Big companies might be surprised to find that customers are falling out of love with them. Perhaps, possibly without them realising their lapsed customer list is growing bigger by the day. In your busy business life, full of competing priorities, perhaps you aren’t aware of the timeframe between your last customer contact. The larger your database, the more challenging it is to keep in touch with your customers and to keep your database up to date. Things change and people change. They get promoted, move jobs internally and leave. New buyers come in that may have never heard of your business. They often bring with them suppliers from their old job with whom they’re used to dealing.
Your customer data is probably your most important asset so it’s crucial to keep it fresh.
That’s all the more relevant when you consider the level of change going on daily in most organisations. And, we have to recognise that the day job kicks in. We’re busy people dealing with what’s in front of us. He who shouts loudest also often gets our attention first. Therefore, some sales and customer care calls can fall by the wayside.
The problem is that keeping data up to date is no simple task. As a consequence, customer attrition can slip under the radar. That’s especially the case for those customers that perhaps aren’t found in the A category or those you don’t classify as ‘key accounts’.
But, it can be really powerful if you get it right. Below are a couple of examples using two of our recent clients.
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- A Global Chemical company that made a product acquisition
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Though this significant change in their business, they gained a further 16,000 customers that they needed to contact within a short timeframe with a clearly defined message.
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- A leading UK incentive company
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The Christmas period is absolutely crucial for this organisation in terms of business sales. This is not only for current customers but also for those customers to whom they hadn’t spoken for some time.
In both cases above, the organisations had internal resource but couldn’t mobilise fast enough to take advantage of the opportunities.
GSA helped them by segmenting and profiling their customer list. We:
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- identified those customers that intended to purchase
- identified those that were not going to buy
- built the sales pipeline for those that were considering a purchase at a later date
- cleaned and researched the data to provide them with a more targeted database for future marketing.
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Armed with this type of customer insight, businesses can target their customers more precisely, regularly and at precisely the right time. This can increase revenue and, of course, you’re saving money by not investing in sales and marketing resource to those customers that aren’t interested or who have simply gone away.
For the companies above, the results were as follows:
1. A confirmed order value of over £2m at their most critical time and vital information on lapsed customers compared to the year before.
2. We opened up 2500 new accounts.
Remember, if you have a large customer database and you’re not speaking to your customers regularly, they may well be talking to one of your competitors.
GSA helps businesses, large and small, become more effective in their marketing and business development. We run outbound telemarketing campaigns into the UK, Europe and further afield. Also, with our experience, we provide telemarketing training to help sales teams improve their results. If you’d like to know more, give us a call.
