Your lead generation machine is working tirelessly to bring in new leads and appointments. Marketing keeps hot prospects focused on the message and proposition. Your sales team has done an excellent job of converting them into a first time buyer. And then something not-so-good happens. The shiny new customer does not come back to make a second purchase. Months go by, and they end up in this no man’s land called “one time buyers.” As a lead, they are coveted. As a buyer they are ironically abandoned. Countless artists have sung the “one and done” blues. Stevie Wonder even has a top hit on this, I think. True cost of leads The consequence of underperforming leads is enormous – from metrics such as cost per lead, multi-buyer conversion, average initial sale to cost per buyer. Indications are that a hidden deficiency to turn first-time customers into repeat buyers seriously understates the true cost of customer acquisition. Lead generation should not stop with the initial sale, rather it should cultivate prospects that contribute to maximizing long-term franchise value. This can only happen through continuing repeat purchases and higher level of engagement. It’s a safe bet that you do not make money on …Read More
CRM trends to watch in 2011
Web 2.0 Acceleration: If it wasn’t clear before, we now absolutely live in an instantaneous and interconnected world that our CRM processes must reflect. Growth of open CRM systems, particularly “as a service” platforms will accelerate to leverage social, mobile and global dimensions of essentially the same issue of managing and facilitating customer relationships. Self-serve will gain more prominence as technology makes it easier to facilitate cross-communication among customers. Integration of Data: Salesforce.com’s launch of database.com will trigger a new trend towards taking the PAIN out of everything data-related: creating, consolidating, cleansing, appending and extracting intelligence. The idea is bring all these functions into one place, including applying domain expertise. You could argue that benefits might be limited to a particular platform, but this phenomenon will gain momentum as more CRM systems “open-up” as well. Embedded BI/predictive actions: Insights are good, but actions are better because ultimately they drive revenue, save costs or increase margins. Companies already invested in CRM will seek to get more out of it by increasing high value analytic content and driving consistent actions across and within all channels. With analytic integration further facilitated by tools such as predictive modeling markup language (PMML), the latency from …Read More