VIDEO: How Clearly Do You Know Your Customer?

ISM, Inc. President Barton Goldenberg explains the importance of having a clear understanding of who your customer is to effective CRM in this clip from CRM evolution 2018.

You can watch Barton Goldenberg's complete two-part Executive Bootcamp, Engaged Customer Strategy: Your Roadmap to Success to 2030 and The Central Role of CRM in an Engaged Customer Service Strategy, in the CRM evolution Conference video portal. Learn more about CRM evolution here. 

Read the complete transcript from this clip:

Barton Goldenberg: Imagine your marketing sales started with a full picture of the individual, what they really want and like. A lot of people look at their customer like this. They're a little bit out of focus. If we had a laser focus on our customer, would we be able to sell marketing service better to them?

Why is it that so few companies have mastered that holistic profile? I don't get it. This is Beneteau, another one of our customers. If you're a sailor or a motor boater, you might know them. They sell to distributors on the one side and they sell directly to consumers on the other side. It's a B2B2C, and they have a similar type of thing.

Again, I kept it generic. It's not important, the actual petals, but it's the same concept: 12-18 months to build the profile. Most companies have 80-90% of the profile information somewhere in the company--notebooks, Excel spreadsheets, Post-its, people leaving the company, knowledge bases, whatever, or can definitely get what they need.

I would just humbly submit that if you don't have the profile, you can't run a data analytics against it. If you can't run the data analytics against it, you'll come out with incomplete segments and/or clusters and/or channels of preference. Then if you go to market to sell a service to customer, you're unlikely to nail it.

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