Too Few, Too Little, Too Much: Why Direct Marketers Fail . . . And Ten Ways To Make Sure You Don't continued --- Page 3 6. Too little customer talk Even though the revolution of customer-focused marketing has come, few direct marketers are talking to their customers in meaningful ways. There may be no element of marketing as blatantly ignored, lied about, denied, or otherwise artfully dodged, as the amount of time invested in and the quality of the dialogue with customers. Everybody says they are doing it; only a handful of companies really are. Every company has copies of all the right books; only one or two people have actually read them. Most of the ways in which companies talk to customers are meaningless. Customer surveys question what happened not what was expected. The expectation of the customer is the only thing that counts and on a scale of one to ten, all customer expectations are tens. Unless you have open, direct lines of productive talk right into the heart of hundreds of individual customers daily, you still don't get it. If you believe as little as 15 percent of your time should be spent talking directly with the people who pay the bills, then you personally are spending 33 full days a year in one-to-one dialogue with your customers. You are finding out what they expect, what they think, how they see your company, what their product needs and ideas are, what their price sensitivity is this year, and a myriad of other concerns, interests and quirks that you must know if you are going to keep those customers coming back. After years of focus on the customer relationship, most of our direct marketing CEOs have still not talked with a living, breathing customer in years. The dialogue starts and stops with TSRs and CSRs. I shop hundreds of catalogs, both business to business and consumer; not even once has a senior manager called to ask what I think or how I was treated as a customer . . . not once in the last ten years! SOLUTIONS:
7. Too much missing, flawed or unreliable information Direct marketers are failing or are in danger of failing because they are making increasingly more important and more expensive decisions based on too much missing, flawed or unreliable information. At almost every company I consult with, information is on a "fly by the seat of the pants" or a "guesstimate" basis. Where information is organized, it cannot be verified; where information is not organized, there is no recognition of the importance of the formulaic nature of business to business direct marketing. At a time when information technology is at an all-time high in international direct marketing, the reality is that maybe only 10% of our consumer and business to business direct marketing companies have absolute information. Direct marketers fail because they don't know -- to the penny -- the cost to acquire a customer; to the penny, the lifetime net profitability of that customer; to the penny, the advertising support cost of that customer over the next one, two and three years; to the penny, the profitability of an advertising vehicle or channel; to the penny, the net profitability of each product. In short, far too much reliance is placed on the bottom line and not enough on the intervening lines of operation. The sick businesses are in a state of denial; the unhealthy businesses are working with bad numbers; the symptomatic businesses are worried that they may not have reality in hand; the healthy businesses can answer all the important questions without any doubt as to the validity of the knowledge. SOLUTIONS:
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