FEATURE
CRM's Missing Link: Acquiring the Customer

If you can fully understand your customers and their behaviors, the theory goes, you are more likely to keep them coming back. There is no denying the importance of CRM and the role it plays in customer satisfaction and account growth, although CRM applications have had their share of implementation issues. However, those responsible for business growth may be putting themselves at a disadvantage by not applying this same attention and care to relationships with prospects before they become customers.

The adage about the ease of keeping customers versus acquiring new ones goes only so far when what you want is a bigger share of the market -- which, almost by definition, requires new customer acquisition in tandem with customer retention programs.

This is certainly not news to most sales and marketing departments, yet few sales and marketing heads have access to a comprehensive look at their customer acquisition process, from a prospect's initial interest through a sale or lost opportunity.

The Missing Piece

What's missing is the means to examine and manage marketplace response before a prospect becomes a customer and is input into the CRM system. This process is called customer acquisition management (CAM), a comprehensive approach to relationships with prospects.

Think of CAM as a process that encompasses the entire front end of the lead-to-customer lifecycle. It manages the acquisition of customers, while CRM addresses the ongoing customer experience. As such, CAM complements and enhances CRM . Where CAM and CRM overlap is in sales-force automation (SFA), a process in which hot prospects are typically identified.

Many companies feel pain not in lead generation, but in managing, tracking and even nurturing leads from the beginning to the end of the cycle. This is where CAM can play a role. In today's competitive marketplace, you can build an advantage by gaining knowledge of or intelligence about those leads throughout the cycle. Even understanding why certain prospects do not buy can help reshape your marketing efforts.

Marketing departments most often are cost centers that continually struggle to justify their budgets. With customer acquisition management, marketers can measure cause and effect precisely. This makes justifying budgets easier and provides vital insight into where to spend promotional dollars to get the optimum result.

Accurate Data, Accurate Decisions

Ideally, to acquire customers efficiently, your company should be able to track sales lead resolution, or what happened with each lead, back to each individual marketing event.

When you know exactly which ads or events produce sales and which do not, spending advertising dollars more effectively is easy -- and so is justifying your budget. A better understanding of your ideal prospect will help you define your target market with precision. Meanwhile, accurate marketing knowledge will drive efficiencies in your marketing spending.

For some companies, intelligence gathered from well-managed customer acquisition strategies actually dictates where they spend their promotional dollars.

For example, Watkins Manufacturing, which makes Hot Spring portable spas, markets its products largely via direct-response television, which generates substantial leads for its national network of independent dealers. Watkins uses sophisticated customer acquisition and lead management services to find the right places to advertise.

"We found the advertising we were doing on MSNBC was not yielding results and was not bringing in people who were intending to buy our product," Susan Strible, dealer programs manager at Watkins said. "Conversely, our spots on the National Geographic cable channel were generating significantly more leads and more people who tended to buy our spas."

The result: Dollars being spent on MSNBC were moved to the National Geographic channel.

Watkins uses a hosted customer acquisition management solution supported by professional services, including lead management, fulfillment and inbound-outbound telemarketing services to improve its sales-to-leads ratio. The program has allowed the firm to wring much more value from its marketing budget. An active CAM system has been the key to many of Watkins' marketing successes.

Leads generated by sales and marketing efforts are captured by Watkins' CAM partner and are automatically qualified, ranked and routed to the spa company's dealers across the United States via the Web.

Focusing the Sales Force

Clearly, understanding the value of customer acquisition management and its importance to overall sales and marketing efforts in both consumer and business-to-business environments can accelerate your sales success.

When it's done well, it becomes a process of building profiling information in which leads that are not yet appropriate for salespeople are peeled away. That refining process makes the sales force more productive and more welcomed by prospects.

Moreover, when outsourcing to a full-service hosted CAM solution, you never have to see raw leads come in. They go directly into the process through toll-free numbers, e-mails, Web site hits, direct-response cards -- any medium you use for promotion. But you can view online every sales lead and its status as the service provider qualifies, nurtures, profiles and distributes them. Your own business rules determine how each lead is ranked and distributed.

This solution can be a great benefit to organizations where the salespeople own the leads. With the hosted customer acquisition management approach, leads are first entered into a central database, not simply distributed to regional sales teams. Each lead is refined and clearly categorized before it goes to salespeople .

"I can tell you that the president of our company is personally interested in this program," Strible said. "It gets a lot of attention across the executive team here. The program helps us build brand awareness -- it helps us meet those goals of tracking our advertising efforts and increasing brand awareness among our target consumers," she explained.

CAM Benefits

As another example, Seattle-area technology company Intermec Technologies employs a hosted customer acquisition management solution as a key ingredient in its sales and marketing efforts. Intermec is a seller of global supply chain products and also develops, manufactures and integrates wired and wireless automated data collection, radio frequency identification (RFID), mobile computing systems, bar-code printers and label media. The company uses a hosted CAM program to collect and manage more than 20,000 sales leads generated annually.

"It offers a really great lead-management and response system," Maureen Szlemp, Intermec director of marketing communications, explained. "The service provides a good, robust back-end database [and] a good Web interface for inputting information, for distributing leads, for reporting activity and the maturation of leads," she said.

Szlemp's colleague, Intermec Sales Development Manager Dave Koering, agrees on the advantages of the service. "The ability to track and refine leads from the inception to an actual sale, and to have that kind of feedback for our marketing group, is one of the biggest positives. And having Web-based access to all the leads that are in the database is important to us," he said.

Intermec, which uses lead management, on-demand printing, fulfillment and inbound-outbound telemarketing, has found the hosted CAM model it works with to be excellent at helping it turn leads into sales. Also, the automation firm has found the full-service model more helpful and less expensive than the software system it formerly used, which offered limited access to prospect data. The current system allows 24-hour access to reports and the ability to export data for other multitouch campaigns, so the data can be used over and over again.

In the end, customer acquisition management can deliver a competitive advantage in your customer acquisition process -- and that's an option worth considering.