“What do you do to build valuable relationships with your key clients and prospects?”

This is the questions we asked Pierson Broome - Europe's Retail Subject Matter Expert at Hitachi Consulting Corp - at our Rainmaker event in the Summer and he was kind enough to let us video his answer (see below).

Pierson states that you must, of course, integrate your service with the needs of your customer.  You must align with their needs and the needs of their customers.

Building successful deep commercial relationships takes a different type of marketing and sales approach from the start. Pierson here gives a really interesting example of how they do just that at Hitachi Consulting. 

How technology & consulting companies can engage with their customers and build long-term relationships.

'At Hitachi Consulting, we’ve always built relationships with customers in what would be called the traditional manner. That includes things like events, internal sales campaigns and methods that create demand for the products and services Hitachi Consulting sell.

Over time this has been changing, GDPR as well has perhaps limited the ways that we approach people. But we have the need from a marketing perspective to understand the market, identify what they want and engage with our prospects and customers.

If those prospects know us and have been with Hitachi for a long time - our job is slightly easier (if no less important). But if we are looking at new organisations then we need to find different ways of going to market ourselves and making sure that the Hitachi Consulting brand comes up first in their minds.

Whenever we look at engaging the customers, we look at social media channels, we look at marketing and events and some of those more traditional means. These days we use more of the social and we try hard to service those accounts with engaging content.

We don’t want to be seen as just another provider - we want to be seen as an innovative organisation providing real business advantage to our clients.

Part of my role in integrating our business with our client's needs is making sure that we have the right solutions in the first instance. That means understanding the marketplace in detail. The experts we have in different domains, whether that be retail, manufacturing etc. need to be impartial from a commercial sense and positioned as experts in their own right.

Through Expert-to-Expert marketing, we have an opportunity to create some of that provocative content, but also to use that content to engage commercially with our targets and prospects. Where our experts would produce an article relevant to a certain industry we can use that in two specific ways.

1. We comment on relevant happenings the industry, through this we can demonstrate our expertise and show that we are part of the market.
2. We can use that content in a proactive way with commentary that is relevant to the targets of the campaign and the topic we are addressing.

This is going to be more and more important as we move forward. We’re seeing very much a growth in this type of marketing. This new trend of using social and content to demonstrate brand value is a real opportunity moving forward.'