This episode features an interview with Erica Chan, Head of Brand and Marketing North America B2B at Alibaba.

Erica Chan joined Alibaba Group in 2018 to lead brand and corporate strategy for Alibaba.com, one of the world’s largest B2B ecommerce marketplaces and a business unit of Alibaba Group. She helped oversee the brand launch in the U.S., when it unveiled its enhanced platform to enable U.S. small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to sell their products to millions of Alibaba.com buyers in the U.S. and around the globe.

On this episode, Erica talks about the importance of customer success, Alibaba’s focus on international sales, and the necessity to globalize, and keep a pulse on local markets.

Tune in to hear Erica discuss:

• You’re only as successful as your customers' success. 
• There are over 30M U.S. businesses, but only around 1% do international sales. Think about how your marketing efforts can increase international sales. 
• If you have a brand or company that you’re trying to globalize, don’t forget about the localization aspect of globalization. Local communities make up the global community.

‍Episode Quotes

“At the end of the day, B2B is a very human business. What we’ve found is that having an on-the-ground customer success team to pick up the phone or meet face-to-face with our customers to help them through this digital journey has been tremendous. For us, this is a gold mine for customer insights.”

“We rely a lot on our ecosystem of partners to help us with content ideas and also content creation...we love creating the content with our customers. We feel very strongly that our customer's success is our success. We're only successful if our customers are successful and we love featuring customer success stories.” 

“We actually have a competition within our office...We want to encourage folks to talk and get in front of as many customers as possible. It's like a competition amongst teams... like a fun way for us to incentivize getting front and center and really listening to our customers.” 

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