I've been saying it for years, marketers want the thrill of new business and spend way more money on it than they do on retaining the business they have. But every time there is a hiccup in the economy, you customers start to be a marketers new BFF.
A new story in B2B citing a Chief Marketing Officer Council study bears me out.
According to the study, only 6.8% of marketers said they have excellent knowledge of the customer when it comes to demographic, behavioral and psychographic data, while 51.9% said they have fair to little knowledge of the customer. "One of the problems is a lack of ownership of the customer relationship across the company," said Jim Hintze, senior VP-marketing at Fujitsu, which provides hardware, software and services for the tele-communications industry.
As we discussed recently, research indicates that a 5 percent increase in customer loyalty can increase profitability by up to 85 percent. This should be enough to get a marketer off his fat Francis to do something about taking care of current business all the time, not just when the economy tightens. As my marketing mentor Bill Loeffler used to say, "the best new business program is doing great work for current clients."
Can I get an Amen?