Leverage Customer Data

How many times have you bought something from a company only to receive a week or so later a promotion on the exact same item you just bought? You aren’t alone. If you are a company that is doing that you are just plain dumb. Sorry to be so blunt but you are. You are not only wasting valuable resources of time and money in misaligned marketing but you are driving your customers away from you. You are telling them “I don’t know you or want to take good care of you.” Now if you took and looked at what they are buying and send out promotions in line with what might complement their latest purchase then you’re on target, and if your business is too big to watch out for this huge mistake there is software available to help you in this.


Yet, here are a few helpful hints to help you leverage that data, employ some analytics and start some insightful marketing that keep you on track.


1. Prioritize data. Data even the basic data is gold when you start to apply it to your marketing, strategies campaigns and tactics. It can provide a big upward movement in the kinds of results you get. Cross platforming it from sales to marketing to IT to customer service thru finance will make sure that you company is all taking the same thing to each customer.


2. Make it accessible. Many companies have customer data that is collected but it is “owned” by the salesman or the marketing department or finance. You need to all be on the same page. This data needs to be accessible to everyone in your company. Therein lies my case for not having sales people on 100% commission.


3. Keep it updated. Keeping data updated is everyone’s responsibility. It is not sales or finance that needs to keep things updated. Everyone needs to be working on the file.


4. Analyze it. After you set up a practice of keeping your customer data updated and clean you need to look at it and analyze it. As much as we might want to be trite and say, statics can lie, data doesn’t. If you don’t look at what you have collected on your customers with the intent to sell them more of what they need (note that I said need) they will buy from somewhere else.


5. Test measure and improve. Using your data is not enough. You need to be testing different offers, different ideas measuring the success against what is or was business as usual. As you get in results or non-results you need to be keeping track of that so you can do better next time.


Larson Notes & Satire: How many times has it happened that you place a call to order something or make a change on one of your accounts, you give the nice lady or gentleman your phone number, your account and all pertinent data only to be transferred over to the person in the company that can solve your problem only to have to give that person the exact same data? That really busts my chops. Like what’s wrong with these guys? At they dumb or something? I just gave “you” that information.


So if you are going to do something, do it. Inaction is worse than anything you can do. These days even a poor marketing attack that is consistent is better than no marketing attack. You sit in the sidelines, that is what you will do. Sit on the sidelines. You want to play with the big kids, step out and make it happen. Beat them at their own game by selling to your customers over and over again and again with things that they need, that you know they need because of what they bought from you in the past. It’s not all that hard if you have your eyes open


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.


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