Many a studies have pointed out 65% of the profits can be attributed to a mere 20% of the customers and another 25% of the profits owed to another 20% of the customers. Thus the remaining 60% of the customers put together are responsible for only 10% of the overall profits. With that in mind if you add in the onboarding costs of a customer, it would not be an anomaly that some of the customers might even be yielding a negative profit figure. As per eMarketer’s “Getting and keeping the customers” report, acquiring a new customer can be five times more expensive than satisfying and retaining an existing customer.

CRM

With the advancement in CRM technology, the focus on 360 degree customer and business view can for the first time provide the organizations with the capability to make their relationships with the existing clients more holistic and providing services and channels more in line with the customers’ needs. The key is to build customer profile based on the interactions and knowledge regarding the customer and design products and services targeted to that customer. That would require providing the front office with the analytical capability based on the customer reference data.

That is however easier said than done, because the silos within the organizations could lead to different account and contact identifiers, leading to a lot of redundant data with incomplete information. A common source of reference data and standardization of client onboarding and contact creation process is critical to enabling this cross cutting enterprise wide view. In order to further institute collaboration across these divisions visibility of account and contact information org wide, within the guidelines provided by compliance, would be crucial.

Identify Top Customers

In order to identify the top 25 customers it is imperative that you have valuable and actionable information on accounts. You can easily do that by adding the following fields to the account level:

• Date of last won deal: Rollup summary field to evaluate the close date using the MAX operation, with filter won set to true
• Count of opportunities: Count on the opportunity object.
• Total value of won opportunities: Rollup summary field on Account evaluating Amount and calculate the SUM with filter won set to true.
• Win percentage: formula evaluating the count of won opportunities and total opportunities.

Report on top customers

Having these fields on the account object is not an end in itself but a means to an end. You can then use these fields to build reports to

• identify you top 25 accounts,
• neglected accounts among your top customers
• Win percentage on accounts

And use these reports to build a strategy to open new communication channels with these customers and make them more profitable.

Strategy to make your top customers more loyal

The next step would be translate this valuable intelligence into actionable items. You can now engage in an effort to learn more about these customers by building a 360 Customer View as explained in my CRM maturity model blog. The key is to:

• Engage these customers on a more regular basis by using activities feature in Salesforce.
• Use survey tools at AppExchange to gather valuable anonymous feedback. Track the responses and create metrics to translate these surveys into meaningful data.

Social Intelligence

Increase your users’ access to social intelligence and top customers better with easy access to social networking within salesforce. Once an account, contact or lead is linked to a social profile, you and everyone else in your organization can access current social data without having to login to other sites.

Leverage Intelligence to design Services

Not all the customers are equal, once the top ones have been identified you can now identify areas to upsell or cross sell and turn your customer services into a selling machine as well. This way your customer services team is more of a revenue center than a cost center. Some guidelines could be as follows:

• Leverage self-service capabilities for low value customers.
• High value customers, based on the nature of the won opportunities, target them for cross sell opportunities. (Identify cross sell customers based on analytics).
• High value customers, based on the nature of the won opportunities, target them for up sell opportunities. (Identify up sell customers based on analytics).
• For a certain segment of the customers you can even monetize the services.

Reduce cost of coverage

In order to do so enterprises need to examine the customer portfolio:

• How much effort really goes into each customer and transaction?
• What are the services particular customers are interested in and which segments are growing or shrinking?

Salesforce can lead to a reduced cost of coverage if enterprises realize that big customers do not necessarily need big sales coverage and focus on the opportunities that matter and improve collaboration among the sales teams. It has to be kept in mind that cutting costs across the board can have negative implications and one should focus on improving collaboration a better metrics generated by salesforce to reach these goals e.g., moving account management for smaller customers to a web based systems could significantly cut costs. It has to noted that introduction of new channels would have a twofold impact in terms of cutting coverage costs as well as improving interaction metrics. The sales rep time is an expensive commodity and technology should be leveraged to treat it as such. Revenue growth can be achieved if relationships with core clients are strengthened through innovative service models