Discovering Pockets of Opportunity for Revenue Enhancement -- Customer Analysis

During a period of economic distress, top-line revenue growth is unlikely to happen without a focused plan in place to target areas of customer opportunity.  Insights about such opportunities (an unmet need or an awareness of a competitive advantage, for example) result from disciplined research of customers, yours as well as your competitors’.   Conducting this research in a thoughtful, organized fashion leads to the analysis and introspection that should be a pre-requisite for strategic decisions to bring about revenue growth.

‘Voice of the Customer’ involves qualitative and quantitative research to generate an understanding of customer wants and needs, prioritized in terms of their relative importance.  What Voice of the Customer research often fails to deliver, however, is  the kind of actionable detail on an account-by-account basis that enable business developers to make real decisions.  Moreover, the typical tools of Voice of the Customer research (surveys and focus groups) are difficult to establish and often result in biased data. Respondents often provide the answers they believe the interviewer wants to hear, as opposed to their actual purchase decision opinions.  

The only way to gather detailed, account-level insights that are unbiased, objective, reliable, and actionable is to conduct blind (the contact does not know who the interviewer represents) conversations (not surveys or interviews, per se) with the purchase decision-maker at high-priority prospects and vulnerable accounts.

The research should be conducted by an objective third-party who can gather candid feedback and insights.  More than a simple check of the pulse, the process should include an assessment of the customer’s purchase decision process, loyalty, goals, needs, and how well your firm is supporting the customer in these regards.

Some of the issues that your management team should be considering are:

      Is your company targeting the appropriate customers or customer segments, given its core competencies, selling process, distribution channels, etc?  Are we positioning ourselves with the most attractive customers for our business capabilities?

      Does the company have the right mix of strengths for its target customers, or does it need to develop new competencies?

      How do our strengths compare with competitors’?

      Why do we offer the mix of products and services that it does?

      What will we need to be doing differently in five or ten years to ensure that we maintain this account?

Top-line revenue growth during this recession may depend on specific, actionable customer intelligence.  Ultimately, customer insight ties more directly to revenue gains than any other kind of business intelligence.  Understanding, and acting on, the implications of this intelligence is critical.

For more information, visit our website, www.acclaropartners.com.