Off the Meter

When you hear the name Pitney Bowes, as a marketer, your mind might immediately go to the mailbox — postage meters for big and small enterprises, direct mail solutions and the like. But for quite a while now, the company’s offerings have gone beyond meters, letter sorters, mail feeders and shipping scales (although Pitney Bowes still offers those, of course).

And as its customers move more and more online, it is essential for Pitney Bowes to make them aware of solutions that can work in a digital world, like document processing, print stream management and the like. This, says Juanita James, the company’s chief marketing and communications officer, is what the company is focusing its marketing communications strategy on.

“When there is a lot of external change, that’s an exciting time for a company,” James said in an interview at the company’s Stamford, CT, world headquarters, which overlooks Long Island Sound. “Our reputation has been closely aligned with mail and postage meters, so the challenge is to ramp up awareness of our other capabilities.”

After graduating from college, James, a Brooklyn native, worked for Time-Life Books for 20 years. There, she held a number of management roles in the publishing division, including president and CEO of the telemarketing subsidiary. She left Time to work for Bertelsmann’s Doubleday book clubs as senior vice president of operations and joined Pitney Bowes in 1999, first working in human relations and then moving into the chief communications officer position in 2006. She added the chief marketing officer role to her portfolio in 2007.

“It was a great opportunity to align communications across the company,” she notes.

CHANNEL SHIFT

To market itself, Pitney Bowes still uses direct mail, teaming it with targeted print to drive prospects to landing pages on PitneyBowes.com. The company’s small business segment sends out more than 50 million pieces of mail annually as part of a multichannel approach to acquiring new accounts for the home-office/small-office segment. At the corporate level, Pitney Bowes doesn’t do a lot of direct mail.

“Direct mail in particular is still a critical piece,” James says. “But while mail will always be a part of who we are as a company, it is becoming a smaller part of the total portfolio of capabilities.”

Not surprisingly, there has been a moderate decline — single-digit percentages — in Pitney Bowes’s direct mail volume in recent years, as use of online media increased. “It still is a big part of how we market ourselves as a company, but we’re increasingly using other channels for retention,” James notes.

Of course, so is everyone else, which means less need for the traditional meters and mailing services that Pitney Bowes is perhaps best know for. But there is opportunity as the Web widens.

“As more people shop online, that has implications for another segment of mail,” James says. “While some aspects of mail are decreasing, others are increasing. For example, we provide the technology for the shipping solutions for Amazon.com and eBay — so what we’re doing is taking our secure technologies and applying them in different ways.”

Another area of interest for Pitney is cross-border mail solutions. “As the world becomes more global, navigating commerce through different countries and customers becomes a question of logistics,” she adds.

Pitney Bowes targets a number of different vertical markets. The ones with the greatest potential right now include insurance, financial services, government globally (both local and federal) and retail.

Across all sectors in business-to-business, the biggest challenge right now isn’t finding leads, but rather getting customers to loosen the purse strings.

“We need to reinstill confidence in the business market and get companies to invest in themselves and their customers,” James notes. “If everyone is in a hunker-down mode, it’s a challenge to get them to experiment, invest in new solutions and try new processes.”

B-TO-B CHALLENGES

While prospecting is still essential, Pitney Bowes is putting a lot of focus on retaining and growing its existing customer base, 2 million strong globally. Of course, a constant challenge in B-to-B is finding the right contact within an organization — a factor sometimes made even more difficult thanks to the cutbacks of this current economic climate.

If a decision maker or key long-term contact leaves a company, you’re not necessarily starting from the ground up, but there is work to do.

“It’s really more a question of expanding their knowledge — if the relationship was with the director of operations, you need to expand that to the CIO or CFO.”

One challenge is getting the various divisions of each customer to talk to each other internally.

Next Page: Social Strategy

“It takes a village,” says James. “When we’re selling a solution to a large enterprise, we’re speaking to so many different customers within the organization. There are so many decision makers in a large, complex multinational enterprise, and getting them to talk to each other is a challenge. You need to pull together IT and operations and marketing and finance and the decision maker — get them together face to face and help them understand what is best for the entire company, not just their function area.”

Connecting with the right contact within an organization is one task for social media; it can be an essential part of the multichannel strategy of helping identify the correct targets.

“If you send out your print piece to your targeted audience, say CIOs or CTOs or CMOs or mailing professionals or mid-level executives, and you provide enough compelling information to get them to come to your Web site, then they’re in the driver’s seat in terms of what they are looking for and whether you have a solution that appeals to them,” James says. “That’s the beauty of using print and Web together.”

SOCIAL STRATEGY

At present, Pitney Bowes is using social media like Twitter and Facebook to help build awareness of the company’s offerings. As for the ROI of all this community building, that’s still a question mark.

“As a medium, it’s too new for us to have the definitive metrics in place, so at this point what we’re all doing is trying to increase awareness and increase usage within the organization,” James says. “And we’re monitoring the extent to which we’re getting those social networks going, who and why are people talking about us, and how many are tweeting about us.

“Ultimately, we want to see how that translates into engagement with the customer and its ability to take new customers and get them to buy more of our products and solutions,” she continues.

With the world moving a step away from heavy use of traditional direct mail in many quarters, does that mean this is the prime time to reposition Pitney Bowes in the marketplace? No, but that will eventually happen.

