Mr. Muhamed Muneer

One of the biggest myths in business is: we know who our customers are. This is especially true in small and medium businesses in the industrial sector where one is supposed to have more solid relationships with a handful of customers.

I wish I had a rupee for each time a client uttered these words to me, usually as justification for rejecting or scaling back a recommended programme. For some reason, all sales and marketing managers alive feel they have to declare to the world that they know who their customers are.

What these managers are really saying is they know which companies are most likely to buy products and services from them in the coming months. In many cases, they have signed contracts for specified purchase volumes that will account for most, if not all, of their short-term sales revenues.

So, in a broad sense, most marketers really do know something about who their customers are. But who are the specific decision makers who will determine your sales success beyond the current year? Most clients I have interacted with have a tendency to move people around. This is particularly true of multinational companies.

As I look back on who the important people were for us last year, and compare that list with who the key decision makers are this year, the difference is stunning. And, it is not because this past year was particularly unusual. One of the companies had six marketing or general managers in as many years. Even though they keep insisting that things won't continue that way, I am not convinced.

With all the corporate restructuring and right-sizing going on these days, a company has to reserve the right to move its best people around as needed. So promises regarding management continuity are difficult to keep. The point is that decision makers are a moving target. You can't be sure the ones who are important to you now will be important to you in the future, probably even the next year.

Even the most sophisticated database marketers will not claim to know the names, titles and buying needs of their key customers next year. They will, however, have a plan to augment their existing data bases with new prospects who are emerging as possible buying influences for future purchase decisions. At the same time, they will be dropping other persons who are no longer interested in their products and services. That is what database management is all about.

Enlightened marketers know that databases are dynamic tools, ones that require constant care and feeding. Once you stop feeding your database, it starts losing its value as a marketing tool. For that reason, marketers look for every occasion to add names to the database and to stimulate response from prospects who are already in it.

If they are sending a quarterly newsletter to database prospects, they ask for feedback on which articles were of great interest and which topics might be most desirable for future articles. If they are mailing product literature, they include a bounceback card giving prospects a chance to request additional information or a sales call. And they always give respondents the option of having their names removed from the list.

But as important as it is to keep the list current, it is even more important to continually add names to it. Because it is not so much a question of knowing who your customers are, it is knowing who they are likely to be. A critical part of knowing who your customers are likely to be is knowing what they will need in terms of expanded or improved product and service benefits.

The most successful database marketers use their lists for telemarketing surveys to keep tabs on market trends. It is no accident that they always seem to come out with new products or services just about the time that other companies are only beginning to understand those needs.

How can you expect to know about customer needs if you are not asking the right questions? Or the right people? The customers of tomorrow may have significantly different needs than the customers of today. Doing phone research with selected database respondents also has the extra benefit of helping you to keep your list up to date. If a prospect professes to have no decision-making responsibility or interest in the survey subject, off the list he or she goes. No sense keeping people in the database who are no longer prospects.

Which gets us back to the subject of feeding the database. It is an on-going task, one that demands a balanced marketing communications programme to reach prospective customers at all levels of interest and need. In some cases, you are cultivating prospects who will not have any buying or decision-making responsibility for your products or services for years.

A balanced communications programme will include a mix of broad and narrowly focussed media strategies. For example, a typical plan might include some "horizontal" and "vertical" trade magazine ads, public relations activities, direct mail and some trade show promotions. The "horizontal" or broad-based efforts will help you identify emerging market segments, while the "vertical" or narrowly-focussed programmes will concentrate rupees where the greatest short-term results can be expected. You generally need broad and narrow marketing strategies to optimise your marketing communications programme and ensure that your database is being fed a balanced diet of prospects across the full range of market segments served.

Yes, whenever I hear people say they know who their customers are, I can't help but wonder if they are really being serious. Anyone who is struggling to get computer printouts of customer/prospect names updated by regional sales people knows the frustrating ordeal of putting actual names and titles with company addresses.

So why the big charade? Not only do we not know who our customers are, we are not even sure who they were.

(By arrangement with Innovative Media)

Feedback and queries may be e-mailed to him directly at muneermuhamed@hotmail.com