The Marketing Mélange

Are Marketing Budget Cuts Here to Stay?

Talking with a number of marketers and business executives over that past several weeks indicates a common theme of continuing marketing budget cuts. Many marketers are now facing a second or third round of budget cuts after widespread marketing budget reductions late 2008 / early 2009. The optimistic outlook for many marketers is to hopefully retain current budget levels into 2010.

Research from various sources substantiates this anecdotal information:

Marketing budgets were cut over 20% on average in 2009 versus pre-recessionary levels in 2007/2008.
The number of companies that cut marketing budgets in 2009 is 25% higher than predicted in January 2009.
In one survey less than 20% of companies are expecting marketing budget increases while over 40% are expecting further reductions in 2010.

In spite of these substantial and what now appear to be sustained marketing budget reductions, companies are still expecting marketers to deliver results and performance at levels similar to those prior to the cuts. Marketers have generally responded positively to this challenge for accomplishing the same or more with less. The following are some of the common approaches to this challenge:

Restrictions and reductions for expenses such as travel, agency fees, contractors and other external costs.
Staff reductions, organizational rationalization and other internal cost reductions.
Eliminating or delaying new projects and/or campaigns. While this is a good short-term deferral tactic, it does raise concern whether further delay of these projects/campaigns will eventually impact business performance and results.
Reducing spend and attention on less effective outbound marketing channels such as print advertising, direct mail, tradeshows, etc.
Increased focus on more effective and less costly inbound marketing channels such as websites, search engines, blogs, social media, videos, etc.
In a fortunate confluence of circumstances and timing, inbound marketing is proving to be the primary means for marketers to produce good results with lower budgets.

Although overall marketing budgets are expected to decrease in 2010, the Forrester US Interactive Marketing Forecast predicts that social media, email, search and mobile marketing spend will grow significantly in 2010 and subsequent years while outbound marketing spend will decrease even further.

Marketers have cut expenses and refocused attention in response to budget cuts and mostly achieved performance goals and expectations during 2009. The question is whether this performance can be sustained in 2010 with flat or further reduced budgets.

What are your marketing plans for 2010? Do you expect your budget to remain flat, increase or decrease? Are you going to shift more budget and attention to inbound marketing channels to meet your goals? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Why On-Premises Business Software Vendors Should Give Their Products Away

Traditional on-premises business software vendors are facing challenges on multiple fronts:

Published financial results for the second calendar quarter of 2009 from 10 of the major vendors reported license revenue declines in the 20-40% range year-over-year.
Buyers continue to show increasing interest and preference for Software as a Service (SaaS) business software. SaaS business software vendors reported an average of over 20% increase in new subscription revenue for the same year-over-year period.
On-premises vendors now derive 50% or more of their revenues from annual maintenance fees, but are facing increasing dissension from customers over increasing costs and perceived lack of value for the annual maintenance fees.

Licenses are the lifeblood of on-premises business software vendors – it’s what drives current revenues from services and long-term revenues from maintenance. These vendors must sell more licenses by acquiring new customers and/or selling more products and/or user seats to existing customers. While most on-premise vendors have announced plans for delivering SaaS solutions and some have already delivered some SaaS applications, their on-premises licensed products are still the core of their businesses and SaaS may not be the preferred delivery for many customers.

Some vendors are responding to the challenge by offering ‘buy one get another free’ type of deals to increase the number of licenses and users for which customers will require implementation services and pay annual maintenance fees. IMO, this is a flawed marketing tactic as discussed in last week’s bog post.

On-premises business software vendors have to get more licenses to feed their continued existence as viable businesses. A review of their business models reveals some interesting points:

Based on results for the 12 months through second calendar quarter of 2009, License revenues now account for approximately 20-25% of total revenues.
These vendors spend approximately 20-22% of total revenues on sales and marketing, of which over 90% is usually targeted at license sales.
Taking cost of goods and other expenses into account, license sales are at best a break-even proposition.
On-premises vendors are known to deeply discount product licenses to get a sale. Discounts of 75% or more off list are more common than most are willing to admit.
These vendors now derive 50% or more of their total revenues from annual maintenance fees with 80% or higher gross margins on this revenue source.
Services account for approximately 25% of revenues with gross margins typically in the 25-30% range.
License sales currently contribute little or nothing to profitability, but are the lifeblood that drives maintenance and services revenues and profitability.

Given all the abovementioned circumstances and other factors, why not give the product licenses away? The end game is to get more customers and users using more products for which they pay implementation services and annual maintenance fees. The business of selling licenses is tough and hardly profitable. Why not change the game and focus on creating value for customers rather than selling them licenses.

A proactive move by on-premises business software vendors to give their product licenses away can produce several positive results:

Bolster current services revenues and longer term maintenance revenues.
Compete more effectively with SaaS vendors. Negate a big selling point of SaaS vendors because there would be no initial license cost for on-premises products.
Change the relationship with customers from selling them stuff to creating value for their businesses.
Get rid of the licensing fee and discounting practices that customers view as a farce.
Realign a leaner sales organization focused on creating lifetime customer value.
Change the way customers view the annual maintenance fee to be more like an annual license fee that includes support, enhancements and maintenance.

I would go as far to argue that if these vendors don’t do this proactively now, they will have to do it reactively later anyway to survive. They can do it on their terms now and make this a win-win situation for them and their customers.

Depending on your role from a vendor or customer perspective, what do you think about this situation and the recommendation? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Buy One Get Another Free – Is this a Good Marketing Tactic for Business Software Vendors?

A major business software vendor recently offered buyers at midsize companies CRM product licenses at no charge when they purchase a particular version of their ERP product. There are qualification requirements to get the free CRM licenses. The catch – customers must pay the regular annual maintenance fee on the no cost CRM licenses.

Other business software vendors have made this type of offer either directly with buy one get another deals or indirectly through product bundling deals. The real objective is to get more of their software and more users in a client site which produces additional implementation services and annual maintenance revenues in exchange for foregoing the initial license fee. I’ll discuss the business perspective of doing this in next week’s post, and focus on the marketing aspects of this tactic in this post.

