Southwest Airlines and Grammarly Turn B-to-C Strengths Into B-to-B Success

Southwest Airlines has hitched its modern brand to serving customers. It focuses on its lack of baggage and change fees. It’s held to a somewhat free-range boarding system with no demarcated class structure. In the mid-2000s, it had a reality show on A&E centered on its customer interactions. When winter weather conditions led to a systemwide meltdown that canceled 17,000 flights during the holiday, it was an anomaly severe enough to warrant a Senate hearing and force the airline to lay out a plan for upgrades. It is unquestionably a business-to-consumer enterprise. So what was it doing at a business-to-business conference in February? At the B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, Ariz., Southwest team members spoke about the airline’s b-to-b branch—Southwest Business—whose mission involves bringing Southwest’s consumer-based customer service to business travelers. We are a b-to-b function within a legacy brand. We call ourselves a startup within a business.Alexis Skipper, Southwest Airlines While Southwest has policies and programs in place that translate to both consumers and businesses, the airline and other companies often find that different tools are required to bridge the divide between b-to-c and b-to-b. Increasingly, consumer-focused companies like Southwest, Grammarly and others are blending their winning b-to-c strategies with new tools from customer-relationship management (CRM) software companies like Salesforce to lure business customers. “The fact that you go from an individual buyer to selling to a committee is a big mind shift,” said Neha Shah, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce. “Speak to every buyer, which means even if you're talking to Salesforce, you need to have multiple messages.” Making it your business Though the U.S. Travel Association doesn’t expect business travel to completely rebound from the pandemic until 2025 at the earliest, Southwest has attempted to stay ahead of the recovery. The airline has addressed corporate sales in one form or another for nearly 20 years (with its corporate sales unit starting within the Southwest marketing department), but Southwest Business as it exists today didn’t take shape until just before the pandemic in 2019. As Covid-19’s effects waned, Southwest Business launched the Rapid Rewards Business loyalty program in 2021 and its Business Assist corporate travel booking tools last year. How Park & Battery Made a B-to-B Campaign That Would Make Saul Goodman Proud “We are a b-to-b function within a legacy brand,” said Southwest product business consultant Alexis Skipper during a presentation with Salesforce at B2B Marketing Exchange. “We call ourselves a startup within a business.” Unlike in its leisure sector, where travelers themselves typically book flights through online travel agencies and Southwest.com based on price, business travelers are typically guided by corporate travel policy, the company booking office and their schedule. Southwest Business illustrated its b-to-c to b-to-b learning curve with its referral program, built using Salesforce’s Account Engagement automation platform. While it began by giving travelers the chance to earn 25,000 rewards points by referring their company to Southwest Business, a look at the results generated from that program led to some complex, yet beneficial tweaks. By adding a few layers to the referral process and changing the terms so travelers could earn 125,000 points by referring up to five companies to Southwest Business, the airline signed on more than 550 companies and increased revenue. Salesforce’s Shah noted that, for primarily b-to-c companies, piling up corporate accounts often requires increasing familiarity with a b-to-b anomaly: account-based marketing (ABM). “Because they are very b-to-c, with this b-this-b angle they lean heavily into ABM,” Shah said. “They have these lists, they have a sales team, and they start with one account, then a few and then they have to scale.” Thinking big When Grammarly debuted almost 14 years ago, it was originally intended to help college students improve their English skills. Even as it grew, and had digital ads at the beginning of seemingly every YouTube video, it was viewed primarily as a tool for individual writers to avoid both errors and plagiarism. Again, this sounds like a fairly simple business-to-consumer service. But you don’t go from 1 million daily users in 2015 to 30 million five years later through simplicity. In 2018, Grammarly launched its b-to-b offering, Grammarly Business. Over the last 18 months, its user base has doubled in size, with more than 50,000 teams worldwide using its AI-driven suggestions. How Marketers Can and Should Measure Social Media ROI It didn’t get there alone. As Grammarly saw growth potential in the b-to-b space, it employed Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement tool to identify and target prospects through analytics and focus its marketing on the most relevant accounts. It used Salesforce’s Einstein and B2B Marketing Analytics tools to score accounts based on their likelihood of actually signing up for Grammarly Business. Grammarly’s marketing team looked at each account, its engagement history, company size, industry and other data to determine their needs, then figured out how to approach them with personalized messages at scale. Internally, Grammarly’s marketing team took to heart research the company conducted with Harris Poll that found workers are spending more time communicating, but less effectively. Grammarly uses Slack to communicate with business partners, which Kelli Meador, senior manager of marketing operations at Grammarly, said saves the company significant time vs. email. It has Slack flag its business customers accounts automatically when they become Fortune 2000 companies. “Our team’s priority is to treat each Grammarly customer and employee as a person first and foremost,” Meador said. Pulling it all together Software alone isn’t enough to help a b-to-c company conquer the b-to-b world. Salesforce’s Shah pointed out the ways that her company was able to help Southwest Business, but noted that Southwest Business now has a sales team dedicated solely to b-to-b. The Southwest Business sales team learned to communicate with its product delivery, enablement and marketing teams on promotions, then use software to identify prospects. When working on its Back to Business sweepstakes to get in touch with customers returning to business travel as the pandemic waned, Southwest Business collaborated with Southwest’s sales, product and legal teams on a contest that was both engaging and mindful of customers’ privacy. Southwest Business received more than 2,100 submissions, had more than 500 of those submitters book flights and saw another 110 sign up for their rewards program. A Fresh Look at B-to-B Marketing Through Social-Colored Glasses “We have not only brought this back to business, but we had a healthcare sweepstakes to drill into those different industries in our portfolio and have a fun and engaging way to get direct to the traveler that maybe isn’t thinking about Southwest now that they’re traveling again,” Southwest’s Skipper said. Grammarly, meanwhile, is looking to add texting functions to Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud so it can communicate with both current customers and prospects. Ideally, this would make it easier for Grammarly’s sales team to handle promising leads while still managing customers. Salesforce’s Shah noted that long-tenured b-to-c companies can still have a significant learning curve when it comes to growing their b-2-b business. While companies like Salesforce rely on this and bake that growth into their tiers of b-2-b product offerings, they’re aware of how much work goes into the transition. “It's a different motion in b-to-b than what their b-to-c DNA,” Shah said. “Southwest talks about how they feel like a startup within a larger organization because it's a newer muscle.”