Often the buying process is staggered – it’s not a one off process. Marketing is a lot more like dating followed by a long term relationship than it is a one night stand. People may visit your premises or website many times before they become a buyer and those that become long term buyers and are loyal, are often more valuable as well.
It’s therefore important to look at how you begin relationships with prospects and then move prospects through the various stages of a relationship.
The goal of CRM the business books will tell you is customer equity. This is the sum of lifetime value of all customers. In plain English, this means treating your customers like your best friends. Keeping and developing current customers through offering something better should be your main focus. It is even more important than acquiring new customers. If you look after your current customers, they will look after you.
The main customer development stages are as follows –
- First time customer
- Repeat customer
- Client
- Advocate
- Member
- Partner
Or an alternative method –
- Suspects – the people that fit your target description.
- Prospects – the list of people who have responded to an offer for more information.
- Clients – the list of people who have tried your product or service.
- Repeat clients – the list of people who have upgraded or purchased more.
- Champions – the list of people who tell others and sell for you.
When going for new customers, the costs of acquiring any customer must always be weighed against the average life time profits per customer.
Instead of tailoring one offering and hoping to sell it to the target market, attempts can be made to move prospects along a logical path with different offerings. These offerings are tailored to address the various stages of client development. Indeed, when customers are looked at further on an individual basis, for example order frequency, spending habits, the last time or order and so on you can further target your offers and communications to them in a more personalised way.
The greatest opportunity in most businesses comes from selling your existing clients more products and more expensive services and in turn from getting referrals from those clients.
You can think of this as an hour glass – funnelling prospects into a well honed marketing machine and then offer them more and more as they go through it. Here the aim is to develop a very deliberate series of product or service offerings with a specific intent – to move people from suspects to champions. Initially this is done perhaps by offering free information, a free workshop, free teleseminar, a free trial or a low barrier product or service. This initial stage is all about getting permission to market to the person and then over delivering to them. After that hopefully you can move the client to other opportunities or levels of service with offers that are of increasing use to them and thereby increasing cost.
By the time clients know, like and trust you, they will expect to pay a premium for your services and if they are presented correctly will feel privileged to do so.
It’s difficult to know the precise point when people buy – accordingly one of the keys to solving the dilemma is consistent and repeated contact with them, at least once a month if not more. You should keep in contact with prospective customers with new services, positive press, charity news, hints and tips, case studies and testimonials to name but a few.
It takes time to get anything moving, for it to gather momentum, but once you do you can keep it moving with less force – in marketing this force is really exposure. Delivering your core message/value proposition needs to be done from many angles, you simply can’t rely on one form of advertising or communication to get the job done.
Locating customers is only hard if they are scarce. Launch a great product that does the job better than before by a mile and customers will queue up for it as long as you get the message out there to them. Yet, by and large there are more great products than ever before, and a shortage of customers to go round, hence the added focus some firms have taken to developing client relationships.