Recently on The Customer Edge, author Peter Rojas asked: “Are Your Sales Teams At Risk of Becoming Irrelevant to Your Customers?” He posits that optimizing talking points and sales collaterals in real time with dynamic adjustments based on buyer triggers enable strategic sales execution. And sales leaders can monitor and learn in real time about sales initiative effectiveness. “Welcome to the era of real time customer value intelligence.”
What exactly is Customer Value Intelligence (CVI)?
CVI leverages big data to develop a deeper understanding of the present and future value of customers. Through this deeper customer understanding, enterprises can then start engaging with customers with more personalized sales and marketing strategies and product offerings to enhance the overall customer experience and strategically increase revenue and margins.
There is an enormous opportunity for companies to capitalize on the Big Data trend via customer-centric Initiatives. This is the lowest hanging Big Data fruit that can have significant impact and achieve immediate returns for those that can exploit it.
For example, selling recommendation engines that came into prominence with B2C (Business to Consumer) companies like Amazon and Netflix are now slowly moving into the B2B (Business to Business) space. Platforms which analyze past purchases of similar customers within a peer group, identify revenue gaps and offer cross and up selling recommendations are extremely powerful. They have strong impact on increasing sales conversation rates and deal sizes by allowing Account Executives to position products that the customer is most likely to buy.
Identification of specific target groups is another area where big data can play have a significant role. Let’s say a Consumer Product company is planning a promotion campaign to increase sales for one of its products. The company has identified a set of customer attributes (age, gender, geography, past purchases, purchase power,…etc) that are of specific interest and wants to focus its promotion campaign on this customer segment. The company also wants to ensure that a specific number of promotions are sent out but unsure how its list of customer defined attributes impact the size of this target customer list. Having a visual breakdown of customers - based on the defined attributes and impact of the size of the target segment allows companies to identify target segments that satisfies its requirements and create a target group that can be pushed out directly into CRM. All this can be done in real time and on very large data sets.
Real-time customer insight and personalized selling recommendations directed to field sales on tablet devices is a key benefit for sales and marketing team - because Marketing can now Stratify and Segment to build a target customer group and then push that target group directly to their field colleagues through iPad devices. Field executives can then do further segmentation on their iPads and leverage the IOS’s Geospatial capabilities to locate customers on a map and prioritize their sales visits.
Companies are becoming strategically closer to their customers through deeper understanding of customer value and the ability to create targeted and personalized sales and marketing strategies for different customer segments. Stay tuned for more on the Customer Edge!
