From the Center for Strategic Relations, a twice-monthly supplement to Applying Strategic Relations, mailed at your request

Introducing Marketing Convergence

Recall the last lesson; you learned how the value of a relationship with leads influences your ability to turn them into frequent buyers. The greater your value the higher probability you'll earn a repeat purchase.

While important points, how do you create maximum relationship value.

To create additional maximum relationship value with your leads and customer, you'll need to align your customer-facing forces. Cultivating leads and identifying profitable customers is half the battle.

These customer-facing forces are your sales, marketing, and service departments. In today's lesson, you'll see how a marketing convergence is necessary to build customer relationships.

To build business relationships it's critical to organize all resources to advance customer objectives while still producing a profit as a company. If you want to create and keep more customers, while increasing revenue, your strategy must include earning relationship value.

Advancing customer objectives in a profitable way is a difficult concept to implement. Write with your questions. I have clients around the world who may have already found solutions to the business relationship challenges you face.

Next week, I'll show you how to improve your internal customer relationships with better communications between sales, marketing, and service departments.

Most sincerely,

Justin Hitt
Consultant, Author & Speaker
https://iunctura.com/

How A Marketing Convergence Is Necessary To Build Customer Relationships

By Justin Hitt, Strategic Relations Consultant, https://iunctura.com/

A marketing convergence brings together sales, marketing, and service departments for the single objective of improving customer retention. Keeping high value customers is the only way to get the most from your acquisition investment.

Are you making these mistakes in your own sales, marketing, and service departments?

You likely see these communications challenges and issues in your own business. Challenges like these keep sales, marketing, and service departments from being productive.

What is different here than in other productivity initiatives? A marketing convergence includes the building cross-functional objectives and measures to serve customers interests.

To further understand how bringing sales, marketing, and service departments together can improve customer relationships; let's look at how these groups communicate.

Clear consistent communications is critical to build cross-functional objectives and measures that serve customers interests.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems were supposed to bring these groups together. If each of these departments doesn't already have access to the same customer information, then you are crippling your relationship building efforts from within.

When each department makes a practice of communicating hard details about customer accounts in a single system, you'll have a better picture of a customer's state at each interaction point. This doesn't have to be fancy, start by tracking communications events with subject-oriented notes.

Communications events are phone calls, appointments, transactions, email messages, and any other way you establish a connection with a customer.

Two points to remember about tracking communications events:

Tracking event level notes isn't about employee accountability as much as it is about fulfilling customer desires. Leaving great notes helps representative unfamiliar with the customer's situation quickly get up to speed.

More importantly, this documents details about how a customer travels through your company. Cumulatively this detail helps optimize your overall sales funnel from lead generation to repeat purchase.

A marketing convergence gets sales, marketing, and service departments talking to each through consistent archival channels. Here are some convergence questions to answer that help build customer relationships:

You'll gain new insights that contribute to relationship value when you bring together sales, marketing, and service departments to answer these questions. Marketing convergence starts with clear communications, but evolves to collect the knowledge necessary to strengthen customer relationships.

The more these departments can work together, the better you'll understand your customer.

Each department contains experts in their areas and each knows something that can help the other be more effective. Marketing convergence is encouraging a "What can we do for you attitude?" in how employees treat each other and the customer.

© 2004 Justin Hitt, All rights reserved.
/ customer-relations | interaction-points /

Do you want to create and keep more customers, but aren't quite sure how to approach it? How much would a second opinion on a business to business customer relationship strategy help your business? Write for details on how a needs assessment might help you

Justin Hitt provides executives with actionable strategies to improve profits while strengthening business relationships. For training materials and other resources visit https://www.jwhco.com/

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