From a strategic marketing perspective, considering that everything a company does is marketing and impacts marketing, I think there’s more downside than upside to this tactic for the following reasons:

This type of offer smacks of a wheeler-dealer approach to marketing and selling. We’re talking about serious business buyers, and major industrial strength business software from major well-established vendors. Do they really want to project a wheeler-dealer type of image for their company in that market?
There are a number of qualifying requirements for these types of offers and there’s always the back-end implementation and annual maintenance costs. Even though the vendors may be upfront, open and honest about disclosing all these terms and conditions, there’s always the risk of the customer perceiving they were taken in by a bait-and-switch type of tactic.
The vendor is debasing the product they’re giving away by openly declaring that it has no license value. The product they’re giving away will be viewed as adjunct or subordinate to the main product customers have to buy.
Is there any going back? Although it may be a limited time special offer, buyers will remember that they attached zero value to this product, and may never be willing to pay for it again.
How do you explain this to existing customers who paid for the product that is now being given away? If I were a customer who previously bought ERP and CRM, I would be on the phone with my sales rep asking for a refund or credit for the CRM I paid for and others are now getting for free.
What about customers who previously bought the core product (ERP in this example) but didn’t buy CRM, can they now get the CRM at no cost on the same terms? If I were a customer in that situation, I would certainly ask for it if I need a CRM system.

While I can see this type of offer generating some activity and sales, I’m struggling to find anything positive from a strategic marketing and market positioning perspective. I think the product being given away will be forever devalued or debased. Is that a fair trade for the annual maintenance and short-term service revenues in the vendor's business and product plans?

What do you think about this marketing tactic for major business software vendors? Have you tried something like this and if so, how did it work out? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Why are Marketing & Sales Forecasts Usually Wrong?

Because forecasts attempt to predict the future they will always be wrong to some degree. Problems arise with forecasts that are usually far off the mark and the resulting impact on a business.

Not that Marketing and Sales can’t or don’t attempt to produce a good forecast, but mostly because the process many companies use is the reverse of what it should it be to produce a good market-driven forecast.

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” – Wayne Gretzky

The above quote from Wayne Gretzky succinctly describes the fundamental problem with the way many companies do forecasting – it’s primarily derived from what happened last year – what was sold based on where the market was, instead of where the market is going to be and what customers plan to buy.

Take the current state of business software companies as an example of this continuing wrong-headed forecasting by business, sales and marketing executives:

Traditional on-premises business software vendors’ license revenues are down an average of over 30% for the most recent 12 months.
Software as a Service (SaaS) business software vendors’ new subscription revenues are up an average of over 20% for most recent 12 months.

The announcements from on-premises vendors about their results are that the shortfall is due to the economic conditions. But, the SaaS vendors are growing in the same economy and markets. It seems that the on-premises vendors have deeply flawed forecasting and planning processes given the size and claimed unexpectedness of the shortfall.

Now there’s a flurry of announcements from on-premises vendors about plans to bring SaaS solutions to market. But, marketers at these on-premises vendors have seen this trend toward SaaS coming since 2007 or earlier and many urged their companies to make investments and commitments for SaaS solutions some time ago.

So what happened? More of the same. The forecasting process usually starts with C-suite executives adding a percentage growth number to the previous year’s actual sales numbers. Usually with no or minimal regard for market forecasts and changing conditions. The Sales organization in turn is required to commit to make the number. Sales then distributes the number through their hierarchy until everyone owns a piece of the commitment – the individual, team and organizational quotas. After some negotiations, the numbers are locked in and marketing now has to somehow produce leads to support sales quotas produced by a flawed process.

And that’s where things begin to go wrong – right at the start:

C-suite executives want more revenue with minimal incremental investment and pressure Sales to commit to these arbitrary forecasts.
Sales want to do what they’re comfortable with and what worked in the past – sell more of the same stuff in the same manner.
Marketing and Sales work hard to produce leads and sales, but they’re swimming against the market currents.
Marketing knows that markets and buying preferences are changing, but it’s tough to get the right attention until the changes leap out and slap everyone with bad results from doing more of the same old stuff.
R&D has a huge backlog and can’t tackle any new projects for at least 2 or 3 years.

Producing good market-driven forecasts is not rocket science. Manufacturers do it well with robust forecasting, planning and scheduling processes that drive the business from end to end. B2C companies have a much more robust and statistically accurate process that starts with Brand Managers developing market-driven sales forecasts and business plans which become the playbook for all areas of the business.

Seems to me that the fundamental problem is that many B2B companies, especially Information Technology companies are not really market-driven – see the Marketing in a ‘Market-driven’ company article for more information about what it means to be market-driven.

How do you deal with this forecasting issue and do you have any recommendations on what has worked for you? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Time: An Overlooked Difference between Marketing and Sales

Most of us in marketing have experienced this scenario – your company misses the just completed quarter’s sales targets – marketing and sales leaders are hauled into the CEO/COO’s office for a grilling to explore why this happened. Inevitably, Marketing is thrown under the bus for not producing enough leads. But there’s a disconnect that is frequently overlooked or disregarded – what marketing are working on today is not what sales are working on today.

Although the above statement may be intuitively obvious to anyone who stops to think about it, this time difference isn’t sufficiently considered for marketing and sales performance measurement.

Consider a manufacturing supply chain as an analogy. There are planning, scheduling, procurement and delivery activities that happen in the inbound supply chain long before manufacturing can produce a product, and then there’s the outbound supply chain to ship and distribute the product for purchase by the eventual customer. This total lead time from end-to-end is typically 3 to 12 months depending on the industry. Manufacturers use Demand Planning to deal with synchronizing the supply chain lead time with anticipated future demand relative to when the finished goods will be purchased.

Marketing has a life-cycle of processes over an extended time period like a supply chain. Consider this hypothetical example of a typical B2B marketing campaign process over a quarterly time increments:

Q1 – marketing does research, analysis and testing to formulate the campaign value proposition, target market(s), offer, etc.
Q2 – marketing develops the campaign content, materials, enablement resources, etc.
Q3 – marketing begins executing the campaign. First leads start coming in.
Q4 – campaign in full swing – leads are coming in. Sales get qualified leads for action.

