I was rooting for our hometown Chicago Bears team in the NFC championship game last Sunday night. Guess that didn’t work out so well. We learned the value of backups aka deep bench, but it wasn’t enough to save the game. I watched the game while working on a customer retention project, so I couldn’t help but see parallels between retaining a transactional customer and the wide receiver catching the ball on the deep passes. After a customer places an order, the customer is like the ball out of the QB’s hands as it soars above the field to its intended destination. But as the saying goes, “When you throw a ball, three things can happen and two of them are bad.” Here is where the customer correlation comes in. Just like the ball must come back to earth, the customer must buy again. On the bad side: your competition intercepts (gets the order at the right time) or you did not anticipate and get to the position at the right time or simply fumbled (did not make proactive calls or relevant upsell/cross-sell offers). Why? Other priorities can get in the way or there is poor communication between teams, systems or processes. The result is the ball gets dropped, literally and figuratively. …Read More
Tag Archives: repeat purchases
Great Fruit Salad or just Apples and Oranges? A recipe for managing customers and prospects
Sales organizations – particularly inside sales — choose between reps managing only customers, only prospecting, or having both in their portfolio mix. This happens for a lot of reasons, such as geography, industry and product specialization of the rep or even workload and efficiency considerations. While customers are often measured by trailing twelve month sales, prospects are all about future revenue. So which prospects does a rep focus on, and how can sales reps allocate time that yields the best future gains from both prospects and customers? There are several simple ways you can guide sales reps towards managing their time to call these diverse customers. Rotate based on value: Set up a pattern where the reps are calling out from low to high value, of course where the current low value customers are prioritized through scoring. For every hour, allocate 15 minutes for low value customers and prospects, 15 minutes for high value prospects and 30 minutes for high value customers. Something like this should help them work across the entire portfolio every 60 minutes: Standardize on future value only: Using modeling and predictive methods, create a future value index for both customers and prospects. You do not have to predict an exact number. Even …Read More
“One and Dones” – The mystery of disappearing leads
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