Live From the NCDM: Bringing CRM to a B-to-B Database

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff

At first blush, customer relationship management in the business-to-business arena is similar to consumer CRM efforts. Both focus on relationships that maximize the long-term value of customers.

But the differences between building a relationship with a corporate entity and a consumer run deeper than how an envelope is addressed. The data necessary to strengthen a relationship with a firm is as critical, and significantly more illusive, according to Robert Burgess, group manager of CRM at Verizon Information Services.

A fair amount of customer targeting can be done with recency, frequency and monetary data. Add in channel preference, and a marketer can aim effective mass-scale trigger campaigns at individuals, heads of households or even entire households. It’s not the most sophisticated approach to marketing, but it can suffice.

In the business world, the sales process is more complicated. In addition to purchase authorities, a marketer may have to contend with purchase specifiers and recommenders. The information needed to determine which products, services or offers should go to who is more varied, and harder to capture.

Don’t think data beyond name and address is important? Try selling computer software priced by the number of licenses without knowing staff levels, or making a proposal without knowing whether purchases are authorized at the branch or headquarter level.

According to Burgess, a well-rounded business database will contain: historical data on the company, financial growth expectations, ranking and market share within the industry, locations of headquarters and branches, key executive personnel names and contact information, and key purchase personnel names and contact information.

A great business database will contain this information not only for the customer firm, but for all of its competitors.

By knowing whether a business is lagging in penetration, marketers can offer goods or services geared toward strengthening the customer’s position.

Some data points can be collected from overlay sources, such as Dun & Bradstreet or infoUSA. Some, such as purchase history, frequency of sales contacts and outcome of sale contacts are observed data.

And some data, such as length of sales cycle, timing of the budgeting process, competitive advantages, preferred methods and time of contact or the seasonality of the business can be collected by asking the customer.

Differences in CRM within the B-to-B arena don’t stop with the richness of the database. Marketing strategies to businesses need to reflect that business customers tend to be more valuable. So, management needs to accept that a higher level of investment–such as comparative data within an entire industry, as opposed to focusing on a single customer–is a worthwhile investment.

As with consumer CRM, a business database allows marketers to determine the customer prospects with the highest potential lifetime customer value, establish the true cost of obtaining a customer through various sales channel, identify cross- and upsell opportunities, and predict accounts likely to fall off and identify those worth saving.

It can also influence the way internal operations are structured. Within a call center, customer service data can influence how incoming calls should be routed. For some marketers, clients might be best served by sending all calls stemming from one product to a dedicated representative.

Burgess spoke at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference in New Orleans. The conference ended Tuesday.

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