Now add the typical B2B sales and/or buying cycle of 3 to 9 months or longer on top of that and we’re in Q6 or Q7 or later when deals are planned to close for leads generated by this campaign. So if Q7 sales didn’t make quota, marketing wasn’t working on the same leads or deals for Q7 as sales was. That doesn’t exonerate marketing from some responsibility for the problem. However, what these quarterly sales review meetings seem to miss, is not to look at what marketing did in the quarter in question (Q7 in this example), but what marketing did in Q1 through Q4 that led to the Q7 outcome.

Some questions executives could ask considering the time differences for a more relevant discussion and productive outcome from the review process:

What was the original analysis for the campaign(s) that produced leads that should have generated sales in the quarter under review?
What was the anticipated customer demand in the plan and how was it determined?
What changed in the meantime? Economic factors, buying cycles, customer budgets, competition, market shifts, etc.
Did the campaign execute as planned and produce the expected results?
Were adjustments made to the campaign as unanticipated external or internal changes occurred?
Are sales selling according the campaign value proposition and reasons customers expressed interest?

That meeting is also a good opportunity to look forward for the next couple of quarters with the same questions to anticipate potential problems and proactively make adjustments. Also review what plans marketing have in the early phases of the campaign process that will drive sales activity 3 to 5 quarters from now.

Is this lead time difference an issue for you? If so, how do you handle it? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Should You Provide Pricing Information on a B2B Website?

Providing specific pricing details is de rigueur for B2C eCommerce websites. Most B2B websites don’t provide details because pricing is usually complex based on many variables, combinations, configurations, and other factors specific to each buyer’s circumstances. Competitive exposure is another claimed reason for not publishing prices, but B2B companies already know competitors’ prices from other sources. Pricing is something that prospective buyers always want to know.

The problem is that website visitors and prospective buyers want to know whether a product/service/solution is within their budget range before they consider further exploration. Many B2B companies provide some guidance by indicating applicability by type of business, industry or company size – e.g. solutions for small business, mid-size companies or large enterprises. That’s a good approach, but website visitors still have no real understanding of the price range. There is anecdotal evidence that website visitors will leave to explore alternatives if they can’t get at least some basic understanding of prices.

The question of whether to provide pricing on B2B websites depends on the specific circumstances of a company/product/service/solution and common practices in the market(s) served. It’s also not a binary question. The question is really whether there are ways that B2B websites could provide some pricing information to satisfy the immediate needs for website visitors so that they continue to consider that company/product/service/solution and possibly initiate some follow-up response.

Many B2B websites want their website visitors to initiate contact to get additional information such as pricing, but the majority of website visitors are reticent to do that because they’re not ready to deal with a salesperson yet, nor do they want their contact information in another marketing database. In most cases, B2B website visitors are not looking for precise prices, just a general indication of price ranges relative to their needs.

What should you do?

Although providing pricing information on a B2B website may not be an absolute necessity, there are good reasons to investigate whether you should do it and in what manner.
If you can provide pricing in a relatively straightforward manner, consider doing it. This is obviously a decision that goes beyond marketing into the entire organization.
Don’t publish a complex pricing formula, matrix or calculator. Providing a complicated pricing algorithm might be worse than not providing any pricing.
If appropriate, provide a simple calculator for estimating general price ranges.
Providing sample prices for typical situations or configurations may be adequate. The key is to provide sufficient samples for website visitors to find one that resembles their requirements and business.
Provide an easy mechanism for users to submit basic parameters to request a price estimate which you can turn-around in 24 hours. But don’t ask for a long list of intrusive contact information details to discourage use of the request service.
Have a sales support hotline link on the website for providing real-time information based on getting the necessary qualification data.

If you do make any changes for providing pricing information on your B2B website, track response rates before and after to determine the impact of pricing availability.

How to do you handle providing pricing on your B2B website? Have you made any changes and seen any beneficial results? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Should you disregard or include ex-customers in your marketing plans?

The previous post ‘How many customers do you have? Really.’ identified 8 distinct groups of customers based their current status. Two of these groups that rarely receive as much attention as they should are:

Customers don’t exist – the customer company doesn’t exist for various reasons.
Customers not using – customers that don’t use your product/service/solution.

Why should you pay attention to, and spend marketing resources on ex-customers? Because, firstly you can learn valuable insights and secondly there is potential revenue from your ex-customers. Most companies tend to disregard ex-customers because they view them as a lost cause and it’s too unpleasant or difficult to communicate or deal with ex-customers. But they’re missing out on a significant opportunity to improve their business by learning from ex-customers. And there is still potential revenue to harvest.

Customers that no longer exist – nothing you can do about customer companies that shut down, go out of business, merge, get acquired or cease to exist for whatever reason. However, there were people inside those companies that used your product, maybe even liked your product. These people have moved on to other companies, they know about your product/service/solution, you probably have their names in your database. Find out where they are now and reconnect. Someone with a positive previous experience with your product/service/solution can be a valuable contact to market and sell into the company where they currently work.

Customers that have stopped using your product/service/solution – this can happen for a variety of reasons including dissatisfaction, new management preferences, a competitive product/service/solution that better meets their needs or many other reasons. Losing customers is painful and costly and has a direct impact on Lifetime Customer Value (LCV). The customers you have lost can provide valuable insights to prevent losing more customers by applying those lessons for improving or correcting whatever caused them to defect. Proactively taking action based on empirical research and analysis from these ex-customers can greatly improve retention and loyalty for current customers.

