Sales & Marketing Effectiveness for Sustained Growth

Driving Sales & Marketing Effectiveness with Customer and Prospect Proximity Reports

One of the most beneficial pieces of knowledge marketers can have is knowing where your customers and prospects are located in relation to your stores, branches, or distributors. Recognizing where your customers and prospects come from and how far they are willing to travel for your specific product or service adds considerable precision to your targeted marketing efforts.

Proximity knowledge is also the first step toward understanding your trade areas plus driving more business to your physical locations. Learn More

Ordinarily I don’t directly promote InfoGrow’s services on this blog but, in this case, I made an exception. Why? Because I keep seeing marketers in both the B2B and B2C industries save time, save money and win more sales by using our Proximity Reports – Plus tool and felt my readers should know about these benefits. 

Proximity Reports – Plus is a web service that provides quick, accurate, inexpensive, pay-as-you-go reports that append your closest locations, by air miles, to your customer/prospect records.  It can be the closest one location or all of your locations within your specified radius and maps can be added to the reports. 

Various Industry Applications

Commercial Printers / Ad Agencies / Marketing Consultants
Often, these groups are in charge of their clients’ direct mail programs.  Using the Proximity Reports - Plus tool they can match clients’ customer/prospect locations to their clients’ locations.  This information enables them to easily add their clients’ closest addresses to their mailers, which steers more customers and prospects to their clients’ physical sites, increases the marketing campaign ROI, plus boosts their value to their clients.   

Chain Retailers and Franchises  
Businesses such as restaurants, beauty salons, tax services, grocery stores, and many others, use Proximity Reports – Plus to tailor their in-house direct mail content. By understanding customer and prospect proximity, they can include local information such as: closest addresses, hours, phone numbers, coupons, and special promotions or events. Proximity knowledge enables them to improve foot traffic and drive revenue. 

Banks/ Hotel Chains/ Healthcare Providers
Service companies, such as the above and others, that are trying to win new national accounts often need to respond to RFPs (Requests for Proposals) from prospective clients. These RFPs usually include their ability to show that their locations are in a convenient proximity to the prospect’s locations, proving they can effectively meet coverage needs.  Proximity Reports – Plus accelerates the process by delivering immediate, accurate on-line proximity reports into their sales reps’ hands, providing a competitive advantage and more corporate account sales. 

Real-Life Examples

Huddle, Inc. - Huddle is a marketing company that specializes in helping national retailers, through their High School Ticket Program, to connect  with the local high school marketplace.  They currently uses Proximity Reports – Plus to localize the match of these retailers to specific schools. See Press Release  

Grainger, Inc. - Grainger is the leading broad-line supplier of facilities maintenance products serving business and institutions in North America.  A recent promotional mailer that I received from Grainger, included their 2 closest locations to my address.  It localized the marketing campaign for them and provided convenience to me. See the following example.  

Try Proximity Reports – Plus Demo
Think about your own possible applications and benefits.  Then, see how easy it is to use our on-line Proximity Reports – Plus tool to help you develop effective target marketing campaigns, assess new opportunities and increase your marketing ROI. 

Wisdom from Marketers for Marketers

Once again, I must point out that nothing beats getting solid, down-to-earth advice from successful real-life marketers.  Well, except, maybe getting it for free!

Earlier this year, Marketing Sherpa released their 7th annual “Wisdom Report”, so if you haven’t heard about it yet, check it out and download it now. Their Marketing Wisdom for 2009 is packed full of real life stories, lessons learned and tips gathered from 101 marketers for marketers. 

The topics include email, search engine, B2B, lead generation, direct mail, metrics, customer service issues, and much more. 

You definitely don’t want to pass this up.  Plus, you don’t want to pass up logging onto the MarketingSherpa site at least once a week to review their marketing case studies, research, surveys, and access to free reports.  If you’re in the market for some great marketing advice and ideas, this is the place to go. 

Marketers Take Wrong Route to Revenue Opportunities

It appears that lack of existing customer insight and the tools to leverage that insight is creating a revenue roadblock for many marketers. 

Despite the critical need to leverage current customer knowledge, especially during this recessionary period, many marketers are throwing up their own obstacles to reaching solid, ready-and-waiting opportunities. 

Instead of concentrating on and maximizing their existing customer potential, too many marketers are spending their limited resources on acquiring new customers, while allowing their existing customers to fall by the roadside.  What a huge waste. 

