IN CLEAR FOCUS: Lynn Daniel, founder and CEO of The Daniel Group, shares insights on differentiating B2B customer experiences. He discusses building trust through communication, leveraging feedback with phone surveys and AI tools, and improving frontline engagement. Learn how understanding the ‘why’ behind customer satisfaction and responding promptly can transform business success. Lynn describes actionable strategies for growth and shares a real-world success story of improved loyalty.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Lynn Daniel: A lot of companies have great products in most any market. So how do you differentiate yourself anymore? It’s got to be that service and that support and that customer experience that you provide to make it easy for the customer to get what they need so the customer trusts you that you’re going to deliver on your promises and that you know what you’re doing and you have their best interest at heart.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. In markets saturated with near-identical offerings, the customer experience that a brand delivers can make or break the bottom line. Businesses that serve other businesses face a stark reality. In today’s always-on social media world, negative customer interactions and experiences can quickly spiral into lost accounts worth millions. Our guest today is an expert in business-to-business customer experience, relationships, loyalty programs, and feedback mechanisms. Lynn Daniel is the founder and CEO of The Daniel Group, a company he established in 1989. With extensive experience in the B2B sector, Lynn’s background includes management consulting, corporate planning, and new product management. Lynn’s company works with notable clients, including around 80% of Caterpillar dealers in North America. Lynn frequently speaks on customer engagement and loyalty at industry conferences, and he’s been featured in major media outlets including the New York Times, CBS Market Watch and Inc. magazine. To discuss B2B customer experience strategies and insights, and what B2C marketers might learn from them, I’m delighted that Lynn is joining us today from North Carolina. Lynn, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Lynn Daniel: Thank you so much, Adrian. I’m looking forward to it.
Adrian Tennant: The Daniel Group has been in business since 1989. What inspired you to start the company, and how has its focus evolved over the decades?
Lynn Daniel: I started the company because I always wanted to have my own company. That just was a motivation for me. We started out as just doing strategy and marketing research for middle market companies. Somewhere in the late 1990s, I’d had a series of strategy projects that were around how we would grow our business. And one of the things I noticed, a lot of the clients I was working with didn’t know how many customers were walking out the back door. You knew the big ones. If you lost an order to a big one or the big one decided to go elsewhere, everybody knew about that. And you didn’t want to lose those. But lots of times in most companies, just especially B2B world where we work, those companies depend a lot on those middle-sized companies, middle-sized customers, to keep them going. And those were ones, in many cases, the medium-sized and smaller ones that were leaving. And it struck me, well, they didn’t know how many were leaving. They had a loose idea, but very loose. They were doing very little, if anything, to try to improve their ability to keep these customers. And so this happened over a series of about two or three projects. We started work with one client who is still in South Carolina to try to understand what was going on in their customer base. This led to what we now call Experience Connect, which is an ongoing feedback process to help our clients understand what they need to do to keep customers coming back and help them to spend more money with you.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve specialized in business-to-business customer experience since 2005, I believe. How does B2B customer experience differ from B2C, and why did you decide to focus on this area?
Lynn Daniel: I have always been interested in industrial marketing. When I went to business school, that was a focus of mine. B2B versus B2C, it’s very different in many respects. First of all, it’s generally a much bigger and more complex transaction. So for example, if the farmer buys a tractor from ADCO, that’s a big purchase. But over time, the farmer depends on that dealer network, for example, to keep that tractor running. Same could be said for a Caterpillar dealer. So it’s a very complex transaction where they need help to determine which one is best for my operation and my needs. So it’s also a bit of a technical sell that has to be made to these customers. In B2C, if you’re going to buy a car, going to buy a toothbrush, you know, whatever that may be, I’m not diminishing the value of toothbrushes, but it’s a much simpler process. So we’re dealing with a complex sales process with a lot of support tail. The customer is not going to walk away from you unless you cause that customer to walk away from me. You and the customer are invested together. And that’s the biggest difference.