“The Customers you lose hold the information you need to succeed.” – Frederick F. Reichheld

Just as most companies do a win/loss analysis on current sales deals, you need a continuing Customer Defection Analysis program to gather information from ex-customers for business and marketing plans:

The first step is to categorize the reason for defection – let the information from ex-customers guide you to the right categories rather than preconceived internal opinions.
Identify the underlying causes in the ex-customers’ context, that led to the defection. Look for commonalities and trends to determine appropriate corrective action to avoid or minimize future defections.
Get information about when they stopped using your product, what they’re using now, whether they’ll make the same decision again, etc.
Determine what other useful and relevant information to gather for the Customer Defection Analysis based on your specific business/ product/service/solution circumstances.
Identify possible revenue opportunities with these ex-customers:

Can you provide paid services to help them migrate from your system to their replacement system? I know this sticks in one’s craw, but getting someone from your company into the ex-customer environment to provide services can yield significant insights in addition to the services revenues.
Can you sell them something that is either complementary to their new system or addresses a completely different functional area of the business?
Put them on the contact list for appropriate marketing programs to stay in touch and consider your business/product/service/solution for future needs.

Although gathering information from ex-customers may seem difficult, most people are usually willing to share the reasons for the decisions. Don’t be defensive, argumentative, judgmental or try to rectify the past – just listen and learn.
Being understanding, supportive and helpful during this information gathering process can put your business in a more favorable position for possible business opportunities with ex-customers.

Are you currently disregarding or including ex-customers in your marketing plans? Has this article given you food for thought to reconsider your practices in this area? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Is the RFM customer analysis model relevant for B2B marketing?

Continuing the discussion about customer metrics and analysis from previous posts; this post explores the relevance of the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) customer analysis model for B2B marketers and businesses.

The RFM customer analysis model has been around for over 40 years and is commonly used by Retail, Database Marketing, Direct Marketing, Non-profits and other primarily B2C businesses and marketing organizations. I have personally only encountered minimal use of RFM in B2B marketing but believe there is value in using this model in some aspects of B2B marketing depending on the specific circumstances of a business.

The premise of the RFM model is straightforward:

Recency – when did a customer last buy? Research shows that Customers who purchased recently are more likely to respond to an offer than those who purchased some time ago.
Frequency – how many times has a customer bought? More frequent buyers are more likely to buy again.
Monetary value – what is the value of their lifetime actual spend? Big buyers are more likely to spend more than small buyers.

The RFM analysis ranks each customer for each RFM factor on a 1 to 5 scale (5 is highest). The 3 scores together are the RFM ‘cell’ for each customer ranking their historical propensity to buy with a 555 customer ranking being the best.

The RFM model has limitations and risks such as:

Historical behavior does provide indicators for future behavior, but it’s not truly predictive.
Continually targeting high-scoring customers could annoy or alienate them.
Neglecting lower-scoring customers that should be nurtured.
Just analyzing the numbers without relating the RFM score to specific business, product and marketing events and circumstances.
The 125 cell (5x5x5) RFM model is too granular – rather group scores into clusters or bands to get a better picture of what the data are communicating.

The RFM model could be a valuable marketing analysis and segmentation tool to complement and qualify other analysis and segmentation tools used by B2B marketers:

Relating customer RFM scores to lifetime customer value (LCV) can provide insights for developing and improving revenues from existing customers.
In addition to the RFM score, the trend or migration between cells over time can provide further actionable information for marketing.
The RFM score trend over time for major customers or segments of similar customers can provide insights into changing buying behavior and revenue performance.
Relating RFM scores to results for various campaigns can provide insights into the effectiveness and appeal of particular campaigns for different RFM segments of customers.
Relating RFM scores to products or product categories. For example, if a customer buys something in a product category do they usually buy more in that category or does it lead to cross-sell opportunities in other categories. Or if they buy something of low monetary value does that lead to buying something of higher monetary value or vice versa.

Do you use a RFM analysis in B2B marketing and if so, how has it worked for you? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Aligning marketing investment and campaigns with customer segments

Following on from the previous post ‘How many customers do you have? Really.’ which discussed basic customer count and group segmentation; this post explores some ideas for analyzing the segmentation for more effectively aligning marketing investment and campaigns. This diagram depicts the previously discussed basic customer count segments:

The fundamental customer objectives for any business are straightforward – acquire new customers, retain existing customers and grow revenues from existing customers. The challenge for marketing is how to effectively do this within budget and resource constraints.

Given this simplistic overall view, the next step is to categorize customers by value. One measure of customer value is how much revenue you have generated from a customer versus the total potential revenue for that customer. Let’s call this Realized Value – the percentage of the potential revenue already realized. We can now categorize customers by realized value:

Most Valuable – customers with 75%* or greater Realized Value. These are the customers you most want to retain and keep active.
Most Potential – customers with 25-75%* Realized Value. These are the customers you most want to grow, keep active and increase buying frequency.
Marginal – customers with less than 25%* Realized Value. Although these customers may have lots of Realized Value upside, it’s a more difficult group to develop.
Least Valuable – these are the customers from hell – the one’s that cause more problems, are never satisfied and cost more to manage than the revenue they produce. They could fall anywhere on Realized Value scale.

*suggested percentage – use appropriate measures relative to your business specifics.

These four categories should provide a good indication which marketing approaches would be most appropriate for each within the context of your business and market.

Now overlay these four Realized Value categories with the customer count segmentation discussed in the previous post and you’ll have an interesting matrix of customer insights to make objective marketing decisions:
Customer Segments vs Realized Value matrix

Customer Segments vs Realized Value matrix

For each intersection in the above matrix you would define specific marketing objectives, engagements, campaigns and execution programs. That should provide targeted alignment to most effectively align your marketing investment to produce better results from your existing customer base.

The concept of Realized Value is related to Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) which was previously covered in several posts; How to determine Lifetime Customer Value, Strategic Insights from Calculating Lifetime Customer Value and Impact of Customer Retention on Lifetime Customer Value.

I have more ideas to share on the customer analysis topic in upcoming posts. How does this approach relate to what you’re currently doing? Do you think this approach could improve your marketing results? Do you use a Relative Value type of analysis? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

How many customers do you have? Really.

