"It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned."
– Oscar Wilde

It's been a while since I found myself lost in Excel pivot tables, but it happened before 2023 came to a close.
We were looking at the goals for 2024/25 and the plan to get there. This company has a lot of customers and a long history with them, so I mention modeling being effective for stretching ad dollars, getting quick wins, and increasing ROI. The sales and marketing team already does a nice job marketing to specific roles and jobs-to-be-done, but hasn't done much with modeling, time-frames, invoice counts, or revenue. Specifically, the data-appending coupled with a Recency/Frequency/Monetary (RFM) scoring I recommend.
The reason they haven't done much with it, I find out, is because they don't know what I'm talking about. I describe it and their immediate reaction is along the lines of sounds expensive, sounds old school, and RFM doesn't sound like it applies to long, complex B2B sales cycles, like ours.
Au contraire, mon frère.
The magic of modeling using RFM, similar to customizing messages to roles and jobs-to-be-done, is that prospects act similarly to their peers. A long-time customer with multiple invoices each quarter doesn't act like a newly invoiced, first-time customer. However, they tend to act like other companies with similar demographics. Combining these segments with roles and jobs-to-be-done tightens messaging, reduces ad spend, and generates revenue, faster.
Here's the kicker. It also shows us which companies in the customer file look like our best customers, but aren't acting like them. Easy conversations leading to early wins.
The one who gets it first is the sports fan. "Sounds like 3-pointers and layups." Nice analogy. Our local favorite basketball team is all about analytics and playing the odds over a season. Shooting 40% over 70 possessions is the same as shooting 27% from the 3 point line. Knowing this, take the highest percentage shot (layup) or the 3 pointer. Skip the mid-range two-pointer. Lead generation for a complex, B2B sales cycle over the course of two years is similar. If we only have X number of presentations, focus on getting the most from them.
RFM segmentation will help them get the most from their limited budget, just like focusing on 3 pointers and layups will produce the most points per possession over a season. The layups are the warm current customers that look like, but don't act like, best customers. The three-pointers are the lookalike cold-prospects that haven't done any business with the company yet.
Trust the process, as they say. If you have a lot of customers, put the law of large numbers to work for you.
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