I remember my first trip to England back in the eighties. We were kicking around London looking to pass the time and spotted a “tealeaf reader.” For fun we thought, “let’s go check it out.”
I had no idea what tealeaf reading was all about. I thought they would whip out a leave from a tree or something and start reading it like a book. What I discovered was even more incredulous.For the Highland Scots, twists of fate were prefigured in the patterns left at the bottom of one’s empty teacup. The general idea of “tealeaf reading” is to interpret the significance of an alphabetical list of the natural symbols commonly found at the bottom of a cup of tea. They would apparently predict fame, fortune and failure based on these soggy herbs.What does this have to do with business improvement, you ask?Let’s face it; running a business is a sober undertaking. There’s no place for the crystal ball, as it were. Successful business leaders must possess a set of pragmatic disciplines in order to make the necessary daily decisions in running their business. They must make very rational and logical connections based on their circumstances.For example, they may see competitors reducing their price and think, “I need to effectively compete by lowering my price or building value.” Or they look inside their company and see an unproductive sales group and think, “we need an incentive program to make people work harder and sell more.” Or they may look at their product mix and notice a product or service not performing as well as others and think, “let’s launch a creative promotion or advertising campaign.”These are very logical and rational responses but I don’t think they are enough. Not that these decisions are incorrect, but they are only part of the story. Not being one to believe in fortune telling, I do sometimes think that business leaders can learn a thing or two from these prognosticators.Everyone’s heard about the 5 P’s of Marketing: Product, Pricing, Promotion, Packaging and Positioning. Certainly all of these disciplines are important but I now realize that they are somewhat lacking in our new 21st Century.As I’ve said many times, today we live in an age NOT of information or technology but of relationships. Certainly consumers are still influenced by promotions, pricing and packaging but relationships have the greatest impact over brand choices and vendor selection.Relationships often take longer to form and carry even greater weight in the B2B world. If you think about it, the higher the cost of a product or service or the more complicated that product or service is, the more critical the relationship. This means developing a powerful relationship with a vendor or supplier who will do more than quote prices and take orders.Therefore it is not enough for suppliers and service providers to merely REACT to client needs. In fact they must learn to become PROACTIVE in predicting customer needs. In a sense good marketers need to learn to read their customer’s minds. They need to become good at “reading tea leaves.”Ultimately client’s need suppliers who will help them learn to evaluate and make the right purchase decisions. This is where CRM or Customer Relationship Management can become very useful in helping to predict buying trends. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a label that has been tacked onto practically everything having to do with marketing. Like the broad field of marketing, CRM touches all aspects of marketing analysis, marketing communications, sales, and customer service.CRM is a technique aimed at collecting information from prospects and customers about their needs, and providing information that helps them evaluate and purchase products that deliver the best possible value. Think of CRM as a process for managing the company’s resources to create the best possible experience and value for customers while generating the highest possible revenue and profit for the company.A typical CRM system uses a centralized database to store data about marketing, sales, and customer service. This gives employees a complete view of the company’s relationship with each customer. This improved communication technique results in creating a one-to-one relationship of understanding each prospect’s needs and showing that the company’s products or services meet those needs. This encourages the prospect to select that vendor. In other words, a CRM approach helps a company implement the learning and communications techniques that demonstrate the desire of the company — and the value to the customer — in forming a long-lasting relationship.For marketing to be effective, management must understand what the needs of the target audience are, which product attributes they value, and what motivations they respond to.
This requires more than creative advertising. It requires researching and understanding a target market, making products or services convenient to purchase, and giving each customer true value and satisfaction.You may not feel the need to go out and buy a bag of tea leaves and practice your fortune telling skills, but I encourage every business owner to think about ways that you may be able to put CRM in place within your organization. The information you will gain will help you to accurately predict buying patterns and maybe tell you more about your company today as well as your customer of the future.