Introducing a Customer Centric Selling Approach for Multiple Brands

Many companies find it extremely difficult to aggregate the target audiences and call strategies when promoting multiple brands within and across sales teams.

As a consequence of this challenge, we often see a “Lead Brand” determining the Target Audience and first brand detail, with other promoted brands falling into line behind the lead brand and presented in a specific detailing order during every sales call.

While this makes it easy for the company to administer, the relevance of the second and third brands message may be lost to the Customer. It also means the second and third brands may be missing a substantial segment of their Target Audience which does not overlap with the target audience for the Lead Brand.

One way to get around this is to implement a Customer Weighted Portfolio Value approach to identifying Target Customers for the company’s product portfolio as described in an earlier article.

We have also helped companies drive additional efficiency by introducing one or more of the following processes;

 Introduce Brand detail objectives rather than sales call objectives. You should be measuring how many times your Brand was detailed to a Target Customer in a high value promotional interaction rather than the number of times a is seen called on (a weak metric that prevails across the industry)

 Introduced flexible Brand detailing order within a call to encourage the Sales Representatives’ to achieve their Brand detail frequency objectives for each customer for each Brand

The Brand detail objectives and flexible brand detailing have been shown to drive call value by increasing the number of “relevant” brand details per call – where the detailed brands are “relevant” to each particular customer.

Introducing Performance Metrics to Improve Targeting and Call Quality

Many companies find it extremely difficult to implement sales force activity to target customers as defined in their Brand plans. Consequently, we often see a very high percentage of valuable sales and marketing resource opportunities delivering low value calls to target customers or worse, still high value activities delivered to low value customers.

The reasons for this can be quite varied but typically include;

• Lack of co-ordination between business objectives and sales force performance incentives & rewards programme
  

  Poorly thought out call activity metrics that are financially incentivised will always encourage “Call fodder”.
  Worse, it may also encourage inappropriate profiling (to ensure activity metrics to ‘Targets’ are also achieved)
  

• Inappropriate territory structures or resourcing to achieve the call plan (under/ over resourcing by geography)
  
• Lack of alignment between the Brand Plan, Sales Action Plan and their implementation
  
• Lack of a Sales Representative Customer level activity reporting to identify Individual Customers who need to be seen in order to achieve Brand strategy
  
• Lack of a robust monitoring process to support Sales Management take corrective action
  

 

Introducing Customer Quality & Call Quality as Performance Metrics

Recognising that improved customer segmentation and appropriate brand strategies to the most valuable segments will put tremendous pressure on sales forces’ time and planning efforts to see these Customers, organisations may wish to consider weighting call quality versus call quantity (where quality is defined by the message relevance and value of the customer this is being delivered to) and decide which behaviours they want to encourage, measure and reward based on Customer and Call value. 

We have implemented a Customer Weighted Points Value metric to replace calls per day as a KPI. For example, Customers are valued from 2– 20 points (based on their segment) and absolute calls per day are replaced by call points per day (Call Points = Customer points value X Call Quality). This takes the focus off the “6 calls per day” quantity mentality (where all calls are of equal value), and replaces this with a Customer quality X Call quality approach. This also encourages planning and execution of sales force time and effort to high value customer calls, with the only sacrifice being a shift away from calls to low value customers.

Vedere Group introduce new web based Profiling application to help Clients build meaningful information about their Customers

One of the major frustrations our Clients’ have expressed to us is their desire to easily and rapidly capture or revalidate specific information about their customers that would allow them to better tailor their communication in a more relevant and valued way to each customer. While some of this data may be being captured in their CRM System, the process of entering or updating several pieces of information for 20,000+ customers typically proves a nightmare.

As one client, explained to us “we have tried to do this in Excel, but collating 35 spreadsheets among 70 people just doesn’t make anyone’s life easy!”. Additionally, marketing have asked the sales team to provide feedback about each customer around what would appear to be a simple question, but 3 months later, 50% of the sales force still haven’t responded and the brand manager is no closer to having the data they asked for, let alone being able to do something with it!

Because many CRM systems deliberately lock some of these information fields down, changes cannot be made until a specific time, which then puts enormous pressure on the team to update that information within a narrow time frame – again frustrating the people it is intended to serve.