Adrian Tennant: You mentioned Caterpillar. The Daniel Group works with four in every five Caterpillar dealers in North America. Lynn, can you tell us about the unique challenges of measuring and improving customer experience in the heavy equipment industry?
Lynn Daniel: As you think about heavy equipment, not just appliances to others, the first challenge is the service experience in many cases is delivered by technicians or frontline counter people. These are generally technically trained people. They’re really good at what they do technically. Sometimes their ability to communicate with that customer and explain why they need to do this for the customer or why the customer needs to buy this part or why the customer needs to rent this kind of equipment is not as good as it needs to be. I think about years ago when you went into a computer store to buy a computer, you had two choices with salespeople. You had the person who could sort of BS their way through it, not tell you a lot of stuff, or you could get the techie who could tell you all about the bits and the bytes and you wind up confused. So this is one of the biggest issues, I think, in the construction, as well as a number of other industries, where you’ve got to really have a top-flight group of frontline people who can listen to customers, who can respond to customers who are well-trained, and they’re comfortable in their own skins talking to that customer. I think the other thing that goes along with this is I mentioned that long service and support tail. A piece of Caterpillar equipment over the life of ownership will consume a lot of parts and service. There’s just no two ways about it. And so by doing that, It requires a lot of ongoing support, both at the human level, as well as just staying in touch with that customer, making sure they’ve got what they need, making sure things are working right. In other words, not assuming. I think now the good thing is a lot of technology is helping our clients improve that ability to stay in touch. For example, if you buy most any of the equipment of any of our clients right now, their equipment will have some type of telemetry on it so that it will tell the dealer that from where they bought it, “I’ve got some parameter that’s out of whack.” Send someone out, or it needs service, or in many other things. But that’s a help that causes them to stay in really good touch with their customers in this day and age. So technology is really helping them, I think, to stay in better touch with their customers.
Adrian Tennant: Lynn, when we were preparing for this podcast, you mentioned to me that you use various methods for gathering customer feedback, including phone, email, and text surveys. Why do phone surveys still dominate your approach? And what advantages do they offer over digital methods?
Lynn Daniel: You know, there have been many times where I talk to a new client and the say, “Well, you’re still doing phone surveys?” I say, “Yes, we are. And we’re doing them because they work.” Why? If I send an email or let’s just say a digital survey out on the cell phone, and you’re out in the field, you may give me a score. Okay, 8 on this, 9 on this, 10 on this, 5 on this. But generally what we’re seeing is you don’t get a whole lot of anything else. You don’t get a lot of qualitative comments. There may be some ways in the coming year or so that we can help improve that process. Most of us that are older, and we don’t have to be older, but using a cell phone with the way the small screens are today, that’s a bit of a challenge. So a phone is a whole lot easier to get the feedback. We get more feedback. And when you think about it, if someone just spent $25,000, $30,000, $40,000 on a service for a product, you really want to dig in and understand, well, what went well and what could have been better for that customer? What we say is we think we’d get more information on the why behind the score with a fold than we do digitally. Digital has its place. We certainly use them. We’ll continue to use them. We’ll probably increase our use of them. But they’re going to be used more, I think, for what I call a little cut and dry transactions. Simpler parts transactions, simpler riffle transactions, those transactions where it’s all, I won’t say binary, you may have three or four factors that you’ve got to look at. And those factors can be gauged in a more quantitative manner. But for others, it’s a lot more difficult. You do get more feedback, more in-depth feedback with volume.
Adrian Tennant: Lynn, I’m curious, do you have any plans to use AI to support those phone surveys?
Lynn Daniel: I certainly would take a look at it. One of the problems we have, Adrian, with AI is there’s so much lingo in the worlds in which we work. keeping the lingo up to date. And it’s got to be up to date because if AI bot calls a customer, first of all, if they find out it’s a bot, they’re probably hanging up. So it’s got to be really damn good. No two ways about it. And it’s going to take a constant training process. I think it’s going to be a while before it’s used in that manner. Now, we’ve got some other ways we have plans to use AI. For example, the transcription of the verbal comments that are recorded in our interviews could be a very good use of AI. That’s probably high on our list in the next year or so to begin to use AI for that purpose.
