Acquiring and Retaining Customers through Loyalty

In the space of CRM (customer relationship management), acquisition and retention are key. As an executive you should know what percentage of acquired customers have been retained over the past 3, 6, 9, 12, and 24 months. Do you know? How are you ensuring customer loyalty to feed retention? Do you have a formal program in place?

Customer trust continues to erode through rough economic times and behavior grows even more unpredictable. This report from Accenture finds that a key characteristic of a high-performance business is an ability to create loyalty by delivering customized customer experiences consistent with the brand promise.

•    Begin at the Beginning—The factors that create and influence customer loyalty begin to take effect even before a customer becomes a customer. The relationship a customer develops with the brand during the acquisition stage strongly influences customer value and retention.
•  Recognize Every Kind of Loyalty—Loyalty is not necessarily an emotional connection to the brand. True brand evangelists—or even potential evangelists—are at best rare and possibly non-existent. Companies need to recognize, develop and manage more than one kind of customer loyalty: conditional, emotional and passive—using more than one kind of strategy.
•  View the Entire Value Chain—Third-party channels and routes to market also affect customer loyalty—and can destroy unless they are managed effectively. Analysis and decisions concerning such factors as offers, sales incentives, pricing, service delivery—all dimensions of the customer experience—should include all the trading partners who contribute to the customer experience.
• Manage Complexity—Products, service bundles, channels—these and many other factors have grown exponentially more complex in recent years, making customer loyalty more complex to manage as well. Providers must retain the ability to react quickly to changing customer needs and market conditions.
• Know What to Look For—Most companies know a lot about their customers, and comparatively little about the factors influencing acquisition and retention. Achieving high performance in customer retention means aligning activities throughout the relationship lifecycle—including acquisition—and using econometric and return-on-investment analytics to study and maximize conversion rates and other customer behaviors across channels and throughout the lifecycle.
•    Know What to Measure—Companies often measure the wrong things when trying to measure customer profitability and loyalty—loyalty indicators are far more involved than customer satisfaction scores. Establishing and managing cross-functional key performance indicators throughout the customer lifecycle helps prevent the loss of current and potential customer value.

Strategy for High Performance in an International Ecosystem

The Accenture Institute for High Performance published a new paper presenting a playbook of options particularly for emerging market multinationals expanding into the global ecosystem.

When choosing strategies to harness different economic geographies, it is useful to look at how high-performance businesses turn these principles into actions. This report isolates a number of specific imperatives that can help companies make focused choices in how they execute their global strategy.

If you are considering international expansion or have recently started, we strongly recommend this article.

Peter Darling’s Approach to Business Development

Of all the things you can do do elevate your BizDev game, the most valuable is this: follow up. Whenever you make a new contact, or reestablish an old, important one, in many ways the original meeting is less important than how you follow up. 

Immediately after the conversation, fire up whatever contact management system you use and take notes. Do a core dump, and get everything you can recall about the conversation down. Otherwise, you will forget almost all of it very quickly, which drains 80% of the value from the meeting. In particular, get down the personal stuff. Next time you meet him (or her) being able to mention one very small, very personal detail from your previous conversation will have tremendous impact. Also, within 24 hours, follow up with a quick “I really enjoyed it/let’s do it again” email. This helps fix you in their memory, which is equally important.

A week after the conversation, send a second, equally quick “thought you’d be interested” email that refers to something in the original conversation. If you need to do a little research to come up with something, do it. It won’t take more than ten minutes, and if you spent two hours setting up, going to, engaging in and returning from a meeting with someone, it’s a trivial incremental effort. For example, if the person you met with talked about her love for collecting early Barbie dolls, send her an article about the Mattel lawsuit over Bratz dolls. The idea, again, is to reinforce your presence in her memory.

A month after the conversation, email a third time. It can be a “thought you’d be interested” email, or a “why don’t we have lunch again?” email — either is fine. The point, again, is that by following up, you make sure that you’re remembered, which is the entire point.

20 Questions for Government Clients When Collecting Opportunity Information

Olessia Smotrova-Taylor, an expert at acquiring government clients, posted the following on qualification:

When you are meeting with a government representative, your purpose is NOT ” to sell” them – especially during your first visits to this customer. Your purpose is TO LISTEN. Dale Carnegie said that you can get a reputation as an extremely engaging conversationalist by mostly listening – and it holds true in working with the government just as much as it does with other aspects of life.

This not only helps you form a great relationship with the customer but becomes an information gathering technique. You should come to your meeting well-prepared – having researched as much as possible about the customer and the agency’s mission. Be prepared to talk about yourself, but only in the context of the customer. And then, be prepared to ask open-ended questions about the procurement that you are chasing, getting the customer to open up and talk. Early in the procurement cycle it is much easier to get the government to be open with you.

Here are examples of the questions you may want to get answers to about the opportunity:

1. What exactly is the requirement – what is this project all about? What is the scope of the work?

2. What is the acquisition strategy that the customer is intending to use – a regular single award requirements contract via an RFP, is it going to be a task order under an IDIQ or GWAC, can it be via a GSA schedule, and so on?

3. Is the contract or some portion of it going to be a small business set-aside?

4. When would they like the project to begin in an ideal world scenario versus what the reality would be – given all the protocols they have to follow?

5. What are the key project milestones (start, other milestones, end)? How long would the project be in duration? Will there be a base and option years?

6. Where is the customer in the procurement process – what needs to happen in order for the procurement to be issued? What is the approximate schedule for that? What are the issues that are still unresolved?

7. What type of contract is the customer likely going to use:

}  Cost Plus (and all of its varieties – Fixed Fee, Incentive Fee, Award Fee, and so on)

}  Fixed Price

}  Time and Materials

}  Other?

8. What is the ballpark budget for this opportunity? Does this include the government personnel costs, or is this the contract cost? If the government representative is reluctant to answer this question, offer them budget ranges – for example, is it under $50 million, between $50 and $75 million, and so on.

9. Has this budget been approved and funded? If not, what are the milestones for approval and funding? What is the risk that the project will not be funded?

10. Has this work being done already – if so, via what vehicle? By what contractor(s)?

11. What about the way the work is being done right now – could it be changed or done better?

12. Does a customer have a specific vision for solving their problem? Would they like some suggestions and options?

13. What is the customer’s vision as to how this work should be done – a particular technology, approach, platform, or solution?

14. Who else in the customer’s  organization is or will be involved in this procurement – and what will their role be?

15. Where will this work be done – in which location? Would the personnel be required to be on the government site?

16. Are there any facilities requirements?

17. Are there any special personnel requirements?

18. Is there any specific challenge the customer is worried about? What “keeps them up at night?”

19. Would they like help with anything – a description of work requirements, for example, different solutions for the problem, tradeoff analysis, or anything else that would help them write the Statement of Work (SOW) for the RFP?

20. Has anything changed since the last visit or conversation?

It goes without saying that you have to work those questions into the conversation naturally as the opportunities come up – don’t turn this into an interrogation. Some of them apply, and others do not. These are just a few examples of questions to get you started.

Starting is the hardest part. As you get the hang of it, and especially as your relationship with the customer grows, you will come up with more questions to ask that are specific to this opportunity. Be prepared not to get all this information in one visit. You may not get it all from one person either – you may have to meet with several people in the customer’s organization to get full and credible answers.