According to a recent study titled, “Routes to Revenue”, conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer Council (CMO), and based on a survey of more than 650 senior marketers, an astounding 75.9% of these senior marketers believe they are not realizing the full revenue potential of their current customers.  Only 46.5% of the surveyed marketers feel they have good insights (note, not excellent) into retention rates, customer profitability and lifetime value. 

Additional study findings include:

• 22.3% lack real-time data and analytics from across all customer touch points

• 21% say that selectively gathered information is inaccurate or incomplete

• 15.5% cite problems with data silos and restrictions in availability and use across the organization

Marketers were also asked what strategies they are using to realize greater revenue and profitability from existing customers.  Top responses were:

• 60.1% - becoming more personalized, relevant and precise in customer communication

• 44.5%  - finding new ways to cross-sell or up-sell current accounts

• 41.0% -  addressing under-penetrated markets or new customer segments

• 32.20% - using more efficient channels or alternative media to engage customers

“Many marketers, and in most cases, the larger organizations, don't have the insight into their customer data to be able to determine what the opportunities are The constrained environment we have today will force marketers to do more analysis, get more data, get more insight and intelligence into their customers, and map strategies to up-sell, cross-sell, partner and be more inventive in the ways they engage with existing customers,” noted Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. 

Neale-May said there are three core areas marketers should be focusing on to improve their overall performance: customer insight, customer experience and customer advocacy.

“That is all about retention marketing and more individual retention management,” he said. “Most creative groups tend to see value in external programs, rather than looking at the customers they already have, the cost of acquiring customers, the value of the deal and whether they are targeting customers that are most predisposed toward the company or brand.

“These do not all require outside media or marketing dollars. They require much more drilling and integrating with the customer database and sales organizations.”

So, are you leveraging existing customer insight to maximize your revenue potential?
If not, then why not?

If you want some guidance on these issues, then take a few minutes to review the following. I am sure it will help. Download Sales & Marketing Effectiveness Overview 

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Number One Marketing Tip for Any Economy

Over the past several months, I’m sure you’ve read more than your share of tips and advice on how to market during a recession, depression, tough economy or whatever term best defines our current economic state.  Much of this advice is valuable and can possibly help you hang on and, just maybe, pull yourself up above our current sales and marketing doom and gloom. 

Yet, if you were to ask me - as I asked myself - what is the top marketing tip, the number one piece of marketing advice that I would offer to B2B marketers in 2009, or anytime, it is this:

Know Your Best Customers

Why?  Think about the following: 

• Your best customers are the foundation of your current and future success – your key to success in any economy, good or bad. 

• If you lose just 3 of your best customers, how would that impact your profits; indeed the very life of your company? 

• Your best customers were probably once your best prospects and it is likely much of your marketing strategies and efforts were built around finding and attracting them. 

• Current and past studies show that it costs about five times as much to attract a new customer as it costs to keep an old one. Chances are, most of your old customers include many of your best customers.

• Best customers provide cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.  If you know them, you’re aware (or should be) of their other departments/divisions/units that may need what you have to offer. 

• Without knowing your best customers, you can’t effectively retain them, keep them loyal or turn them into advocates and referrals for your company.

• If you don’t know your best customers, you don’t know your best prospects and, therefore, don’t know how to effectively find and add more best customers. 

•  Best customer knowledge provides the vital focus of your campaigns, messages and sales reps. 

Knowing

Some people ask me, what does “knowing” your best customers really mean? It means finding every piece of vital information about their company that might help you to build, solidify, keep, and leverage your current relationship with them to find more customers like them.

Knowing your best customers is much more than a simple spreadsheet of your key customers’ names, addresses and phone numbers. Everybody has that basic information. It is learning all you can about them and includes details such as: their primary and related products/services; what they buy from you and how often; their annual revenue, employee size, SIC code; their parent company, divisions/units; their market share and current industry challenges; how often you communicate with them and their preferred method; what else they should be buying from you.  The list goes on and on and on.  You can find a more complete list here.

Whether your recession marketing strategies are customer retention, customer acquisition, or a combination and regardless of your various media choices such as; SEO, Direct Mail/Print Marketing, Internet Marketing, Tradeshows, Public Relations, Social Networking, Mass Advertising, or others…without a best customer focus, chances are you’ll be hanging by a thread from your 2009 marketing efforts.  Or just hanging out.  

Best customers are your sales and marketing treasure map to your best prospects and if you read it accurately, you’ll get to the right destination - your next best customers. 

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