One of the first things they teach you in Business School is that it costs five times more to get a new client than it does to keep one. Yet a lot of companies don’t seem to want to learn the lesson. In the past, and especially in industries where monopolies are prevalent (i.e. Cable), there wasn’t much you could do when customer service gave you the cold shoulder. Sure, you could always tell your friends, but that didn’t always go very far. The emergence of Web 2.0 and the empowering of consumers has changed all that.

Now, instead of telling his friends, a disgruntled customer will pick up his camera, make a video, and post it on Youtube. If the video is even remotely entertaining, you can be sure it will get thousands of views. That’s when disgruntled customers become more of a problem. Consumers are even banding together on sites such as Consumerist.com, where you can document your woes and let thousand more read about it. You can even get help on where to call. One customer with a particularly bad customer service experience can affect the image of your company in the eyes of thousands. Pretty scary.

Now you might be thinking that all this only concerns B2C, and that as a B2B marketer, you have nothing to worry about. While it’s true that there’s little chance that someone will make a hit video about their distaste for your B2B software, the point remains: communication is a lot easier than it used to be. Just look at blogs, which are becoming increasingly popular in the B2B world. One bad review, and who knows how many prospects you might lose?

The solution is simply good customer service. Making sure that your current customers are happy is essential if you hope to keep bringing in new ones. Customers may not always be right, but they are always the ones driving your revenue. And remember that customer reviews go both ways: an exceptional experience with your company will probably provide you with some free leads. Good customer service isn’t just about making your customers happy, it’s also about attracting new ones.

One of the most interesting trends in B2B marketing right now is the growth of SaaS, or Software as a service. The example that immediately comes to mind is of course Salesforce.com, which has built a customer base of over 1 million users by offering a CRM that runs inside a browser. Being able to access sales data from any computer with an internet connection (and soon any iPhone) is something of a small revolution.

The viability of SaaS apps for small and mid-sized companies get a boost earlier this week when Salesforce.com and Google announced a deal to allow Google Apps (Google’s set of office applications, also run inside a browser) to run inside salesforce.com, and to integrate the two. At first glance, this seems like a match made in heaven: salesforce.com and Google are both challenging Microsoft, and their alliance is clearly meant to put a dent in the dominance of the Redmond giant. Running Google Apps inside of salesforce.com (alongside other powerful applications such as Prospect Insight) is certainly an interesting proposition for current salesforce.com customers: you can create documents, events and spreadsheets that can be attached to prospects in salesforce.com and are always updated for anyone who looks at them. On top of that, you can chat with colleagues and customers from within the CRM, and all this comes for free. It’s a great way for salesforce.com to extend their value proposition, and it allows Google to access a new set of potential customers.

Of course, the deal isn’t nearly as revolutionary as Google and Salesforce would like you to think. The problem rests mainly with Google and its set of online office applications: while they make sharing files and calendars a breeze (I use them every day and wouldn’t be able to do without them), they are also lacking a lot of the functionality that makes Microsoft Office so dominant among businesses. In fact, I’ve been writing this blog on Google Docs, and I can tell you that Google still has a way to go before it can actually challenge Microsoft, especially for any document that is going to be seen by a consumer. Add to that the fact that many businesses already have invested in Microsoft technologies over the years and are reticent to make the jump to Google Docs, however cheaper it may be.

My final point is that SaaS is much easier to adopt when it comes to newer categories of software, such as marketing automation and web analytics. Many more businesses will be willing to look into SaaS as a viable option if they haven’t already invested time and funds in a traditional solution. While the Google-Salesforce deal will certainly pave the way for future expansion of SaaS, Microsoft will still be around for a long time to come.