Prioritisation

You can probably cope without more people or expensive new technology, and still grow the business and profits - prioritisation is key, to make the best use of your people and resources, and ensure that you meet the needs of your customers. This applies to sales teams, marketing teams, operations teams and to support teams.

You've probably heard of the Pareto Rule - that 80% of your revenues (or profits) will be generated by 20% of your customers. It may not be exactly this - it may be 70% of your revenues, from 30% of your customers, but for many SMEs, ratios in this ballpark are very common. Does this apply to you? That doesn't mean you don't need the last 20% or 30% of revenue - but if the Pareto Rule applies to you (and it does apply to most SME businesses), it means that you can prioritise your teams and activities to sell to and support your customers appropriately. Subtle adjustments can have massive possitive effects on your engagement with customers, and therefore on your revenues and profits.

Customer or prospect?

The Customer Landscape Dashboard can help you and your team easily visualise the information in your accounting and CRM systems, and then prioritise your customers and prospects, and how the sales of each of your products and services maps across your customer landscape. If you wish, it can then update your CRM system with this analysis to put the information at your team's fingertips, and always up to date.

When you have an enquiry, whether it's by e-mail, phone, Facebook, twitter, via your website etc - and whether it's a sales enquiry, or a support enquiry - you will have much better success and customer engagement if each person's response is tailored dependent upon whether they are an existing customer that has already bought something from you, or is a prospect that is considering their first purchase from you.

An existing customer already has some experience of you. You know that they have already spent money with your company at least once before. You can build upon this to grow your relationship with them. Selling more to your existing customers is one of the easiest and most efficient ways of growing your business, so long as everyone in your team knows who they are, and what priority to apply to each one. Reseach shows that for typical businesses, 68% of customers are lost because they feel neglected or 'perceived indifference' by their current supplier. However those that you do engage with, because of their past experience with you, are likely to make purchasing decisions more quickly and share more information with you in the process as they have a level of trust with you. Make sure everyone in your business knows who your existing customers are, so that they are not neglected! They are often an untapped engine of growth.

A prospect that hasn't purchased anything from you will need very different treatment and information compared to an existing customer. They may need to be nurtured as they consider buying something for the first time, or to give them the confidence that they should buy from you rather than their current/previous supplier, even if they are dissatisfied with the previous supplier! If your current CRM or sales forecast doesn't segment prospects separately from existing customers, and you don't manage the process and pipeline separately for each, then this is your first step to growing your business. The great thing is that you have great information about what prospects want - from your existing customers, if you know where to look. The Customer Landscape dashboard will really help you develop your priorities and processes.

By visualising the information, and then making it easily available to your front-line people via systems such as your existing CRM, you can ensure customers and activities are prioritised to carry through your priorities, delivering profitable growth and great customer satisfaction, whilst building the CRM as a key resource for your team, and a platform to make even greater use of.

We visualise and simplify, to help you prioritise, to help you give your customers great service whilst increasing your revenues and profit. We don't want to create more systems and data for you - you have probably already invested in them. The Customer Landscape Dashboard leverages the information in your existing systems and makes it easier to access, visualise, and efficient to use. By bringing the data available from multiple systems, categorising, simplifying, and visualising in a repeatable way that takes you no effort, and makes it more valuable for your team to use those systems, and helps you evolve and improve your processes and how you use your systems.

Categorising Customers

Not all customers need the same relationship with your organisation.

Customers are important to your business, but:

• some are key to your business's future
• others are good customers but not key to you
• some are nice to have, but you don't make much money from them
• and maybe there are some you'd rather not have!

Similarly, not all customers want the same thing from you:

• for some of your customers, you are a key supplier and they want lots of attention from you
• for others they find you of value, but they don't want you to be overly attentive
• maybe others would rather not have to buy your products or services at all, but need to do so
• Some of your customers would benefit from all of your products and services
• Other customers may only ever really be likely to buy one or a small number of your products and services.

Matching your sales and service approach appropriately to each customer, is key - to both ensuring that every customer satisfaction is maximised by serving them how they want to be, and to efficiently using your resources. It's all about prioritisation.

To do so, you need 3 things:

• Visibility of the your current position - your customer landscape
• Management decision making about the business's priorities
• Make your priorities clear throughout your business, and easy visibility and easy to act upon by every customer facing person in the business

The Customer Landscape Dashboard gives you this visualisation, to help in your decision making, prioritisation, and communication with your team.

Get a simple visual overview of your customer base, where your strengths have been - e.g growing existing customers, winning new customers, lead generation etc, and compare that over the last few years, based upon facts.

Then make sure this information is easily available to your team.

How does the customer landscape dashboard work?

The customer landscape is a simple visual tool to understand your customer base.

This involves analysing your past sales over the last 3 years (or different range if appropriate), ranking your customers by their level of contribution to your revenues or profits, and identifying how much of those revenues came from repeat purchases from existing customers, growth of existing customers, and new customers won. You can then drill into the detail, and compare how these have changed year to year, and see who not only your key customers are, but how that looks across your customer base.

This should take no time from you - we simply point the Customer Landscape Dashboard at your Accounting database (e.g. Sage), and it will process, categorise, and summarise your customers from that data. And then display it visually to you, for the last year, and previous years.

Will I find this of use?

Almost certainly you will find this visualisation will give you some different insights into your business. You may already know your top 10 customers, but if you have 100 customers, or 1000 customers, how important are each of the others below the top 10 to you? Are you capitalising on your existing customer base - they can be a great engine of growth? When you win new customers, do you successfully grow those customers into great repeat customers, or do they just make one off purchases?

You may have an inkling of the answers to the above.

The Customer Landscape Dashboard will give you answers to all of these, as facts, that you can use to better shape your business into the future as you wish.

And using this to shape your team - information at your team's fingertips in the CRM

Even if you had all the answers to the above questions to hand, does everyone in your business know the same answers. Does every customer get the appropriate level of attention and service? (from marketing, from sales team, from operations and support? From the finance team? And does every person in your business know how they contribute to your overall success. If not, then the Customer Intelligence system can make this information available to your employees, via your existing systems.

If your sales, operations and support teams don't all have at their fingertips how important each of your customers is to you, the Customer Landscape system can automatically update your CRM system (including Salesforce.com, MS Dynamics CRM, Zoho CRM, Capsule CRM, Highrise), and other systems to ensure that the Customer Importance Ranking is at their fingertips in future, to guide their priorities.

• Automated categorisation of customers based upon past buying habits, and updated into CRM, updated at a frequency you choose
• Customer list in CRM maintained in sync with actual purchase history

Building upon this knowledge - shaping the future. The Sales Forecast as a prioritisation tool.

Now you know who your customers are, what they've contributed to date, and some feel for their potential, that's great. But it's all about the past.

The real power comes to then visualise where you want your business to be, and then put the appropriate priority and focus into serving your different customer and prospect segments, and then using your sales forecast to carry that priority through your team. For this, the Visual Sales Forecast Dashboard builds upon the data you have produced so far, and helps you really leverage and make much more use of your CRM system to prioritise and manage your team - not just the sales team, but sales, marketing, operations, support, finance and anyone else that interacts with customers.