What you can do to help your company succeed in customer marketing, and how to identify the key places to start?

Focus, measurement and insight are three key concepts:

1. In addition to managing products, you must manage customers.  By understanding customer value, you can maximize the current and future value of customers and find new ones that look like your most valuable ones.
2. Customer measurement is the most important measure of your business success- every day.  Just as you get a scorecard every day on your company’s financial performance, you should focus the same or greater energy and resources on the performance of your customer marketing and sales efforts.
3. Listen, watch, analyze and act.  Your customers will tell you what to do by their actions (or inaction).  By generating customer insight, you can create customer loyalty, drive customer satisfaction and design value propositions that preempt your competitive set.

The following are some key questions you can you can use as a gage of your level of your customer focus:

1. Who is responsible owning customers in your company?  Who is responsible for customer insight?  Who is responsible for creating actionable programs based upon that insight? In successful customer marketers, one person owns the customer.
2. Who is accountable for customer profitability?  What is your customer retention rate?  What is your customer loss rate?  What is your cross-sell/up-sell rate?  What is your new customer acquisition rate?  What is your customer loyalty index?  What is your customer satisfaction index?
3. Does your business differentiate interaction with different customers?  Is this differentiated interaction based upon specific customer value or segmentation structure?

If you answer all these questions with a “yes”, great!  You are probably well on the way to maximizing the value of your business with a customer focus.  If not, you have some work to do.

The next discussion will be focused on the resource requirements for success and

how to create immediate benefit for your business.

I welcome your thoughts and comments!