Unlocking the Hidden Value in Your Customer Base

Unlocking the Hidden Value in Your Customer Base

“There’s gold in them thar hills!”

When talking to business owners and sales/marketing professionals, the questioning focuses on 3 broad areas:We start with attracting new business, how does it happen and are you leveraging your website for new business? Then we move on to business from current customers. Where does it come from? How much is there? Can we find more?

That’s what I ‘m going to focus on today. I have outlined my process for using your website to attract more business in the paper “Why Your Website Isn’t Generating New Business” (available for download here). I wrote another one for your current customer database. It’s titled “Unlock the Hidden Value in Your Customer Database”.

You can get the report via this page: U.T.H.V.I.Y.C.D (wouldn’t it be cool if it spelled something?)

Two points don’t make a trend, but you’ll see a theme developing in these topics. Do it on purpose.

Most businesses have a complex series of events happening at any time and it’s hard to focus on any one thing for too long. I get it. That said, when you use a set of guiding principles and apply them somewhat consistently over time, you’ll get results. You’ll be developing your business on purpose.

The caveat to this paper is . . . you need customers in order to market to your existing customer base. Seems intuitive, but these techniques are best applied to a sample that’s large enough to show you some broad trends. How large? The first database that I was in charge of had 30,000 past customers in it and over 100,000 transactions to work with. The smallest database that has produced results from this process was just over 800 customers but spanned 20 years and tens of thousands of transactions.

What do you do if you have a tiny database to work with? Read the report, absorb the big concepts and go from there. You’ll just need to spend more time talking to customers than analyzing data. That’s more fun anyways.

Good stuff.

(if you’re looking for the 3rd area, it’s in customer service. A mix of touchy-feely and data to drive decisions. That report will come next.)