Sales calls and data mining? What do these two topics have in common? Interesting that you should ask. Any good sales person digs for information about their prospect before making a call, right? You know how it works: you make the call to find the right contact, and you ask probing questions to find out how the prospect business relates to your product or service.
What if you had the inside scoop? What if someone already “qualified” that lead for you and you knew you had the perfect product for their business need? It would make your job so much easier, well wouldn’t it?
Qualifying your prospect is the same as using database mining or other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to better understand your customer. Spending time up front to know your customer, or at least capturing some data related to the customer or their behaviors, will help your business better understand how to align your products and services to their needs.
Let’s look at a real-world example. Say you were trying to sell a pair of shoes to our agency president, Scott Lawrence. On the surface of his agency page, he seems passionate and aggressive in his approach to life, right? So if you were selling him shoes, you might talk about the shoe’s high-quality Italian leather, the functionality of the sole, or the firmness of its last … and you might make the sale.
But what if you knew that he loves Michael Douglas, loves the movie Wall Street and listens to his iPod each day. A little data mining would help you in your sales presentation. With this customer data, you would point out the fact that the shoes in question were similar to the ones worn by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street and that your customer, Scott, could walk around the office quite a few times each day with his iPod, in any weather, without worry. You would definitely sell the shoes.
Customer data drives the sale. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the collection and management of customer data, measurement of customer sales, and using tools to understand consumer buying patterns. With this information, you can better target your marketing efforts and see greater return on those investments in the end. In the next few weeks, we will be discussing various aspects of knowing your customer through a CRM strategy: data collection, database management, profiling, segmentation, and niche marketing. By implementing a customer-centric strategy to your marketing approach, you can target and deliver your message to your best clients and win in the end.
Passionately posting,
Billie Jo
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I think the fine line for marketing companies is to use data mining for good, not evil. On one hand, that sort of information can be used to manipulate a customer, but on the other hand, it can be used to identify more accurately the customer’s wants and needs. It is up to the integrity of the company to decide whether they will do what’s in the best interest of the customer or the agency.