The Rise and Rise of CRM in Marketing
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Every company needs to constantly find new customers, that's what we were always told. Build widget, look for people to buy widget, just like the other twenty widget companies, simple. In an instant that numbers game looked just plain stupid, like a cat chasing it's tail. The race for the best customer, that's the new game in town. Marketing now requires new skills, ones that that must be learned from scratch.
Once a marketing report read like this:
We sent out 10,000 identical 'new blue widget' sales letters, Sales got 10 leads.
A CRM marketing report read like this:
We sent our top 1000 customers a unique customised letter offering to improve how we deliver our widgets based on what the individual customer requested. We made life easier for each customer and all 1000 are still good customers, none have moved to our competitors.
The two marketing approaches rely on entirely different processes, one product driven, one customer driven. Both sell widgets, only one thinks about the customer. Building a picture of an individual customer is new to marketing, we have to reset our goals and our behaviour. Mailings and offers to the customer are not driven not by our products but by what we perceive the customer wants.
