Customer-centric lead scoring

We have always seen that companies struggle to manage the leads that they generate. Either they are not followed-up effectively or there is a conflict of what is defined as a hot/warm lead by sales and marketing or there is no defined process of managing unconverted leads to extract more value out of the marketing investments made.

Tim Wilson has an interesting prespective on the same:

Old school lead-generating efforts often fail because Marketing and Sales initiatives are dependent on each other but disconnected. The image often associated with this relationship is a funnel. At the top of the funnel is Marketing, which finds and lures leads that are then pushed down to the lower portion of the funnel, which is Sales.

This funnel image is fundamentally flawed because it suggests a linear process. Rather, to succeed, the process must be ongoing and circular, like cogs that continue to rotate and engage each other. One cog is Marketing (tactics), and this must be in alignment with a Sales cog (engagement), both of which are driven by a third cog: the continuous process of lead marketing optimization.

Complaints from the Sales department often occur because Marketing prematurely hands over leads to Sales, which creates efficiency problems. First, some of the information that needs to be gathered could have been gathered automatically through a Marketing dialogue. Second, the lack of that information results in lead handoffs that have little or no near-term potential. Over time, these inefficiencies cause Sales representatives to lose trust in the value the Marketing department is providing. In the worst case, it results in the salesperson starting to cold call himself, which makes the level of inefficiency even greater. According to Anders Grondstedt:

“Non customer centric thinking organizations are organized to efficiently produce and distribute goods. They relegate customer management and brand building to marketing and communication departments and agencies that sequester themselves in separate offices, isolated both from each other and from the customer, churning out advertising and other communications material to an information overloaded world. They make a virtue of outspending and outshouting the competition. Run more ads. Maximize the numbers of impressions. Get more ‘ink.’ They are frittering away millions of dollars in “marketing.”

 

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Love your data, set it free!

Data services are freeing corporate data from the silos, allowing for its use on demand while providing security to the data’s custodians. The demand for more data more quickly is driving IT departments to rethink their entire systems architectures.

At Cequity, we have been helping clients work within the constraints of multiple -source systems while making data accessible for marketing when they need it. Our philosophy has been to make data more flexible and easy to access so that enterprises can take advantage of huge amounts of data that they accumulate today.

Dana Gardner writes:

In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events, and transactions.

The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity  values rule the future of data as services.The [new] model is of keeping the data where it belongs and yet making it available to the rest of the world.Our data is trapped in these silos, where each department owns the data and there is a manual paper process to request a report.

According to  Brad Svee”..Requesting a customer report takes a long time, and what we have been able to do is try to expose that data through Web services using mashup-type UI (user interface) technology and data services to keep the data in the place that it belongs, without having a flat file flying between FTP servers, as you talked about, and start to show people data that they haven’t seen before in an instant, consumable way.”

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Survey reveals telecom industry missing marketing oppportunities

A recent survey by Valista reveals that mobile industry wants more streamlined campaign on-boarding and management methods. At Cequity, we do encourage telcos to start thinking  CLCM( Customer Lifecycle Campaigns) which includes planned on-boarding of new acquisitions, defending the relationship in the first 90 days, reinforcing the relationship in the next 45 days and win-back programs if there is a churn amongst these customers. It needs to be a systematic and planned process of customer engagement. Take a look at what the survey revealed: 

“It can typically take months to introduce a new mobile campaign across all the carriers,” Heeran said. “This clearly needs to change as many campaigns lose relevancy with each passing month and some campaigns are never considered because of the production time. Mobile service and content providers need to be able to react to the market quickly and provision new mobile campaigns in a more dynamic fashion.”

 

According to the survey, the mobile industry could take better advantage of customer loyalty programs as a way to spur purchases of downloaded content.

 

“Surprisingly, none of the respondents said that they use any form of loyalty scheme as an incentive to increase content purchasing or encourage repeat buyers,” Valista officials say. “Over 70 percent of those surveyed, however, use other promotions methods to entice customers to purchase more content, including discounts, free trials and product bundling.”

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Are banks ready to shift gears to attract and retain Gen X and Gen Y?

According to a survey by Maritz Research, Younger Generation of Customers are Less Loyal to Banks. 

At Cequity, we agree this is a challenge for banks and we do recommend banks must change the way they service this generation. They need a whole host of new services which makes it convenient for the young generation to bank with them. Also, there is a need to understand their financial needs and configure products that can fit into their life. Take a look at what the research revealed:

“For the most part, the current customer experience model at banks caters to the Silent Generation and Boomers, who more frequently bank in-person at branches. But, younger generation customers are much more mobile and rely more heavily on online interactions,” says Thad Peterson, division vice president, sector strategy and solutions for Maritz’ financial services sector.

• 37 percent of Gen Y and 36 percent of Gen X believe they would get better customer service at a different bank, compared with only 24 percent of Boomer and 16 percent of Silent Generation respondents.
• 22 percent of Gen Y and 21 percent of Gen X reported being upset in the past year about high fees, whereas only 14 percent of Boomer and six percent of the Silent Generation respondents reported the same.
• 18 percent of Gen Y and 17 percent of Gen X reported being upset about a lack of ATM locations, compared with only 11 percent of Boomer and three percent of Silent Generation respondents.

Washington Mutual is one institution that successfully caters to the needs of younger customers. WaMu no longer requires a signature to open a checking account. The bank simply uses the first signed check as the authorization signature — incenting new customers to do business with the bank by simplifying the process and eliminating a trip to the bank. It appeals to the Gen X and Y customer desire to just “get it done,”

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