Vedere Group have developed an elegant solution to address all of these issues, with the introduction of PREO™ Profiler

PREO™ Profiler is a web based application that interacts with your CRM Database, enabling you to update specific customer profile data with ease.

Additionally, you can create a multitude of new profile elements in PREO™ Profiler that do not exist in your CRM System and then analyse the information your team gathers around these profiles before choosing which ones you want to manage back into your CRM database. Managers can also see how the sales force are getting on in “real time” with profiling updates and completion of the profiling task.

Because PREO™ Profiler can be “always on” the rush to complete a one-off re-profiling exercise every 6 months can be managed throughout the year, taking the pressure off the sales team and making the data more relevant as it is being entered at the time of seeing the customer rather than recreated from memory months later.

Examples of the type of information we have been asked to help Client’s capture include;

• Behavioural traits
  
• Customer brand value
  
• Willingness to prescribe
  
• Willingness to switch medication
  
• Willingness to refer
  
• Attitude to a brand
  
• Attitude to a company
  
• Preferred selling style
  
• Algorithms to pull multiple profile elements together to create distinct customer segments
  

Contact us to find out how we can help you capture and manage valuable customer profile information in your CRM Database.
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Customer Segmentation & Targeting

A recent Vedere Group survey showed only 20% of businesses are prioritizing strategic and infrastructural investment at a global or local level this year. Instead, half the managers and executives surveyed said their company was focusing on shorter term investment areas, such as novel marketing tactics.

Sounds reasonable. The slowdown in the growth markets, poor share market performance and healthcare reforms have all increased the cost of business. At the same time growth is becoming more challenging across our markets. So, competitive new tactics to drive our brands needs to be one of any company’s priorities.

Choosing your investments

But let’s not pretend this is a simple process. Getting in the sales and marketing team, the creative and market research agencies and simply challenging them to find novel growth opportunities isn’t enough.

Changing priorities and investments is difficult for any business under pressure and even harder when you lack alignment on the need for change. So where should you start?

Focusing on execution?

One solution may be to focus on execution. Call quality, marketing materials, sales force spend, SOV and support programs… these all commonly come up in business planning. The challenge is which one do you prioritize, which one do you minimize? All of these will have their internal advocates. The answer may be in the number two position from the survey – Customer segmentation and targeting.

Effective customer segmentation and targeting identifies investment and tactical priorities while ensuring activities are delivered to the most profitable and most responsive customers. Companies that get this right drive higher revenues at lower costs.

Profiling is not targeting…

 

One reason we may not be seeing customer segmentation as a higher priority is that many companies confuse segmentation with customer profiling, or leave “targeting” to the sales team.

Market research or sales force elicited customer buying preferences and personality styles are important in understanding how to sell to a certain type of customer, but does not quantify the opportunity or tell you who to sell to.

A complete segmentation of your customers will provide prioritized customer targets based on both qualitative and quantifiable dynamics.

Don’t be shallow…

 

The challenge of integrating the diverse datasets can be quickly put in the too hard basket. So, many companies and marketing teams fall into the trap of defining A,B and C tiers based on perceived customer preference for their brand or potential sales.

There are many issues with this approach. Firstly, it does not create competitive advantage for the brand. The tiers are subjective & open to manipulation. Secondly it does not provide any insight to how you are going to market and sell to these customers.

We need to be aware that our customers are complex and unique. A better understanding of who you should be targeting, and how you need to sell to them is probably one of the most critical drivers of brand performance.

Don’t drown either…

Step one with customer segmentation is to allocate resources. You are trying to identify the most profitable and responsive customers to set strategy and align sales and marketing resources.

As with any key initiative, you need adequate resources if you want a good result.

The following key steps are typically where additional resources are required:

• Data collection and analytical models
  
• Work shopping customer segments on prioritized qualitative and quantitative dynamics
  
• Defining quantified targets
  
• Integration with brand strategy
  
• Deployment and monitoring of sales team and other channels performance
  

 

The Bottom Line

Customer segmentation and targeting identifies prioritized targets for profitable, targeted sales and marketing execution.

Top line or bottom line, this provides competitive advantage for brands, driving measurable performance improvement (sales) in secondary and primary care markets.