For many B2B and Information Technology companies the number of customers is a common and often cited measure of success and implied market share. We’ve all heard claims of “we have 50,000 customers” or “we have 300,000 customers” or whatever the number. While this gross number may provide some intuitive measure of market presence and size to the casual outside observer it does raise questions. More astute observers such as Industry Analysts will want further clarification and breakdown of the number. Marketing needs to segment this number to align investment and campaigns with the reality of various segments in the customer base.

Although most B2B companies are generally reticent to disclose these segmentation numbers to outsiders, they are critical internally for targeted and relevant marketing to existing customers. However, many B2B companies struggle to produce accurate and dependable customer segmentation numbers. The data may be in different databases, variable record-keeping over the years, acquisitions, divestitures, product life cycles, time, staff turnover, etc. all contribute to the difficulty for producing more granular customer counts. Here’s a basic segmentation breakout that all B2B marketing groups should know:

Customers who bought – this is the most frequently quoted external number of customers who ever bought a product/service/solution from the company. A mostly irrelevant number as actionable marketing data.
Customers don’t exist – the customer company no longer exists for various reasons. Identify and flag these records accordingly in your database. Never delete any customer records, just use appropriate status flags.
Customers not using – those customers no longer using the product/service/solution bought from the company. These are ex-customers and should be flagged and counted as such.
Customers currently using – those customers actively using the product/service/solution they bought. Although this may seem like an obvious number to know, it requires a continuing customer contact program to keep track of active customers.
Customers in continuity relationship – these are customers that send you money on a regular basis for license/maintenance/service/support/hosting/etc. It should be straightforward to identify this subset from billing records.
Customers who bought recently – there are two subsets to track in this group; those who recently bought for the first time and those who recently bought again. The qualification of ‘recent’ depends on the cost and scope of the product/service/solution – anything from 12-24 months.
Customers who bought multiple times recently – these are customers that have made multiple independent purchases during the ‘recent’ period. Although this group could be a third subset of the previous group of customers who bought recently, the frequency attribute is important and should be of particular interest for marketing.
Customers with unknown status – take all the customers who ever bought and subtract all the other subsets leaving a group of customers with unknown status (the remaining yellow area in the diagram). For companies that are large, or have diverse products lines, or done acquisitions, or been around a long time, this could be a sizable group of customers.

Customer records must contain product/service/solution line item data to provide more relevant analysis. For example, a customer may no longer use one product line but they could have purchased another product line within the past year.

The obvious observation from this relatively straightforward list of customer segments is that we should be marketing to each group differently to be most effective.

I’ll continue discussing some ideas for analyzing and using this information in next week’s post. In the meantime, it would be interesting to hear how you approach this customer count challenge or other comments on this topic.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

The Marketing Mélange blog now available in Chinese

I am pleased to announce that Phiona Li will be translating the posts in this blog for our Chinese readers. Several of the posts have been translated, more will be done over time and new blog posts will be translated as timely and accurately as possible. If you have any questions or comments about the Chinese version or posts on that blog, please post them on the Chinese blog.
Please click on either of the two links below for The Marketing Mélange in Chinese.
Chinese text
e-works.net.com sina.com.cn

Is Marketing becoming a numbers game?

Based on conversations with fellow marketers over the past couple of years, seems to me that our conversations have shifted significantly to discussing marketing data and metrics. Marketing has been under pressure to produce more measurable and visible metrics about their activities and contribution to the business results. Marketers have responded very well to collect and produce more data and metrics about almost every facet of marketing activities. CEOs, Sales, Finance and other areas of a company now have much better insight into what marketing is doing and the results produced. Marketing has more insights into what they’re doing and tracking their activities and results as never before.

This is all good and great progress over the past several years, but it seems to me that many of our conversations and the preponderance of article and blog topics these past couple of years are mainly about marketing data and metrics. This raises two concerns for me about where our focus in marketing is heading;

First concern is that we’re mostly talking about volumetric data and basic metrics such as percentages, ratios or trends derived from the data. We also keep adding more data and metrics because it’s becoming relatively easier and less costly to acquire the data and produce the metrics. While this may be a significant leap forward from not having good data and metrics previously, it’s only the beginning. The part of the conversation that still needs attention is the next step of generating information and intelligence. The data and metrics tell you what happened and while there may be some intuitive feel for whether it was good or bad, it doesn’t tell you why or how it happened, or how to improve the results, or whether to continue a particular marketing campaign, or answer a myriad of possible questions. We need to generate actionable insights and intelligence from the data to provide real guidance for improving marketing’s effectiveness and contribution to the business. The metrics may be interesting, but it’s the analysis, insights and intelligence that will really make a difference.

“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.” – Clifford Stoll

The second concern is that the customer and value proposition appear to be somewhat overlooked in our attention to metrics. Who specifically are the target customers for this campaign – what industry, market segment, psychographic, persona, etc? Is there a clear picture and understanding of the target buyer and their buying cycle? Does the value proposition really resonate with these buyers? Is the price correct for this target audience? There are so many fundamental marketing questions that determine the outcome of a campaign and the eventual metrics. The story is not in the metrics, it’s in the marketing decisions that went into a campaign that caused the metrics. While everyone initially pays attention to the marketing fundamentals that go into developing a campaign, we need to do causal analysis to revisit these decisions based on the metrics produced from executing the campaign. And most importantly, there is no sale without a buyer – don’t lose sight of the customer and their motivation for buying amongst the captivating metrics.

What’s your opinion about Marketing becoming more of a numbers game? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Relationship vs. Transactional Marketing

During heady boom periods companies focus a lot of marketing activity on traditional transactional marketing processes to find and close individual deals or transactions. Demand is good, buyers have budgets, vendors are busy and there are lots of potential deals to pursue. Transactional marketing as the name implies is about each party maximizing the return on individual transactions. It’s about immediate value delivery and short-term revenue generation. For IT companies, transactional marketing typically focuses on acquiring new customers and gaining market share.

But as we all painfully know, economic cycles go up and down with boom periods giving way to slow periods. Transactional marketing doesn’t work well during slow periods because demand decreases significantly, spending is restrained and there are fewer new transactions to be had. Some companies continue pursuing a transactional marketing approach during slow times by using special promotions, discounting, and other tactics to keep new transactions flowing. Besides being ineffective, these short-term tactics create longer-term detrimental consequences.

