Repeat After Me

如果想推动公司的盈利性销售，不能以牺牲顾客的长期购买行为为代价。

You want to grow profitable sales for your company. But don’t do it at the expense of long-term buying behaviors.

By Jim Lenskold

  比如，道康宁公司的营销部门做了一件非常了不起的事情，那就是实施了6个西格玛方法，即通过有组织的测量和流程来改善可预测性和精准度，从而推动营销取得了成功。首席市场官斯科特·弗森把道康宁的“客户之声”形容为测量流程的基石，指导着公司的营销测量工作朝着清晰明确的客户要求方向发展。

 测量关键绩效指标可以推动销售和营销，帮助提升客户忠诚度，积极排解阻碍获得长久的客户盈利性的负面影响。测量不仅在转变道康宁公司的文化中发挥了巨大的作用，更是帮助公司把外部开支的财政回报提升了二十多倍。

 最近，我与别人联合主持了一个会议，与会的有来自惠普、美国家得宝公司、美国好事达保险公司等企业的十几位CMO。会议的主题是测量营销对利润的影响。你一定能想像得到，这些CMO们对加强盈利能力管理提出了许多真知灼见。他们还谈到了开发测量基础构架方面的困难，坦言必须建立营销问责制。

 但是会上谈得最多的、与营销测评有着显而易见关系的话题则是管理客户体验的重要性。

 想想看，管理营销盈利能力的时候怎么能不把客户体验考虑在内呢？毕竟，对大部分公司来说，真正的利润不是随着新客户滚滚而来，而是最有盈利能力的那些重复购买产生的。

保罗·库罗杰奥吉是电子游戏零售商EB Games公司的营销副总裁，公司在全球拥有两千多家店面。库罗杰奥吉非常注重客户体验数量，他谙知客户的重复光顾行为是公司成功的关键所在。他讲了一个故事，说公司有时会收到一些忧心忡忡的家长们的来信，他们抱怨公司店员的穿着打扮太过另类：有的店员留莫霍克发型（将头两边铲青,只剩中间一丛头发的印第安人发型——译者注），有的身上纹有刺青，有的则“个性十足”。而库罗杰奥吉却对这些来信反应很积极：“太棒了！”

 “推出新产品后，我们会聘请电子游戏的绝对粉丝，为他们提供免费试玩，实行夜间营业，全都是为了确保顾客能在我们店里获得独一无二的体验，这种体验专门针对年轻的、狂热的男性游戏玩家。”库罗杰奥吉说，“无论这个客户群体当时光临商店时会不会掏钱买产品，店内体验都一定要全力针对他们，诱惑他们不断再次光临。”

漏斗管理

 漏斗管理是营销盈利能力管理的重要组成部分。客户漏斗展示了一个一无所知的潜在客户转变为长期目标消费者的整个过程。更重要的是它把试图推动顾客行为的营销活动和这些行为对公司财务结果的影响联系了起来，所以它对营销测量至关重要。

 好事达保险、惠普和希伯系统公司都把客户漏斗作为营销测量管理和全面客户体验的组成部分。好事达保险首席市场官乔·特里波迪讲述了好事达保险如何利用营销记分卡在保险费率、签保率、跨险种交叉销售和续保等重要环节来追踪客户进程的。他的平衡记分卡还扩展到了业务成果（成交量，回报率）、品牌健康程度（品牌熟知度、品牌考虑）以及客户体验（客户挽留率、忠诚度、推荐率）等更多领域。由于公司的广告旨在通过建立和顾客的情感纽带循序渐进地推动业务发展，所以对顾客的初次购买之前、之后的体验进行测量就显得尤为重要了。

 可以这样试想一下：通过所有的客户接触点，你的营销工作影响了一个精心选中的顾客细分群体，让他们很有可能购买你的产品。在漏斗管理的任意一个环节，顾客都有可能泄漏流失，而这种流失有可能是体验中的缺失造成的，比如没有获得某个关键信息，定位脱节，或者是产品和服务没有达到顾客的期望值。泄漏点数意味着公司丧失了盈利机会。营销测量体系必须设计得尽量的万无一失，能够发现漏斗中的泄漏点以便于采取新的营销策略，加强不同营销活动之间的整合，推动公司各方共同提升盈利能力。

发现内部客户

 一家知名的供热空调设备公司的前任首席市场官告诉我，他加入公司不久后就认识到，利润增长的真正机会在于客户体验所有权。为了在公司内部建立正确的测评体系，他努力促使公司更多地以客户为中心，并整合了销售和营销，全面管理品牌体验。

