A Day at Works

As the essence of lead generation is an understanding the right person to be targeted, the tactic is also important – just the same as STP is nothing without differentiation and 4P. The tactical level of lead generation, at least consist of:

First, valid and ‘enough’ database. For contact data, you must have at least 3 deep and 3 wide. This means you must have 3 level contacts and 3 peers for each contact, for instance to reach executive corporate Director, you must familiar by GM and his/ her secretary; while to contact a retail end customer, you need to familiar with the spouse and friend. If those deep and wide are not available, then contacting customer is risking money and time. So how to enrich our database? Buy it, or populate it through social networking and social event; both now even available on-line.

Second you need permission and an offer, generally by mail or e-mail. This permission open-up communication and create awareness and need of targeted customer. Common practice is using combination of media to bring customer deeper into relationship, for instance a mail as i) permission, and ii) information or survey to reveal his/ her need then enclosed with iii) a statement of an offering relevant to the need then a statement that the firm will contact customer a week after to follow-up. Without a permission, for instance the firm contact customer by phone directly, customer usually will feel invaded or/ and unprepared thus will result in negativity. Without a ‘bridge’ to reveal need, any offering will useless. Without offering, a contact will loose its essence, what’s in it for me (customer).

As the first is a fertile soil, the second is food for the seed (fertilizer, water, etc), then the third is irrigation; not irritation. At this level the firm need to contact customer with rich media/ channel to develop a positive experience. The media is considered rich if able to deliver and capture verbal and non-verbal message, for instance face-to-face meeting conducted by Sales person. If the firm needs an indirect media, then a phone call is the most appropriate – once again if direct contact is not available. To develop a positive experience, the firm need to communicate at head and heart level; not only communicate the competitive benefit to solve customer need but also to communicate that the firm understand and a partner for customer. The aim of head communication is positioning, the aim of heart communication is acceptance. Positioning says that our product is different and better than competitors, while acceptance grows from feeling that we are in the same side with customer.

Customer loyalty across industry is declining, driving a new paradigm of managing customer. Instead of pushing loyalty to certain product, you needs to realize that customer’s need is growing thus migration must be managed to the way profitable for the firm. In managing customer migration, you need to understand the indication of migration, and redevelop value.

But before you manage migration, you must sure whether customer migrate or defect. Defection is occurred when customer value (what value customer seek for) is remain the same but competitor offering is better. Migration is occurred when customer value is changes because:
1) customer need is changing due to changes in lifecycle and/ or social status, for instance mini sedan buyer migrate to buy medium sedan
2) customer seek variety due to active competitor, for instance apparel buyer who buy from new designer who do promotion. Based on above reason then we understand indications whether customer will migrate or not.

Value redevelopment can be conducted by many ways, from the most essential to the most superficial: 1) product re-design, 2) enhance delivery channel and 3) developing marketing program –after understanding why customer see existing offering is not relevant anymore, and whether customer will come back.
Product redesign commonly happened when the product status is decreasing, for instance Volvo is considered as vehicle chosen for executives, but as Volvo maintaining its value proposition, corporate executive nowadays changes to be younger, and casual thus making BMW more relevant. To gain back his position, then Volvo design is changing to be more casual and feminism.
Delivery channel enhancement can be conducted by enhancing frontline’s service skills, adding augmented value in delivery such as tracking system. Developing marketing program includes developing loyalty rewards, and ways to enable cross loyalty.

According to a survey of sales managers conducted by CSI Insight, 70% of Sales Leaders are not satisfied with their lead generation process.

Since Sales Dept believes that the best way to get higher sales volume is to have sales team call on as many prospects as possible then Marketing Dept tends to generate as many leads as possible. When the target is quantity then Marketing Dept tend to forget the quality. To do this, Marketing need to:

1. Segment & targeting to natural buyers first, for instance the natural buyer of statistical software is Faculty of Statistics, Underwriter, Claim & Risk Management. The natural buyer of a can of beer is a blue-collar worker – as you see it is depends on the position of the product in the culture and social settings.
2. When there is no natural customer, try deeper segmentation & targeting both using a-priori and post-hoc approach. For instance to sell a SUV Blazer, do preliminary segmentation study to understand who naturally buy this product. See, Blazer generally bough or popular among macho executive who has American education background. Other example is segmenting a ‘common’ product such as a tire, which more difficult to segment using a-priori approach, in this case we can use segmentation based on loyalty, usage or other behavior variables (post-hoc approach). Sometimes segmentation variables is very subtle, just like a case above, so ask your Sales Reps.
3. Remember when doing post-hoc approach, sometimes customers or prospects’ behavior depends on the situation and product offered. For instance for a rally, customer buy special tire, but for off-road hobby he buy mud tire, and for everyday use he buy medium class radial tire. Other example is customer who buys an expensive candle for a special event, but just ordinary candle for everyday usage.
4. Profile each ‘natural’ segment for future improvement. When market is not segmented there is few variables significant as differentiators but after segmentation hopefully many will emerge.
5. Make sure the leads can be served competitively than competitors, in other word we truly have something compelling to the leads.

From customer perspective, quality is the ability of the product to fulfill its promise to solve customer’s problem. From company perspective, high quality reduces (potential) cost. Low quality yield for additional cost, high quality input, process and output do not.
When quality product or when delivery met expectation then customer will be satisfied but satisfied customer does not always come back for repurchase and spreading good word-of-mouth. This reality broke the Service Profit Chain concept.
Satisfied customer actually indifferent in his/her attitude toward the product, thus in this stage customer service initiative generally is fruitless, even increasing customer expectation or hygiene factors. Then company should aware that customer service initiative sometimes is a long and hard decision. In macro level this decision is similar to phenomenon that increasing production capacity or go to capital intensive will eventually produce less profit for the whole industry.
CRM concept as a verbose has many definitions, but simply it is an initiative to identify, keep, and develop profitable and loyal customers. CRM is advancement of CS, it ensure that customer service activities directed to the right customer, that is: who can be loyal to company as well as provide profits in the long-term relationship. CRM then make sure company effort will keep desired customer from churning, and develop this customer in term of involvement, trust and commitment (3 basic elements of attitudinal loyalty) and behavior (transaction: referral and repurchase; form of repurchase: buying the same product, other group of product or cross-selling, and buying higher margin product or up-selling).

Thus when company wants to calculate accountability of CS activities such as B’day greetings, executive lounge or simply extra discount then company should move to CRM.