Relationship marketing on the other hand focuses on long-term customer loyalty, retention and satisfaction to generate a continuing revenue stream from existing customers. The “relationship” is not about some cozy, kumbaya intimate friendship with a customer. Relationship Marketing is about a continuing mutually beneficial business relationship process that encompasses the entire customer life-cycle.

Relationship marketing continues whether or not a customer intends to buy this quarter or whenever. Although relationship marketing should be a cornerstone of B2B marketing strategy, many companies have recently found new religion in relationship marketing during the economic slowdown.

Relationship marketing is ultimately about generating additional revenue from existing customers using appropriate retention and loyalty methods. The key to successful relationship marketing is to tune your retention, loyalty and marketing activities to relevant and prevailing circumstances:

Listening to customers or market segments of customers – they’ll communicate their circumstances, needs and buying intentions.
Customer life cycle – what’s going on in their business, when last did they buy, what did they buy? Either individually for large customers or in groups with similar characteristics.
Customer events – capitalize on major events such as acquisitions, management changes, new product introduction, etc.
Customer demographics – such as larger versus smaller companies, owner operated versus corporate management, etc.
Industry – yours and your customer’s. Each industry has its own economic cycle and specific conditions.
Monitor customer service / support activities for trends in issues and complaints to identify threats and opportunities.
Improve your Net Promoter Score
Even though your focus is on retention and loyalty, always provide meaningful value that customers appreciate during the process.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker

I’ve seen several recent articles positing that the current slower market conditions for IT vendors may continue long after the recession is over due to a fundamental shift in the market, demand and buying motivations. Relationship marketing is the best approach to combat the vagaries of the economy and business cycles over the long term.

The basic premise of relationship marketing is to stay engaged with customers and keep them long enough to buy more stuff from you.

How does your company use relationship marketing? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Why can’t website visitors just view your best content?

Last week’s “Is your website wewe-ing?” blog post discussed part 1 of my observations from browsing through a number of business software vendor websites. This post looks at the second of the inside-out common practices observed.

As I was browsing through these 20 websites looking for information, access to the detailed or interesting content was gated most of the time. Almost every time I wanted to look at product datasheets, demos, whitepapers and other worthwhile content, I had to first disclose my full set of contact information to see the vendor’s marketing material. This is incredulous – these vendors provide mostly marginal, self-centered information on their web pages and make it difficult for their website visitors see the information they came to get in the first place. It’s not the crown jewels or their trade secrets – it’s just marketing materials for goodness sake.

But it gets worse – the links to these materials are somewhat deceptive; usually stating something like “download this whitepaper now”, or “view the datasheet for more details”, or “view the product demo” or something like that. I didn’t see a “registration required” qualification on the originating links. Some websites even had flashy graphics or animations promising something, but leading directly to a registration page to collect your full contact information.

Some vendors take absurdity to new levels with this practice. The worst examples require you to create a full profile with over 25 data fields to become a supposed member of some privileged inner circle group before you see their information. Wow, what a privilege to see their marketing materials. Another absurd example is after I completed the obligatory registration information with my mickey@mouse.com contact information to access something, I had to reenter all the information again 3 minutes later to download something else. And they think someone is going to buy eCommerce solutions from them when their website can’t remember a simple registration from one minute to the next?

What about existing customers for one of these vendors – would they have to register to download something? I didn’t see anything to indicate otherwise. Sure they could call their account manager or Support to send it to them, but that’s just unnecessary and unproductive for multiple people.

This is a dumb practice IMO. Think about the website visitors and why they came to a website. WIIFM (what’s in it for me) – there’s nothing in this practice that’s good for website visitors. Why give them the impression that they're dealing with an impersonal company that makes things difficult for their customers? We all know why marketers do this – to add the contact information to their database so they can email marketing stuff and add to their marketing statistics for management reporting.

There are many good tools available to track downloads and the use of downloaded materials that don’t require registration. Inserting links to videos or other additional materials in the downloaded material can track usage. There are better ways to fulfill marketing statistics and better track material usage without annoying or chasing your website visitors away. There are more welcoming ways to get potential buyers to sign up for permission marketing.

There are various anecdotal reports that up to 95% of website visitors abandon websites or enter bogus information when confronted with a registration form. MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide, indicates that after reading whitepapers, engineers typically visit the vendor’s website (70%), contact the vendor (45%) or pass the white paper to a peer (37%). Seems to me it’s possible to get more downloads and more subsequent qualified traffic by not requiring registration.

Maybe there’s a better way to handle this and rethink this registration practice that website visitors, customers and buyers loathe. What do you think about this?

Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Is your website wewe-ing?

Working on a project this past week that had me browsing through a number of business software vendor websites looking for information; I noticed two common practices that indicate the top 10 business software vendors are still inside-out oriented with their communications. I’ll discuss one of these practices in this post and the other in next week’s post.

As I was reading through a bunch of web pages looking for information, it struck me how often the information presented was from the vendor’s perspective. The websites were full of “we do…”, “we can…”, “we have…”, “we are…”, “our product…”, “our staff…”, “our technology…”, “we provide…”, “Companyname has…”, “Companyname is…”, etc. – you get the picture – it’s all about the vendor. I wasn’t specifically looking at their content writing style, but it was rather noticeable after a few sites and several pages.

Not wanting to be judgmental without supporting evidence, I remembered reading about Roy Williams asking "Are you wewe-ing all over yourself?”. So then I found this WeWe Monitor from FutureNow that analyzes whether a website or other content, speaks about the customer or themselves. Next step was to enter the information for the software vendors’ websites I’d been looking at, to see how they ranked.

The average Self Focus Rate for 10 major business software vendors is approximately 88% - i.e. they speak about themselves 8 times more often than they speak about their customers or buyers on their websites. How do these vendors think that comes across for customers and prospective buyers? It’s all about them, not about their customers or buyers. The best Self Focus Rate in this group was just 82%. One well-known major software vendor scored 96% which means they speak about themselves 22 times more often than they speak about their customers or buyers, and that wasn’t the worst score. So the impression I got while reading through these websites that they were self-centered and inside-out, seems substantiated.