“As we refine our strategy of who we are going to be in the next 100 years and where we are going, there will be a clear opportunity to reposition,” she says. “There is an opportunity to reposition the brand now, but we have a lot of experimentation going on, in a number of different sectors. We first want to define which will present the best opportunities for us.”

The best sources of new leads depend entirely on the business unit. Some get more traction from the Web, while others score a good bit of demand generation from trade shows. From a corporate standpoint, Pitney Bowes is working to raise brand awareness with its marketing efforts, as opposed to the individual business units, which are selling specific solutions and services. “We’re creating the umbrella, so they can connect the dots,” says James.

MORE TO SEE

Last year, Pitney Bowes launched a new campaign using mainly targeted print to drive consumers to targeted landing pages. The theme was, “There’s a lot more here than you think.” Ads depicted unexpected things coming out of envelopes — like rockets, a bouquet of flowers, a suspension bridge or a waterfall — and played on the company’s heritage of mail, while at the same time talking about new technology and solutions.

“The primary goal was to get IT people and others to specific landing pages on our Web site, to get them more information about our products,” James says, noting that the campaign generated a significant number of page views and clickthroughs. Print ads were placed in business magazines and timed to hit audiences before key live events, such as Print ’09 in Chicago last September or Mailcom in Atlantic City last April.

Like most corporations, Pitney Bowes has cut down on the number of trade shows it exhibits at annually. It also redesigned its show booth to focus more on the entire breadth of the company rather than just segments of its business. The company is also doing more Webinars and having executives speak at industry events to build its public profile.

To keep the fires burning with its larger customers like banks, large insurers and big utilities — about 10,000 of the company’s 2 million clients are considered large scale — Pitney Bowes relies on relationship managers. The company has a 2,000-person sales force worldwide that does things like invite executives of big accounts to the Shelton, CT, “Innovation Center.” There, the staff can provide intelligence on the needs and challenges of a customer’s particular vertical market.

At the Innovation Center, customers can get their hands on technology not widely available in the marketplace, like a high-speed, large-format, high-resolution color printer integrated with a mailing operation — everything from paper cutting and folding to insertion, sealing and metering. Relationship managers can talk with customers about new ways to design and use marketing documents and test-drive the system.

The typical sales cycle depends on the product or solution. For example, James notes that Pitney Bowes recently spent 18 months helping a corporate customer completely redesign their business processes so that when they relocate to a new office, they’ll take up only a third of the physical space, thanks to so much information being digitized. “That’s a very different sales cycle from just selling a customer a software package or software as a service. A lot of it depends on the complexity of what the customer is dealing with.”

The current economic climate isn’t necessarily making the sales cycle longer, but customers are moving in a different manner, sometimes deciding to lease something they would in the past have purchased in a heartbeat.

“Procurement functions are becoming more powerful and more disciplined in many organizations, so we need to respond in a more timely fashion,” she says.

The piece many B-to-B marketers are missing in their puzzle is managing the customer relationship at every touchpoint. “You have to be as opportunistic as possible and understand that when your customer connects with you in social media, or gets a marketing piece, or receives a bill, this is an opportunity to build the relationship,” James says. “And it doesn’t involve heavy investment in a complex CRM system that many midsize companies really can’t afford.”

For its part, Pitney Bowes has globally unified all experiences it sees as relevant to the customer experience — the Web, social media, in-person sales calls, service calls, e-mail, customer service reps and direct mail — and put them under the purview of one executive charged with making the company easier to do business with and more transparent to the customer.

This, says James, is crucial, because “These touchpoints can also be sources of disintermediation between you and the customer if not handled properly.”

TAKING CONTROL

Marketing leads PB’s charge into social media.

Gather a group of large B-to-B marketers together, and they’ll likely agree that social media is a growing part of their communications strategy. But what they might not agree on is what division of their organization should take ownership of creating that virtual connection.

AT PITNEY BOWES, MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS STEPPED FORWARD, SERVING AS A GUIDE TO HELP THE WHOLE COMPANY USE TOOLS LIKE BLOGS, TWITTER AND FACEBOOK TO CONNECT WITH CUSTOMERS.

Last year, Pitney Bowes’ marketing communications department held a series of monthly events, pulling in sales, marketing and operations employees from around the country to help them understand all the various aspects of the company’s social media strategy. “We wanted to develop an awareness and bring the community up to speed,” says Juanita James, chief marketing and communications officer.

Pitney Bowes regularly updates a number of blogs on the PBConnect.com site. Bloggers — from numerous business units as well as external consulting firms — write about customer service, technology, direct mail innovations and other issues. The blogs link over to the PBconnect Twitter feed, which has about 420 followers. The company, which first started tweeting in the summer of 2008, connects to users via about 20 different corporately sanctioned feeds, including PBCares (customer service), PitneyBowesCanada and PB News. About 700 folks have also fanned Pitney since it joined Facebook about six months ago. PB is also on Flickr with 800 images and 3,000 views, and YouTube with 27 videos and 21,000 views.

But while marketing is taking the lead, the key is to have users throughout the enterprise on the front lines. “People are intrigued by social media, so now we can focus on getting them to use it effectively,” James notes.