 从这位首席市场官身上我们可以学到很多，无论是经验还是教训。我认为引领他走向成功之路的有4个重要的步骤。开始，他从最明显的问题着手。他所在的企业是销售驱动型的公司，最主要的业务测评体系是以交易为基础，按照区域销售追踪产品，既没有预测性的测量手段显示当前绩效会如何影响未来销售，也没有基于顾客的测量手段显示VIP重要客户是谁。

 从表面看，现在的测量体系表明总体业务绩效不错。为了进一步了解顾客和销售流程，他通过会见高层销售主管，开展顾客焦点小组访谈，调查顾客满意度，发现近期购物的顾客从公司再次购买的可能性最多是50%，因此他认为现有的测量体系并没有真实反映公司的业务状况。

 于是，他仔细察看了所有的客户接触点以及销售流程，绘出了顾客体验路线图。他的销售策略从推销产品变成了销售针对顾客具体需求的销售解决方案。他还力图将公司重心从注重产品转向注重顾客。这些大手笔的举措意义重大，因为引入了新的测量体系后，就意味着现有的销售佣金计划必须改变。

 而改变前的最后一个关键步骤就是确定公司的关键测量指标，公司的核心指标做了调整以便和顾客测评指标保持一致。

 精心设计的顾客满意度测量手段与销售绩效挂钩。其他顾客驱动的测量手段还包括对顾客进入市场速度、客户体验所有权总成本、符合客户监管要求等方面的贡献。在所有的销售和营销团队当中还设立了共同的测量体系。现在，公司的销售和营销文化是不仅关注客户的满意度，还注重客户的客户的满意度。

细致分析

 考虑一下，目前公司营销测量能反映出客户漏斗进程中的哪些情况。如果你要测量品牌知名度和品牌考虑，你是否会把绩效作为一般目标群体的惟一测量指标？还是将非客户、新客户和忠诚的老客户区别对待？每组的绩效结果应该对公司业务的潜在成功有不同的影响。

如果你使用市场混合模型软件，那么对广告投入和销售总量的相关性是否满意？你是否深入研究了解新客户潜在的行为变化、购买模式的短期变化，或者是忠诚度的持续变化？你是否公正地调查过客户体验是如何影响未来的采购决策或者如何导致客户漏斗泄漏的？

 我建议你一直要深入分析到客户面，可以通过挖掘客户数据库、创造新的建模方式，开展定量调查研究，或者观察真实的客户体验等等方法来进行。随着对营销对潜在客户和现有客户行为影响程度的不断了解，你在制定未来战略战术、设计营销活动的财务结果上会更有优势。

                               （王欣红译）

When you think of marketing metrics, it’s not likely that the customer

       experience immediately comes to mind. The warm and fuzzy stuff isn’t as easy to calculate as your typical marketing measurements. Yet leading CMOs will tell you that customer experience is key when building solid marketing measurements.

At Dow Corning, for instance, the marketing organization has done a terrific job implementing Six Sigma methodologies—the discipline of improving predictability and precision through structured measurements and processes—to drive marketing success. CMO Scott Fuson describes Dow’s “voice of the customer” as the cornerstone of its process, guiding the company’s marketing measurements toward clearly defined critical customer requirements.

Measurement of such key performance indicators supports sales and marketing in developing stronger customer loyalty and proactively addressing issues that negatively impact long-term customer profitability. The results have been significant in both shifting Dow’s culture and generating more than 20 times the financial returns on external spending.

I recently cochaired a conference that featured more than a dozen CMOs from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, The Home Depot and Allstate. The topic: measuring marketing’s impact on the bottom line. As you would expect, these CMOs provided insight into their journeys toward greater profitability management. They talked about the difficulties in developing their measurement infrastructure and acknowledged the need for building accountability.

But the theme that was most prevalent—and least obvious in terms of relating to marketing measurements—was the importance of managing the customer experience.

When you think about it, how can you really manage marketing profitability without thinking about the customer experience? After all, for the vast number of companies, the real profits roll in not with new customer acquisition, but with repeat purchases from the most profitable customer segments.

Paul Koulogeorge, vice president of marketing at EB Games, an electronic game retailer with more than 2,000 stores worldwide, is attentive to customer experience numbers and knows that repeat business is critical to his company’s success. He tells a story of how the company occasionally receives letters from concerned parents complaining about how store employees had a Mohawk haircut, tattoos or “a bit of an attitude.”

