Let’s start by summarising what we’ve established so far in effecting successful relationship marketing to businesses in the context of right person, right proposition, right time.
Firstly, remember there will only be a finite universe of prospects for your products and services. Therefore licensing prospects from a number of sources won’t change this truth. Hence our starting point must be to successfully identify these prospects, which in business-to-business means at a company level as well as at decision maker level.
We have recognised that targeting a large corporate requires a different approach than targeting a small business no matter what you are selling and with larger purchases, more people are likely to be involved in the process of decision making.
Also established is that analysis of your existing customers is the most effective way to do this, firstly creating a single view of customers through data preparation. Analysis identifies the key attributes that are associated with customers, which can then establish the number of non-customer companies that meet the same criteria. These prospects can be licensed on multiple use terms and held within a prospect pool environment ready for your first piece of lead generation activity.
Remember that existing customers represent new business opportunities too particularly where you offer a wide portfolio of products and services. In addition to new revenue, selling your latest products to existing customers is also important from the churn prevention perspective.
We know that propensity to choose one brand over another increases exponentially against the number of products owned. This effectively builds in retention and protects against churn.
Therefore it’s important to have a clear strategy or up-selling/cross selling process in place when new customers come on board. This ensures they quickly move to a place which creates inertia and makes it more difficult for them to want to defect to competitive offers.
How to analyse existing data
So, to the next of our principles ‘the right proposition’ or ‘what to sell them’ and ‘how to’ communicate it effectively.
Again, experience shows that analysis of existing customers’ information can give us most of the answers required; or certainly enough information to provide for the creative and marcoms experts to develop programmes that work.
To begin the process we must develop a customer segmentation and value model. This segmentation establishes value (by various measures not limited to sales revenue) and generates through profiling the segments the key attributes associated with the segments.
Product path
The undertaking of ‘product path’ or ‘anchor analysis’ will also enable us to understand what product path customers take from various points within the product portfolio. In other words, if a customer in a defined segment buys product ‘x’ first, they typically go on to buy products ‘a’ and ‘c’ thereafter and typically within a timescale of ‘z’ months.
For existing customers this methodology gives us knowledge. Firstly of what else they are likely to buy and when, and secondly of which customers are likely to become our most valuable customers over time and importantly, what to invest to retain them.
With our prospects we will know what products are likely to appeal to them first, what they are likely to buy next and when and what to invest to acquire them.
Expert delivery
Through this knowledge and understanding of the needs driving this observed behaviour, we are well armed to develop products and contact strategies that fit these customer and prospect segments.
The ‘how’ question is a little trickier and until recently this was the sole domain of the research community. However, recent exciting developments in B2B data and classification can provide insights into developing far more engaging communication which will centre on understanding the decision-makers personalities, behaviour and values as individuals first.
This puts us right into the heart of the marketing department as our analysts and business consultants assist with the interpretation of this data. Once undertaken the creatives can then develop communications that best engage these values and behaviours.
Next month I will discuss how to engage with the ‘right time’ issue and go a step close to delivering great, customer centric relationship marketing that delivers a consistently better ROI.