Adrian Tennant: In B2B, there are often multiple stakeholders involved in customer experience. How do you approach gathering feedback from different organizational levels, from the end users through to decision makers?
Lynn Daniel: That’s a really good question, because what we often find, there’s some surprises there. So for many of our clients, if we, let’s say we talk to the construction supervisor or the farmer or someone like that, there’s no front line actually using them. we’ll get one set of information from them. So what we do quite often is we will do what we call relationship surveys. So these are done typically with more senior level managers. They have a senior relationship with someone, maybe the dealer or the OEM. But they don’t know the details of a transaction. They don’t know, you worked on that truck, we worked on this piece of construction equipment. They don’t know all that. But they have a perspective of how they see the relationship with that provider. And at times, there’s a difference between what the senior-level folks see and what the frontline people experience. Sometimes it goes one way or the other. It all depends. And honestly, this is helpful information for our clients because they can begin to understand, well, let’s say we’ve got a really strong relationship with the senior level management, but we’re losing it with some of the frontline people who are actually on the bubble before we’re getting a lot of this done, that’s really valuable information for our clients to have. And then they can start to say, well, what do we need to do to change this? What happens if we don’t change it? And where are we breaking down? Because we want to have the feedback from both of these big groups more in alignment.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve discussed the importance of understanding the why behind Net Promoter Scores, for example. Can you elaborate on this and explain how qualitative data complements quantitative metrics in B2B customer experience research?
Lynn Daniel: A few years ago, we started looking at that very question of, okay, how [do] we get to the why, what can we do about it? We were already getting a lot of qualitative feedback, getting that qualitative feedback organized in a way that people could use it as a challenge. You know the challenge, I’m sure, in your line of work. So what we did is we started asking two very simple questions following, say, an overall satisfaction or maybe some other prompt question. So we’d ask the customer, “Rate your satisfaction on this particular experience,” or whatever it was, product, whatever. And so it’s maybe a 1 to 10 scale, and they give a 9 or 10 or 8 or whatever they give. And then the first question we ask, “Tell me, Mr. Customer, what went well?” Our interviewer collects that information and tags it with preset tags. And then the next question is, “What could have been better?” And we’ll go through the same process, collect the information, and tag it. And then with the technology that we use, we’re able to pull all those tagged comments together so we can start to understand – “Okay, the customer said, ‘well, communications could have been better.’ What does the customer mean?” We can pull up the actual surveys and they can look at the surveys and say, “This is what the customer was talking about.” One of the other benefits to this approach is we can shorten surveys. Why? If I ask you what are the things that you like best about some experience, you may come up with one, two, or three of us. They’re the ones that pop in your mind. And likewise, the things that went not so good, a couple or three that pop in your mind. So we’re getting to the top of mind thinking for that customer. So that means we can eliminate some of the questions. For example, we may not need to ask a question about communication. We’re doing that. If it’s not mentioned by the customer, then it’s likely not a hot-button issue. If it is, we capture that and we start to understand why it was an issue. Likewise, if the customer said, “Hey, I love the ease of doing business with this company,” then we can start to understand, “Well, what makes us easy to do business with?” Which, by the way, is a power, absolutely powerful tool to have in your toolkit if you want to keep customers happy.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Lynn Daniel, founder and CEO of The Daniel Group, about B2B customer experience strategies and insights. Lynn, I understand you discovered that around one-third of surveyed business-to-business customers reported referring their current provider to a friend or colleague. How does this insight impact B2B marketing strategies?
