I was reading a blog recently called Channels com but never seem to go by Mitch Lieberman.  I’m not sure if I took the same message as the writer meant me to take, but if you are like me, it’s frustrating as a Seattle IT consultant to have business experts just drop everything in my lap.  The “Everything” I am talking about business decisions.  Because a technical system is involved, managers assume that all decisions should be made by technical people.  How do you support a department, such as a Marketing department that is still trying to follow the same marketing tactics of a business selling product 100 years ago?

In my research I found it interesting that traditional marketing principles going back 100 years.  Marketers were trying to figure out how to market lots and lots of beer.  The problem was, that without a national presence selling a locally brewed beer was difficult.  In learning how to distribute the message, to the millions and millions of potential customers around the country Budweiser was able to become one of the first national marketers of a local product. Their strategy was to send out the message to millions of people in any way possible.  The system required sharing that marketing message with potential customers, but with an even larger majority of people who were uninterested in the product.  The result of course was very successful and most Americans drink American loggers.

The problem is that when things change, nobody wants to try anything new.  With information technology it’s possible to change the whole way we look at marketing.  Even 100 years ago, the 80/20 rule was known and an interesting idea.  Yet nobody knew what to do with it.  Nor did anyone have the manpower to make it cost effective.  Look at any 100 year old company and there is no way to identify who are the top 20% of customers that buy 80% of any organizations products or services.  We have the technology.  Yet companies like Campbell’s and Budweiser distribute their message to everyone within earshot.  The message is so dominant that it is impossible for smaller companies with other options to get their message out.  It is ironic to me that in the information age, it seems that this blanket method of marketing seems to be the only way anyone seems to know how to market. 

A lot has happened in the last 100 years, so why do we still have marketers that think like tactical sales people ignoring the top 20% of their customer base.  A company like Campbell’s could identify every customer who loved their soups.  In the process Campbell’s Soups could market coupons, advertisements, samples and other materials to their biggest evangelists.  These evangelists (the top 1% of buyers) would naturally sell products out of a strong almost compulsive product loyalty.  Yet instead they prefer to ignore the new ways of marketing and stick with the old.  I can’t help but wonder if sticking with the old isn’t similar to sticking with horse drawn carriages when the automobile came out.

Mitch Lieberman is right in my opinion when he writes in his blog that Marketing and customer service need to be integrated.  I think that it goes back to the sales culture.  It’s much more glamorous to be hunters looking for new customers and ignore the farmers who build the long term relationships with our present customers.  Traditionally hunters are the top dogs in the sales groups.  Marketers seem to be ex-sales people who couldn’t hack it in the sales world.  So it makes sense that Marketers would build strategies around strong “Hunting” sales forces. 

I think though that putting tactical sales people into a strategic marketing role is a mistake.  When I studied marketing in college I was impressed by the end to end customer relationship planning described in my marketing classes.  We know that economically it’s much less expensive to develop relationships with our present customers, and then sell more stuff to present customers through a customer centric approach to marketing.  Now a hundred years ago it’s possible to automatically manage 1000’s of marketing campaigns that are customized to individual customers.  In doing so, we build a customer loyalty that brings customers back even if our prices are higher.

Instead we see marketing departments focused on contact management tactical sales approaches, rather than strategic customer centric marketing roles.  In marketing models, we can show that if you spend a dollar on finding new customers you are doing well to break even.  Whereas when farming present customers each marketing dollar spent on the top 20% of clients comes back as $7 for the company.  Marketers that focus primarily on finding customers miss out on $6 dollars of company income by spending that money on non-customers. 

As a business consultant specializing in business technology I am struck by the difficulty.  When a marketer drops the decision in my lap, I need to make a decision.  Should I build a customer centric marketing program with CRM, Cloud and SEO and online marketing strategies?  Or do I build a technical version of something they were doing 100 years ago?  Of course building a technical platform your marketing director doesn’t have a vision for, becomes the conflict.  So do I allow the marketing director to hold the direction of the company hostage to a 100 year old legacy strategy… or do I take the company hostage and drag the company into the next century.  It’s a dilemma every modern network architect runs into eventually.

Working as a Seattle business consultant specializing in technology I tend to be on the lookout new solutions for my clients.  I came across an interesting solution for among other things, Incident and problem managment.  Kana is an interesting if you are a Modern Network Architect.  Kana has a solution for solving one of the difficult weaknesses with Incident management in any large organization.  How to you keep your Incident management and Problem management technicians from re-troubleshooting known issues. 

It’s called knowledge management, but I’ve worked on projects where teams are just not good at it.  So problem management teams in large enterprises can spend 50% or more of their time performing root cause analysis on the same issues two or three hundred times.  Why does it happen?  There are a number of reasons.

