Relationship Revenue Triggers

For the past two decades since the advent of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, and even earlier among the direct marketing industry, it's been a goal to identify which elements of a customer's profile is most relevant for predicting likelihood to purchase.

For most consumer-oriented product marketers, data that can predict the next transaction is key. For example, what behaviors can be observed in a consumer to indicate they might be ready to replace their television set? If that can be well understood and (less likely) well tracked, then a marketer can place their message in the right time and place. This can be highly profitable, but also intrusive.

For business-to-business marketers, a deeper emphasis has been placed on relationship profile data. In many ways, relationship marketers have attempted to automate and scale the intelligence-gathering that good sales reps have always captured: What is the purchasing agent's wife's name? Does he have kids? What are their names? What is his favorite sport? What does this person most value in a vendor relationship?

There are many benefits to capturing this information in a centralized manner, not the least of which is the ability to help the next account manager "get smart" on the account faster than if the prior sales rep took all that valuable information with her to the next job.

The challenge of replicating how a sales reps captures this information is great, but it's even more difficult to think of relevant and ethical ways to automate and leverage this information in a systematic way.

One of my favorite and most challenging projects I have worked on is a corporate contact profiling system which attempted to both integrate existing data on a given contact (how many times has this person received a direct mail piece? which ones? did they respond?) and also provided a place for sales reps to enter their own personal profile items (where did they go to school? what charities are they involved in?). It was insanely complex, and required very disciplined internal coordination.

Privacy laws and policies are also a major factor. In most cases, it is legitimate for an account manager to capture publicly available information about a contact, but it is normally not accepted practice to make personally identifiable information available to others in the company not associated with that account.

At the end of the day, marketers should focus on a handful of profile data fields that have the most relevance to ongoing relationship building, account management and cross-selling. This will differ by industry, but identifying these revenue trigger profile items can make a huge difference in generating higher ROI.