These disappointing results got me wondering who has better ratings in this category. So I ran a list of 10 smaller business software vendors’ websites through the WeWe Monitor. The average Self Focus Rate for these vendors is approximately 78% - a better average score, but a mixed bag. 3 of the 10 vendors had 100% Self Focus Rate (they only speak about themselves), one had an excellent 33% and another had 52%.

"If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think." – David Ogilvy

Although I’m not entirely surprised by these results, it’s disappointing that after all these years, the majority of business software vendors are still talking about themselves rather than relating to their customers and buyers. I wonder how much this exacerbates their current sales, customer retention and revenue problems?

While the authors of the WeWe Monitor state that “a score between 60% – 70% seems to have the most natural tone”, I think that’s way too high. IMO a score of 33% would be a good customer oriented tone – which means speaking about customers and buyers twice as much as yourself.

How do your website and marketing materials score on the WeWe Monitor?

Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Is your company a Branded House or House of Brands?

If you don’t know the answer off the top of your head, that’s a problem. If you’re in a B2B or Information Technology company and gave either one as your answer, that could be a problem too.

Most branding practice and academic study originated in the B2C world and most examples and case studies of brand portfolio strategies are about B2C companies. The academic classifications of the most common branding architectures are:

Branded House – uses one master brand name across all products which are usually assigned descriptive or identity sub-brand names. In this model the products or sub-brands have a tight connection to the provider.
House of Brands – each product line is a stand-alone brand that is specifically positioned in a particular market segment independent of other brands in the company. The brands have no intentional connection to the provider.

Looking at these models from a B2B and Information Technology industry perspective, it’s tough to find examples of companies that exclusively use one or the other. Microsoft is an example of a Branded House with Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, etc. But they also have stand-alone brands such as Xbox, Zune and Bing, although there is a known provider connection. Oracle seems to be a House of Brands example where they have retained independent brand identities such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Oracle, etc. But these brands all have a known connection to Oracle as the provider.

B2B companies are fundamentally different from B2C companies in just about every aspect of their operations, customers and markets. Many technology companies operate in both B2B and B2C worlds. While B2C buyers couldn’t care less that P&G is the company behind Crest, Pringles or Tide, B2B and information technology buyers care a great deal about who is the provider company for a product they buy. This gives rise to a 3rd branding architecture as the prevalent model for B2B and IT companies:

Hybrid or Asymmetrical – uses elements of both the Branded House and House of Brands models in a defined architecture for a company’s specific circumstances.

What B2B and IT companies typically use, and what their customers expect, is a known and trusted umbrella brand. Adobe is a good example of a Hybrid model with stand-alone brands such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Flash, etc. all prefixed with the overarching Adobe brand. The hybrid or asymmetrical architecture doesn’t mean that you haphazardly do whatever you like for branding. It means that you use elements of both in a properly structured, well-defined and internally published brand architecture specific to your company and market situation.

"Brand is the 'f' word of marketing. People swear by it, no one quite understands its significance and everybody would like to think they do it more often than they do" - Mark di Soma, Audacity Group

A major concern with the Branded House and Hybrid umbrella brand architectures is that when something goes wrong in one product line or sub-brand, it could impact other products, sub-brands, markets and customers whether related or not, in the house or umbrella brand. In the Hybrid architecture, introducing a new umbrella brand across previously independent brands originating from organic development or acquisitions, is a huge and long-term undertaking, but it’s what B2B and IT customers and the marketplace want and expect.

Back to the title of this post – it’s a good question, but the underlying more important fundamental questions to take away are:

Do you have a Brand Portfolio Strategy? Or in different terminology, do you have a Brand Architecture?
If so, what is it and does everyone in your company understand and follow it?
If not, when are you going to develop it?

Are you Branding or Positioning?

Two interesting observations I’ve found over the years during discussions with B2B companies about Branding and Positioning:

There always seems to be some confusion about what constitutes Branding versus Positioning
Too many seem to want to start with Branding or do a Branding exercise.

A Brand is a visual, emotional or cultural identity in the minds of your buyers. Branding is the promotion of this identity in the market to place the visual, emotional or cultural association of your brand in your target buyers’ minds. However, Branding actually comes from Positioning, which must be developed before you even consider doing Branding.

According to Al Ries and Jack Trout in their seminal book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, “Positioning starts with a product. A piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution, or even a person. Perhaps yourself. But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind [and context] of the prospect.”

Both deal with placing something in your buyers’ minds. The key distinction is that Branding is an identity whereas Positioning is the promise of the value you create for your customers.

Here’s an often cited example to illustrate the difference – Volvo set out many years ago to build the safest vehicles on the road – that was an intentional position they wanted to claim in the automobile market. Volvo did not set out to brand the name, they focused on delivering on their positioning promise and proved it was real, not just some marketing eyewash. Today when someone mentions “safe vehicle” they think “Volvo”, or vice versa. The positioning, and delivering on the promise of value created the brand – not the other way round. That’s where the confusion arises, people look at companies like Volvo today and see a brand, but don’t realize how the brand identity actually evolved from the original positioning.

Branding takes many years, lots of money and consistent delivery on your positioning. When people think about great brands, it’s mostly consumer products like Coke, Nike, Starbucks, etc. I would argue that very few B2B companies qualify as great brands when you don’t confuse brute-force name recognition with branding.

“Nowadays, branding is often what you do when you cannot differentiate. So much of current marketing communications is shouting but with nothing special to say.” – Steve Johnson, Pragmatic Marketing

Most B2B marketers don’t have the resources, time or wherewithal to do a thorough job of branding. Successful B2B companies have great positioning and focus on delivering the promise of that positioning. Positioning is where you should start and spend your time as a successful B2B marketer. Branding will come from good positioning and delivering on your promise.

Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Why you should know your Net Promoter Score

Continuing the discussion about Customer Loyalty; a common question is how to measure customer loyalty. Measuring customer loyalty should provide:

An objective and consistent measurement
A measurement that is easy to understand and provides a common goal across business areas
A means to interpret results for improving customer loyalty
A means to benchmark your performance with your industry and competitors.

Based on previous experience, the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a good approach for measuring customer loyalty. NPS was originally introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article "The One Number You Need to Grow" and his book “The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth”. It was subsequently developed by Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix who hold the registered trade marks for Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score.

Determining your Net Promoter Score is relatively straightforward:

Ask your customers one question – “How likely is it that you would recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague?”
Customers respond with a 0-10 point rating with 10 being extremely likely to recommend
You then create 3 categories of customer loyalty based on the scores:

Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others
Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic and will consider competitive offerings
Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy and/or feel no loyalty to your company.

The NPS is calculated as the % of Promoters minus the % Detractors.

The logic behind the NPS calculation is that Promoters will keep buying and referring others to fuel your growth while Detractors can damage your reputation and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

A NPS of 50% or higher is considered good. Companies with great customer loyalty have a NPS in the 70-80% range. However, research shows that most companies are floundering along with NPS in the 5-10% range.

When you do the customer survey, don’t just ask the one NPS question. Formulate at least 6 additional supporting questions that will help you analyze where to focus your attention for improving your customer loyalty and NPS. Don’t go overboard and ask too many questions – we all dislike taking surveys with endless questions.

NPS is not perfect and has been subjected to some criticism. However, it is a popular approach that is favored by many CEOs because it provides a straightforward single measure that can be compared with other companies and industry averages. Just as important – it is one metric in which all functional areas of your business can have a stake and influence.

More details on NPS are available on the Net Promoter website.

Do you use NPS? If so, how has it worked for you? Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

How customer loyalty depends on employee satisfaction

We’ve all experienced it – you go to a store to buy something and the service is lousy, you walk out annoyed and make a mental note to never shop there again. Or you go to another store selling the same stuff and the service is excellent, you walk out feeling good and make a mental reminder to come back to this store when you next need whatever they sell. The difference behind these experiences is primarily employee training and attitude. Employees who are poorly trained and/or dissatisfied with how they perceive being treated by their employer and manager will reflect that in how they deal with customers.

How does this apply to B2B marketing and sales? Many B2B companies are focusing on customer retention and loyalty as a means to market and sell additional products/services/solutions to existing customers. A key element of this strategy is to increase customer retention and loyalty. Firstly, we need to recognize these are different attributes:

Customer retention means that a customer continues to actively use your product/service/solution and there is some continuing relationship such as subscribing to support or maintenance services.
Customer loyalty means that a customer desires to continue doing business with you based on their positive experience and satisfaction. They want to buy more from you.

While you obviously want to retain customers, developing customer loyalty is the key to generating significant revenues from existing customers.

However, before you set off on any marketing and sales program based on customer retention or loyalty, be aware that there is a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and customer loyalty. There is a lot of research to support this – just search for ‘customer loyalty and employee satisfaction’ in your favorite Internet search engine. If your employees, in every area of your business and particularly those who interact with customers, are dissatisfied with their situation and/or the conditions at your company overall, your customer loyalty rating will probably be impacted negatively.

To adapt an old adage – “customer loyalty starts at home” – there is no point in launching a customer loyalty program for generating more sales unless employee satisfaction and attitude at your company is generally positive. Unfortunately, during this challenging economic period, companies are doing many things to undermine employee satisfaction and are mistakenly expecting to improve sales via customer loyalty at the same time.

“Bring a good attitude to work and customers will feel it all day long.” – Anonymous

Customers can sense when something is wrong at a company based on the demeanor of the employees. An employee satisfaction program should be an integral precursor to using customer loyalty for marketing and sales programs for best results.

If you have a customer loyalty focus in your organization, check out this blog post by my good friend and former colleague Melissa Paulik about the role: The Trials of the Customer Loyalty Specialist.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Impact of Customer Retention on Lifetime Customer Value

Continuing the series of posts about Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), this post looks at how Customer Retention impacts LCV.

Everyone probably agrees that customer retention is important and we know intuitively that better retention is a good thing. But just having better customer retention isn’t worth much unless you have relevant programs to monetize existing customers. Do you know specifically how a change in customer retention will manifest in financial terms at your company?

That’s where having factual data that measures LCV comes into play. Measuring LCV provides the means to do modeling on possible scenarios and then track performance. Using the same LCV example from the previous posts, this would be the scenario if we increased retention to 95% with a 10% increase in retention costs (changes in red):
Assuming the same sales penetration rate for existing customers, revenues and gross profit would increase by 41% and 34% respectively during years 2-5 (the retention period). The LCV revenue and profit per customer would increase by 9.1% and 9.3% respectively over the full 5 year lifetime period. In this example the 10% increase in retention cost represents 1.05% of total costs. Therefore an investment of 1.05% returns 9.3% additional LCV profit – a good deal by any measure. Would you like to do this for your company?

Unless you have factual LCV baseline data to model possible improvement scenarios, you’re just guessing that the outcome would be favorable. In this example, spending 28% more on customer retention produces a negative return – do you know what your rate of return would be for various spending levels?

“Old age marketers like photo shoots and they believe in their intuition. But new age marketers believe their job is allocating assets in order to achieve desired business results, such as increasing revenue or customer retention.” – Jeff Levitan

As mentioned earlier, we probably all agree that improving customer retention is a good thing, especially in the current recessionary business environment where finding new customers is tough. Retaining more customers should reflect positively on Lifetime Customer Value, but it’s not a straightforward certainty:

What’s the value proposition for customers to stay with you longer than they have been?
How much can you spend to retain more customers?
If you can retain more customers, how are you going to monetize it? There’s no point in just retaining more customers if you don’t have a plan to market and sell something to them.
What other benefits can you reap from retaining more customers? For example, a larger pool of candidates for references and case studies.

Hopefully this series of blog posts has provided some ideas and food for thought to make better decisions and improve business results using Lifetime Customer Value data.

Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com