Posted by: Matt Shanahan
Subscriber loyalty is a relative measure. More is better, and less is worse. To qualify the level of subscriber loyalty, you compare that subscriber’s loyalty metric to all your other subscribers. And in the B2C world, this is a straightforward process. Let’s face it an individual only has 24 hours/day of attention that can be devoted to your product. So it’s fair to compare any metric directly between individuals.
And while metrics can be used to compare individuals, how do you determine the comparable level of loyalty for an organization? In the B2B world where we’re dealing with significant variances in sizes, attention capacity between two organizations can be enormously different which makes comparison of engagement trickier. How do you compare the level of engagement for a large global organization with 2,000 users to a medium-sized locally focused organization with 1,000 users? No longer do we have the built-in apples-to-apples comparison found in the B2C world.
In the B2B environment, metrics need to be normalized to account for the differences in subscribers’ sizes and contracts. Incorporating firmographic information (e.g., # of employees, revenues) to compare against actual metrics (e.g., subscriber loyalty), lets us take into account organizational capacity, allowing metrics to be scored and normalized and therefore comparable. This approach lets you determine how much organizational demand you have—essentially, loyalty at the organizational level.
Getting back to our example, if that large, global company with 2,000 users out of 15,000 employees, it has significantly less demand than the medium company with 1,000 users out of 1,500 employees.
By overlaying the actuals against the firmographics for the company, we normalize traditional metrics, making them useful in the B2B arena. This approach let us extend our understanding from “are the individuals within the organization loyal” to “is the organization itself loyal?”