Lynn Daniel: Adrian, I think we need to really change our approach to marketing in the B2B world. To add a little bit more to that, over 90% of those came from the customers who gave a 9 or a 10 on the Net Promoter scale like you had recommended. So it’s those happy customers. So one thing is, great CX is at the root of that referral activity. Secondly, if you know you’ve got a third of your customers referring you, how do you manage that network? Do you know who they are? And most companies don’t, what I’ve seen. For example, a customer comes to a company as a new customer. Unfortunately, too often we may ask them, “How did you come here? Why did you choose to do business with us?” But it’s not captured in any sort of rigorous, formal way. If you think about it, I think about this being almost a network where you could put a map on the wall, you spot, who’s your referral network in your territories? And what can you do to nurture that network? And I’m not talking necessarily about giving spiffs or anything to customers. Oh, those customers don’t want that. But they do want to be acknowledged, I think. And they do want to be recognized. But at the root of that is that customers gotta be happy with what you did for them. Either the product’s gotta be a really good product, or the service is gonna be fantastic to get them to do that. One quick story I will tell you, one of our clients introduced a new product, a big farm tractor, several years ago. And we interviewed this one customer. I think he told us that he felt like he was responsible for selling nine of these tractors in the county. And he was really proud of that. What I later learned is when he got the tractor and started using it, when he wasn’t using it, he parked it out beside the road of his farm to show people he had another kind of tractor that they need to take a look at. And it was a thing of pride for him. But we see this all the time with customers who want to, if they have a good experience, they want to tell people about it.
Adrian Tennant: What are some common mistakes you see B2B companies making when managing customer experience?
Lynn Daniel: Let’s think about this feedback loop. You’re asking customers to give you feedback on how you can get better. One of the biggest mistakes is companies don’t communicate back. Well, first of all, they may not do anything about what the customer suggested. It’s like you get something back and you look at it, that’s great, stick it on the shelf. Well, customers over time will say, “Heck with this, I gave you feedback on what you needed to do and nobody’s ever done anything about it.” We hear that as a complaint quite often, although I think that’s starting to improve a little bit. So we hear that. I think the second thing is not responding quickly enough to a specific complaint. So for example, if the customer bought something, had a service, and the customer’s really upset about it, it didn’t work as expected, it was more expensive than expected, you probably got about 24 to 48 hours to at least respond to the customer before the temperature of the customer goes way up. That doesn’t mean you’ve got to have an answer. That means you just have to respond. And then you’ve got to try to work on, “Well, let’s figure out what happened in this particular situation and try to get the customer happy.” That’s, I think, one big mistake. I think the other thing is people won’t celebrate success enough. Customer experience is largely about changing the culture of an organization. And I’m a strong believer that positive encouragement, meaningful positive encouragement, goes a long way to building a strong culture of focus on the customer. Many years ago, we started what we call a good job flag. So if the customer mentions, “So-and-so did a great job for me, loves this,” or whatever, our interviewers are not soliciting it. That ‘good job’ flag comes back in the form of an email to whoever’s been designated to receive emails for that location, division, or company. I saw the power of that a few years later when I was visiting one of our clients, and it was break time. Some of the technicians from the shop were in the break room, and I was in there getting coffee or something. And I noticed they were watching a monitor that the company had installed. And what they were doing is they had a loop playing, showing the comments from the customer with the customer’s picture on it, and talking about those technicians were looking at that with rapt attention, talking to each other about what they did. And the feedback I got from the managers was it was one of those things that got them engaged and got them to understand that they play a critical role in delivering good CX. I keep hearing that over and over and over, because really, a lot of times, those kinds of jobs are somewhat thankless. They go unrecognized way too much.
Adrian Tennant: We love case studies on Inclair Focus. So Lynn, can you share an example of how a B2B company successfully improved its customer experience based on insights gathered through your research?
