Cloning Your Best Customers
Any Sales Manager worth their salt knows that while all customers and prospects are important, they are not all of equal value. In the rapid-fire world of customer acquisition, at the end of the day, we all wish we had an endless stream of high-value prospects.
So doesn’t it make sense to target those prospects who behave like your best customers?
It is no longer enough to simply identify their general line of business. In the age of big data, it is important to know more about your current customers so you can effectively identify the most productive market segments to approach with your targeted marketing efforts. Many of our clients have been surprised to find that their best customers were not whom their instincts predicted.
The Process:
1) Clean & Clear Customer Data
The first step in creating an accurate, valuable profile of your best prospects is to verify and standardize your current customer data. The NAICS Association offers a service that normalizes and standardizes your current customer data to ensure we can identify each customer’s actual identity (making sure John R. Cooper and Johnathan Richard Cooper only have one entry and that he works on elm street — not elm st, elm st. AND elm street).
2) Add Valuable Data Fields
Once Identified we can now take the ever important next step to verify and enhance our customer data with mission-critical data fields. Once completed we now have the tools to truly analyze the attributes that our best customers share and later emulate them when obtaining a targeted prospecting list. Those attributes include:
- DUNS Number
- Business Name
- Tradestyle Name
- Mail Address
- Street Address
- SIC Codes & Descriptions
- Top Contact Name/Title
- Six NAICS Codes & Descriptions
- Telephone Number
- Year Started
- Sales Volume
- Employees Here
- Employees Total
- Status Indicators (HQ, SL, Branch)
- Fax Number
(The NAICS Association can append full prospecting records to your current customer database with standardized and verified results.)
3) Analyzing the results:
Your now up-to-date customer list is ready for further analysis to determine the trajectory of your marketing efforts moving forward. Either in collaboration with your NAICS representative or in-house with your marketing and accounting teams, it is helpful to identify certain characteristics of your current customers.
Think of these as KPIs for your customers. They are as essential to your marketing goals as your employees’ KPIs are for your management goals.
Common Client “KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)”
- Which customers have the highest total purchase values from your company?
- Which customers have been with you the longest?
- Which customers have the highest rate of repeat business as well as longevity of loyalty?
- Which customers have had the highest rate of repeat business in the recent past? (3 months, 6 months, this year?)
- Which customers have traditionally responded to your marketing efforts?
- Which customers have traditionally purchased premium products?
Many larger enterprises will choose to carry these Client KPIs further by including items such as high referrers, social media influence, etc. Download our Cloning Your Best Customers for B2B Marketing Success White Paper to see more examples.
4) Assigning Value
Once you have cleansed, gathered and compiled the necessary data fields, it is time to assign values to each of your customers. There are many effective strategies commonly used to assign value to and segment your client base.
IBM suggests the RFM Model for customer segmentation, focusing on only Recency, Frequency, and Monetary values. The RFM model uses a basic 1-5 scoring system for each indicator.
(Customers who have made purchases in the last month may be scored 1 as a very high value for Recency, while customers whose last purchase was 5 years ago may be scored at a 5. Each customer would be assigned a 1-5 value for each of the 3 indicators resulting in a score that would look like 1-2-1, 5-2-4, 3-1-1, 1-1-5.)
Download our Cloning Your Best Customers for B2B Marketing Success White Paper to see more customer segmentation examples and methods.
Once you have scored the value of each of your Customer KPIs, it is now easy to identify your ideal new prospects.
5) Customer Suppression:
The easiest of the steps provided, a customer suppression file can easily be created. The NAICS Association will create a customer suppression file to suppress your current customers from your future Prospecting Efforts.
6) The Meat, Potatoes & Gravy Too:
Now that you have cleansed, enhanced, suppressed and assigned vales to your customer database, all that is left to do is present your completed ideal client list to any NAICS Association customer representative. Whether you are developing a direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing, prospecting or a multi-touch marketing campaign for your selection, the NAICS Association can provide you with the right-sized marketing record to fit your exact needs.
To Clone Your Best Customers with Guidance from the Business Data Experts at NAICS.com, contact us here, or call 973-625-5626, Monday through Friday, 9am-5pm Eastern Standard Time.
Taking Customer Cloning to a New Level
Read the NAICS Association Exclusive whitepaper: Cloning Your Best Customers for B2B Marketing Success to learn more about client data analysis and client segmentation techniques.