to turn that satisfaction into new customers.

If a customer doesn’t see value in the deployment, they won’t provide a reference. If your company doesn’t reach out to that customer, and doesn’t have the infrastructure to turn that testimonial into collateral, none of it works.

PowerObjects have a relationship manager dedicated to running their reference program, with over 125 active reference claims. They have 3 Microsoft MVPs within their organization, who act as thought leaders on CRM. With a team of experts in tow, PowerObjects happily makes content available for free.

PowerSuccess and maintaining the customer relationship

In a cloud first world, PowerObjects understands that recurring revenue is only as good as the relationships you maintain. The modern sales process has no finish line, as subscription engagements and the recurring revenue they bring in require a consistent investment of time and commitment in order for them to continue to bear fruit.

PowerObjects recognizes this shift and, with programs like PowerSuccess, has found a way to build services and IP around sustained, lifelong customer relationships.

“With our PowerSuccess program, we provide a resource to a customer’s organization in order to establish and maintain their CRM system and ensure they can continue to derive value from their system over the duration of the engagement.

“Many small customers do not have the staff necessary to run these systems on their own, or customize them effectively to their business, so our PowerSuccess program is an enabler for those businesses who want to empower their sales teams with a robust CRM system without making a large long-term investment in their own personnel.” – Jeff Wedren, Director of Marketing, PowerObjects.

Purchased as a service, the PowerSuccess program fits seamlessly with the subscription model of cloud services, enabling the smaller companies to which it is targeted operate try the service without a large up-front investment. With all the costs provided up front, customers can comfortably budget without surprises.

Incenting for lifelong customer relationships

When committing to a recurring revenue model, it pays to listen to your customers. PowerObjects incents their sales teams to meet frequently with their customers, and limits the number of accounts a single account manager touches in order to ensure both intimate knowledge of their customer and to conversely provide the customer a close relationship with their rep.

“We survey at all levels of Customer Engagement, checking in regularly to see how they are doing and ensuring our reps are doing a great job,” Sarah Merten said when discussing how they maintain their strong customer relationships.

Sales teams and customer representatives are touched by the marketing processes throughout the engagement, ensuring that the customer is kept informed and up to date with any new information, webinars or collateral.

“We listen to our customers and look for opportunities to collaborate with them in testimonials, videos and case studies. We have a practice director who works to produce webinars which we push out to our partners.

At times, we will have a customer come in and run a webinar themselves – we feel this is a great way to give valuable content to the community, position ourselves as thought leaders, and give the customer a platform to share their findings and successes.” – Sarah Merten, Marketing Manager, PowerObjects By listening to our customer’s suggestions, PowerObjects maintains an advisor relationship with the customer, staying abreast of issues that could threaten the engagement, and keeping an eye open for opportunities to add further value – be it for that customer, or all of their customers.