Lynn Daniel: Let me think about one that comes to mind. It is a large dealer of construction equipment. They were doing okay, but let’s just say they were toward the middle, lower end of the pack. And part of this was that it was some basic blocking and tackling they had to do first. Through the feedback we provide them, they’ve realized they thought they had a system problem with their phones, and they found out, yes, they do have a system problem with their phones. I mean, this was just basic blocking and tackling, really, as a first step. So it was getting some of the operational stuff out of the way so that people could deliver good service. Second thing was putting in place some metrics of what was needed to deliver great CX. Because I think one of the things you have to do is you have to explain to people what you’re talking about when you deliver a good service. So, for example, they just put together, I think, five basic things to do when you’re interacting with a customer. Over time, they started measuring. They’ve since stopped that because they’ve realized that it was a little counterproductive over time and it was not as helpful as they wanted over time. But it got people to thinking about, “What do I need to do each and every time I interact with a customer?” They also made some just process improvements behind the scenes to improve inventory accuracy so that if they send to the customers parts available, it’ll be there in two days or be there the next day. They can say that with a high degree of confidence. And I think the other thing they did, they started to use, since they had done about 45 locations, so it’s a large operation. One of the things they did, they started to use the better-performing locations as almost consulting operations for some of the other locations. So they would go into these locations that are performing well and spend a couple, three days there just watching, taking notes, understanding what they did, and then the main staff that were involved in CX would take those notes, put it together, and then work with the other lower performing operations and say, “Okay, let’s try to figure out some ways you can implement some of these things in your organization.” I say some, because, you know, each organization, each location is always a little different. Some may work in here, in this location, others may not. So, that’s one of the very fragile things they do. Right now, they’re among the top performers in the dealers that we work with, and they stayed there, and I think they’ll continue to stay there, because they just welded that notion of the customer and the importance of the customer throughout the organization.
Adrian Tennant: Great example. When I think about the timeline for The Daniel Group, you founded the company in the late ‘80s. It was still a pretty analog world back then, as I recall. And then, of course, through the ‘90s, we saw the proliferation of personal computers, then the commercial internet. So we’ve seen a lot of changes from a technological standpoint and, of course, the ways in which people organize the companies and work and so on. I’m curious, Lynn, looking ahead, how do you foresee the field of B2B customer experience evolving in the next three to five years, say?
Lynn Daniel: Well, first of all, we will see more use of technology. There is no doubt about that. I do think we have to be careful that we don’t forget how to be human in that process. Because I think, back to the earlier question that you had of me, that human interaction, I think, is even more important in the B2B world than in the B2C world. If someone’s going to spend a half a million dollars on a piece of equipment, they’ve got to really trust you, that you are telling them the truth, first of all, and then this thing is highly likely to perform well. So I think we’ve got to be careful as we use technology not to forget that we need to know how to be human, and that may be the biggest concern I have right now, I’m seeing more and more companies are getting much more serious about CX. They’re seeing it now as one of those things that you must have if you’re going to be successful. Yes, you’ve got to have great product, but let’s face it, a lot of companies have great products in most any market. So how do you differentiate yourself anymore? It’s got to be that service and that support and that customer experience that you provide to make it easy for the customer to get what they need. So the customer trusts you that you’re going to deliver on your promises and that you know what you’re doing and you have their best interest at heart. I think you have that, their best interest at heart, then you’re going to win this game and you’re going to win over the longterm.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Lynn, if listeners would like to learn more about your work at The Daniel Group, what’s the best way to do so?
Lynn Daniel: Our website is www.thedanielgroup.com. My email address is lynndaniel, l-y-n-d-a-n-i-e-l, at thedanielgroup.com. And you can find my phone number on the website. So by all means, give me a call. Love to chat.
Adrian Tennant: Lynn, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Lynn Daniel: Thank you so much, Adrian. I greatly enjoyed it.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Lynn Daniel, founder and CEO of The Daniel Group. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to Customer Experience in B2B
02:12: Lynn Daniel’s Journey and Company Evolution
04:00: Differences Between B2B and B2C Customer Experience
05:27: Challenges in the Heavy Equipment Industry
08:11: The Importance of Phone Surveys for Feedback
10:27: Exploring AI in Customer Feedback
11:19: Gathering Feedback from Multiple Stakeholders
13:14: Understanding the Why Behind Customer Scores
16:13: “Marketing for Social Change” Promo
17:20: Impact of Customer Referrals on B2B Marketing
20:00: Common Mistakes in Managing Customer Experience
22:51: Case Study: Improving Customer Experience in Construction Equipment
25:57: Future of B2B Customer Experience
28:11: Conclusion and Contact Information
