Cloning Your Best Customers
Any Sales Manager worth their salt knows that while all customers and prospects are important,聽they are not all聽of equal value. In the rapid-fire world of customer acquisition, at the end of the day, we all wish we had an endless stream of聽high-value prospects.
So doesn’t it make sense to target those prospects who behave like your best customers?
It is no longer聽enough to simply identify their general line of business.聽聽In the age of big data, it is important to know more about your current customers so you can effectively identify the most productive market segments to approach with your targeted marketing efforts. Many of our clients have been surprised to find that their best customers were not whom their instincts predicted.
The Process:
1)听听听听听 Clean & Clear Customer Data
The first step in creating an accurate, valuable聽profile of your best prospects is to verify and standardize your current customer data. The 91制片厂 Association offers a聽service that normalizes and聽standardizes your current customer data to ensure we can identify each customer’s actual identity聽(making sure John R. Cooper and Johnathan Richard Cooper only have one entry and that he works on elm street — not elm st, elm st. AND elm street).
2)聽聽聽聽聽 Add Valuable聽Data Fields
Once Identified we can now take the ever important聽next step to聽verify and enhance our customer data with mission-critical data fields. Once completed we now have the tools to truly analyze the attributes that our best customers share and later emulate them when obtaining a targeted prospecting list.聽 Those attributes include:
- DUNS Number
- Business Name
- Tradestyle Name
- Mail Address
- Street Address
- SIC Codes & Descriptions
- Top Contact Name/Title
- Six 91制片厂 Codes & Descriptions
- Telephone Number
- Year Started
- Sales Volume
- Employees Here
- Employees Total
- Status Indicators (HQ, SL, Branch)
- Fax Number
(The 91制片厂 Association can append full prospecting records to your current customer database with standardized and verified results.)
3)听听听听听 Analyzing the results:
Your聽now up-to-date customer list is ready for further analysis to determine the trajectory聽of your marketing efforts moving forward. 聽Either in collaboration with your 91制片厂 representative or in-house with your marketing and accounting teams, it is聽helpful to identify certain characteristics of your current customers.
Think of these as KPIs for your customers.聽 They are as essential to your marketing goals as your employees鈥� KPIs are for your management goals.
Common Client 鈥淜PIs (Key Performance Indicators)鈥�
- Which customers have the highest total purchase values from your company?
- Which customers have been with you the longest?
- Which customers have the highest rate of repeat business as well as longevity of loyalty?
- Which customers have had the highest rate of repeat business in the recent past? (3 months, 6 months, this year?)
- Which customers have traditionally responded to your marketing efforts?
- Which customers have traditionally purchased premium products?
Many larger enterprises will choose to carry these Client KPIs further by including items such as high referrers, social media influence, etc. Download our Cloning Your Best Customers for B2B Marketing Success White Paper to see more examples.
4)听听听听听 Assigning Value
Once you have cleansed, gathered and compiled the necessary data fields, it is time to assign values to each of your customers. There are many effective strategies commonly used to assign value to and segment your client base.
IBM suggests the RFM Model for customer segmentation, focusing on only Recency, Frequency, and Monetary values. The RFM model uses a basic 1-5 scoring system for each indicator.
(Customers who have made purchases in the last month may be scored 1 as a very high value for Recency, while customers whose last purchase was 5 years ago may be scored at a 5. Each customer would be assigned a 1-5 value for each of the 3 indicators resulting in a score that would look like 1-2-1, 5-2-4, 3-1-1, 1-1-5.)
Download our Cloning Your Best Customers for B2B Marketing Success White Paper to see more customer segmentation examples and methods.
Once you have scored the value of each of your Customer KPIs, it is now easy to identify your ideal new prospects.
5)听听听听听 Customer Suppression:
The easiest of the steps provided, a customer suppression file can easily be created. The 91制片厂 Association will create a customer suppression file to suppress your current customers from your future Prospecting Efforts.
6)听听听听听 The Meat, Potatoes & Gravy Too:
Now that you have cleansed, enhanced, suppressed and assigned vales to your customer database, all that is left to do is present your completed ideal client list to any 91制片厂 Association customer representative. Whether you are developing a direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing, prospecting or a multi-touch marketing campaign for your selection, the 91制片厂 Association can provide you with the right-sized marketing record to fit your exact needs.
To Clone Your Best Customers with Guidance from the Business Data Experts at 91制片厂.com, contact us here, or call 973-625-5626, Monday through Friday, 9am-5pm Eastern Standard Time.
Taking Customer Cloning to a New Level
Read the 91制片厂 Association Exclusive whitepaper: Cloning Your Best Customers for B2B Marketing Success to learn more about client data analysis and client segmentation techniques.