How do best practice sales & marketing teams navigate the changing economic landscape to conclude profitable transactions? At the heart of the best-in-class marketing approach is a consistent focus on the company’s extensive knowledge of its customers, as they progress through the five stages of the customer lifecycle. Implementing such a customer lifecycle strategy enables companies to build a solid foundation for confident decision-making that can help achieve the company’s business objectives, even during hard times. Putting customers at the centre of decision making is critical because it allows marketing professionals to support their decisions and protect profitability even when the prevailing economic conditions change for the worse.
By definition, a customer lifecycle approach is one in which a business interacts with a customer across all the lifecycle stages: prospecting, enrolment, portfolio management, monitoring and growth. The customer lifecycle is a continuum of activity that guides organizations in finding new customers and cultivating existing relationships. Businesses that interact in a structured and constructive way with their customers at every lifecycle stage fare much better, especially in testing times. The goal is to achieve a workable 360-degree view of valuable customers.
The customer lifecycle approach is based on the principle that companies regularly gain information about their customers on a range of dimensions: their location(s), size, financial health, appetite to purchase and invest etc. The challenge is to convert this information into useful marketing insights.
The key process in converting information to insight is Rationalizing data held across the organization on customers (or other trading partners). Rationalizing means cleaning records, eliminating duplicates, consolidating linked records and arriving at a clear picture of who is purchasing and using your goods or services. In a system of any complexity or longevity, this can be a huge challenge.
D&B,which manages the world’s largest commercial database, offers a database cleansing and consolidation process that delivers a more rounded view of a customer or prospecting portfolio.
The D&B consolidation process compares internal records with company records in D&B’s global business database. This entity matching process pinpoints the precise identity of a company’s trading partners. The ability to do such matching accurately derives from the assignment of a unique nine-digit number, known as a. D-U-N-S® Number, to over 145million individual legally incorporated businesses worldwide, from sole proprietorships, to corporations and government entities. Every D-U-N-S Number is unique and moreover the same D-U-N-S Number stays with that company through its entire life. Systematically appending internal records with D-U-N-S Numbers provides the enterprise with an accurate, consistent and timely window on its customers and trading partners.
