It is not uncommon to find organizations in which a small number of customers represent significant sales or profits. It is known as the 80/20 rule, meaning 80 percent of revenues are coming from 20 percent of customers. For example, one enterprise we know of has 600 customers with the top 100 representing 97.5 percent of the revenue contribution. In another case, a client’s CRM efforts are focused on its top 5,000 clients (about 5 percent of its total customer base) that as a group represent 90 percent of total revenue. Recently such a customer contacted us for advice on successful CRM strategies for when a small number of customers represent a significant percentage of sales or profits. Their thinking was, “We don’t generate new leads as we already know who are customers are so how can CRM help us?”  To learn CRM best practices for managing strategic customers, read on.

Here are five key CRM best practices for when a few customers represent significant sales:

  1. Create strategic account teams with sales and support responsibilities for your largest customers, most profitable customers, those with the greatest lifetime value or some other meaningful customer segmentation criteria. These account teams serve as the preferred point of contact for strategic customers. These teams enable the organization to present a single face to the strategic customer treating it is a single entity. Organize around the customer versus products, geographies, internal departments or processes.
  2. Select and adopt a strategic account management process. Strategic account managers require a selling process that centers-around a deep understanding of customers’ financial goals, strategies, tactics, business processes, service levels, risk profiles, and marketplace and competitive conditions. They need account plans that show the linkages against the customer organization, and identify the activities, strategies, tactics and time frames to execute the plan. A strategic account management process can be internally developed or adopted from a sales methodology vendor. There are many sales methodologies available for strategic account management. Salesforce.com has partnered with the leading methodology authors to integrate sales methodologies into Salesforce. Current partners include Miller Heiman, SPI (Solution Selling), The Complex Sale, ValueVision, and others.
  3. Use an on-demand account management system to: 1) define all the people involved in managing an account, along with their respective roles (executive sponsor, dedicated support rep, and so on), 2) define parent-child relationships between accounts to depict complex organizations with multiple subsidiaries or divisions, 3) provide a 360-degree view of each of strategic customer to manage all customer information and interactions in one place, 4) analyze and use customer information to proactively identify and solve customer problems, and 5) embody your account training and your chosen strategic account management methodology and make it part of the everyday routine of your account teams.
  4. Know what your strategic accounts want most. This can be done by instituting frequent measures of customer satisfaction. For surveying strategic accounts, there are two customer satisfaction survey solutions from our partners integrated into Salesforce, available on the AppExchange. Use the tools to survey strategic customers to see which top 3 to 5 processes they care most about (e.g., getting an engineer on-site, invoicing, pricing updates, and self-service web portal) and focus your CRM efforts on improving these processes. Set delivery standards and proper expectations with them regularly and provide consistent interaction to keep strategic customers abreast of internal developments that may affect them. We know of many organizations that have strategic customer advisory boards they meet with quarterly or semi-annually to collect and report on customer feedback. Take it a step further and evaluate the benefits of creating a community for strategic customers, link customer to customer.
  5. Consider providing private and personalized customer web sites to strategic accounts as an opportunity to reduce the costs of supporting strategic accounts and improve customer satisfaction. The objective is not to eliminate the valuable face-to-face personal time sales and service people spend with strategic customers, but to increase the communication flow by leveraging 24×7 Internet availability for customer access to a private Web site where it can find historical data, order information (e.g., product quantities ordered, product quantities shipped, orders pending), contact information, billing data, contract information, and more. Ask strategic customers their preferred methods of communications and implement self-service where it will improve sales and service quality for strategic accounts.

Have a CRM question? AskWendy@CRMsuccess.com.