Your best customers are the foundation of your current and future success. Knowing your best customers today can help you find and keep your next best customers tomorrow. This means getting every piece of vital information about them and their company that will help you find and keep more like them.
Customer data and information is more than a simple spreadsheet of names, addresses, and phone numbers. All marketers have this basic data. To outdo your competitors, you need to convert raw data and information into sales-and-marketing intelligence.
Data, Information, and Sales-and-Marketing Intelligence
Data and information needed about your best customers includes:
• Company headquarters and all locations, and the parent company, divisions, and units
• Correct name (names often are entered with different spellings)
• Phone, fax, website, and email
• Primary and related products and services, and primary and secondary SIC or NAICS code(s)
• Industry segment, annual revenue, employee size, years in business, and market share
• Decision makers, media used by the decision makers, and influencers to the decision makers
• Mergers and acquisitions, partners and affiliations, and latest press releases
• Industry trends and challenges
• Your customers' major customers and their market share
• Your customers' major competitors and their market share
Also, what they’ve bought from you, how often, from what lead sources, why they buy from you (price, quality, service, effective communication, etc.), how much of their total revenue last year was influenced by your product or service, your share of their business, how often you communicate with them and their preferred method, what else they should buy from you, and outstanding proposals you have with them.
Then, whether your marketing strategies are customer acquisition and/or customer retention, and regardless of media choices such as direct mail, print marketing, internet marketing, tradeshows, public relations, social networking, mass advertising, or others, with a “best customer” focus, you will be aiming in the right direction for your next best customers.
Where to Find This Data
A company's website has a wealth of information on all the basics like correct company name, parent company, product details, divisions, press releases, and annual reports.
With a search at Google, Hoovers, PRNewswire, Yahoo Finance, and others, you can often find current news on industry challenges, market share statistics, and major competitor information. Also, CRM intelligence vendors, such as (San Francisco, CA), provide relevant prospect and customer information.
Your sales and marketing teams, using a good database, should constantly be gathering, sharing, and leveraging customer information such as products they buy from you, how often they buy, and key contact details.
Benefits of Knowing Your Best Customers to Find More Best Customers
• If you don’t know your best customers, then you don’t know your best prospects and can’t
effectively find and add more best customers.
• Your best customers were probably once your best prospects. It is likely that much of
your marketing strategies and efforts were built around finding and keeping them.
• Research shows that it costs about five times as much to attract a new customer as it
does to keep an old customer. With better knowledge about prospects, you could lower this
cost.
• Best customers provide cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. If you know them, you’re aware
(or should be) of their other departments/divisions/units that may need what you have to offer.
• Best customer knowledge provides the focus for your marketing campaigns and sales reps.
• Without knowing your best customers, you can’t effectively retain them, keep them loyal, or
turn them into advocates and referrals for your company.
CRM Transforms Data and Information into Intelligence
With software such as , you can easily transform data and information into sales-and-marketing intelligence. CRM manages leads and tracks sales for selling more products and services, quickly, easily, and effectively. CRM provides the right information at the right place, and at the right time, for informed business decisions. With this management, your customer data becomes a strategic asset by extracting more value from your customer base, which yields increased revenue and profit.
CRM assures that sales, marketing, and customer service all work together toward a common goal of being on the same page with the customer, raising your company success to a new level. It combines processes, technologies, and people to help you better understand your customers and their needs.
To learn more about turning data into intelligence, and for a longer list of what you should know about your customers, please contact us at 800-897-9807, x224.
by InfoGrow