Reason 1:  Once the root cause is understood by the Problem management team, there is no shared database with the incident team to document the unknown problem.

Reason 2:  QA problems in ticket creation.  Because every technician fills in tickets information using their own vocabulary, every ticket describes the problem differently.  When searching the ticket database for similarities in symptoms, many symptoms are missed because they are described with different vocabularies.

Reason 3:  If there is a separate database where Knowledge Base (KB) articles describe similar problems, the KB articles are not integrated with the ticketing system.  Instead of symptoms prompting KB article, the technician has to manually search a second database for solutions.

Kana provides a solution that solves a much broader set of problems, but in the process solves this problem as well.  As soon as I began reading about integration of the various solution possibilities within the technology teams I was very interested to learn more.  In addition the entire system can be integrated with other business teams like management, customer service, marketing and account management.  Marketing and customer service can provide more support for the technical teams in troubleshooting problems.  Personally I find that the more time “People Professionals” spend in front of customers vs. “Technology Professionals” spend in front of customers, benefits the company and even the technology department.

As a Seattle IT Consultant, specializing in cloud services I’m delighted and impressed whenever a system is created that keeps the technicians out of the strategic business decision business and keeps them thinking about fixing pure technology.

In a previous article I discussed the importance of customer satisfaction in the design of modern network architecture.  In that article a discussion around the need for a centralized database that tracks the customer experience.  The Information Technology (IT) department often gets lost in the technology.  It takes a special understanding of the organization to create an information management system that can be utilized to build customer satisfaction.  Modern network architecture needs this understanding to smoothly integrate with the way the organization is already doing business.  

When a sales person calls meets a new person this becomes a contact and a possible lead.  An estimate is made and a value is placed on the lead.  This value relates to how closely the lead matches the best customers within the organization.  Based on the estimate, the lead is qualified by the sales person.  Once it’s determined that a contact is a qualified lead, the sales person follows a series of documented and undocumented steps to walk that person through the sales process.  Finally a sale is made.  Then the new customer is handed over to customer management.  Working with Customer management a formal or informal process of hand-off from sales is made.  This is often the first place new customers begin falling through the cracks. 

When a customer has finally received their first order the company has a lot of information on the new customer.  As a Seattle IT Consulting Company I will ask my client, 

“How many times have you gathered the customer’s information?“ 

Usually the information was first gathered by the sales person.  Then the information is gathered again by billing.  Then once again the information is gathered by Operations.  Then once again the same exact information is gathered by shipping and logistics.  It doesn’t stop there as customer service and every department in the organization also asks for the same information over and over again.  One non-profit client I worked with had 15 employees and 18 separate databases with customer information that they were maintaining.  The customer information across these databases was not unique and 80% of the information in each database was duplicated information.  Imagine the frustration of your customers as they call in and are redirected from department to department giving the same information over and over again.  Also try to imagine how much effort is wasted by the organization trying to maintain the integrity of so many databases.  

The first step for my clients is a recommendation to consolidate the common information into one database of customer information.  Then give ownership to the integrity of this database to the customer management group within the organization.  Once this is done we can begin to understand our customer.  

The first step then is consolidating the information within the organization.   

This gives us a lot of benefits.  The most important is that we can track the customer through the customer life cycle process from pre-sales through sales.  We can also use this information to understand why the customer purchased and understand why they would purchase again. 

Marketing gives us the Secure Customer index that we can rate customers in our database.  Mike Pritchard is the owner of a market research company 5 Circles Research and explains in his article, Profiting from customer satisfaction and loyalty research some of the variables that make up the Secure Customer Index. Customers are ranked as, 

• Secure
• Satisfied
• Indifferent
• Vulnerable 

Most organizations don’t know what customers are Secure vs. Vulnerable.  100 years ago, there wasn’t much that could be done about this problem.  Strategies ignored this issue and focused on blanketing the highest number of potential leads.  Because of this companies spent 80% of their marketing on indifferent and vulnerable customers.  Yet we know today that as much as 80% of income comes from Secure and Satisfied customers.  By identifying each type of customer, management can design and automate workflow based on each customer type.  Focusing a referral program on the indifferent customers can be pointless, but the same referral program focused exclusively on the most satisfied customers can be an effective way of bringing in new customers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases can be focused to identify these four types of customers.  The problem is that most business organizations don’t identify their best customers.  As the business grows more and more programs that should be focused on “Secure” customers is wasted on indifferent and vulnerable customers.  As systems are moved out of on-premise networks and into a Cloud Network Architecture the requirements for IT professionals will need to change from Technology centric to Information centric and Customer centric strategies.