Koulogeorge describes his typical reaction to these letters as: “Great!”

“We hire raving fans and include free trials and midnight openings for new games to ensure the store experience is unique and completely focused on the young male audience who are avid gamers,” says Koulogeorge.“The in-store experience has to be centered on this core audience and entice them to return again, whether they make a purchase or not at that time.”

In the Pipeline

Funnel management is a major component of marketing profitability management. A customer funnel lays out the progression from unaware prospect to long-term customer; it is central to marketing measurement because it creates the link between marketing activities intended to motivate customer behaviors and the impact of those behaviors on financial outcomes for the company.

Allstate, HP and Siebel all include the customer funnel as part of their management of marketing measurement and the overall customer experience. CMO Joe Tripodi describes how Allstate’s marketing scorecard tracks customer progression through key milestones such as quote rates, close rates, cross-sales and renewals. His Balanced Scorecard broadens to include business results (quote volume generated, ROI), brand health (awareness, consideration) and customer experience (retention, customer loyalty, referrals).?Given that Allstate’s advertising is intended to generate incremental business by building strong emotional bonds, measurements around the customer experience before and after the initial purchase are critical.

Think about it this way: Your marketing efforts through all of your touch points influence a select segment of customers to be more inclined to buy from you. At any point in the funnel, leakage can result from a single gap in the experience, such as a failure to communicate a critical piece of information, a disconnect in positioning, or delivery of products and services that fall below expectations. Leakage points represent lost profit opportunities. Your marketing measurements must be structured to uncover the leakage points in the funnel in order to guide new strategies, tighten integration across diverse marketing initiatives and motivate a common commitment to improving profitability.

Finding Your Inner Customer

The former CMO of a leading heating and air-conditioning equipment company told me that, shortly after joining the company, he recognized that the real opportunity for growing profits lay in taking ownership of the customer experience. His efforts to get the company to become more customer-centric, integrate sales and marketing, and manage the complete brand experience were largely driven by the work he did to establish the right metrics for the organization.

While there are many lessons to be learned from this CMO, I saw four key steps that really made the difference in his success. Initially, he took the approach of questioning the obvious. He came into a sales-driven organization where the primary business metrics were transaction-based and reflective, tracking products sold by region. There were no predictive metrics to indicate how current performance would affect future sales and no customer-based metrics to indicate who the top customers were.

On the surface, the current metrics indicated overall business performance was going well. To get a deeper understanding of the customer and sales process, he met with top sales executives, conducted customer focus groups and initiated customer satisfaction research. He discovered that the likelihood that recent customers would repurchase from his company was 50-50 at best, so he knew the current metrics were not telling the full story.

He then mapped out the customer experience with a close look at all touch points, including the sales process. The sales approach shifted from pushing products to selling customer-specific solutions. He also sought to move the company from being product-centered to being customer-centered. Such buy-in was significant, since the introduction of new metrics would mean a disruption in the current sales compensation plan.

The last critical step before initiating the transition was defining key metrics for the organization. Its core metrics were shifted to align with its customers’ success metrics.

A carefully constructed customer satisfaction measurement was designed to correlate with sales performance. Other customer-driven metrics included contribution to the customer’s speed to market, total cost of ownership and compliance with customer regulatory requirements. Common metrics were established across all sales and marketing groups. Now the company’s sales and marketing culture is attentive to not only customers’ satisfaction but also the satisfaction of its customers’ customers.

Analyze This

Consider what your current marketing metrics actually tell you in terms of the entire customer-funnel progression. If you are measuring awareness and consideration, do you look at your performance as a single metric across your broadly defined target audience? Or do you assess your position for noncustomers, new customers and loyal customers differently? The results for each group provide very different insight into your potential success.

And if you are running marketing mix modeling, are you content with the correlation between advertising spend and total sales volume? Or are you drilling down to uncover the underlying behavioral shifts by new customers, short-term shifts in buying patterns or sustainable shifts in loyalty? Are you completing the right research to identify how the customer experience influences future purchase decisions or leads to leakage from the funnel?

I encourage you to bring your analysis down to the customer level, whether it’s through mining your customer database, creating a new approach to modeling, running quantitative research studies or observing the actual customer experience. As you learn how your marketing influences the behaviors of prospects and customers over time, you’ll be better positioned to design future strategies and tactics and project the financial outcomes from those initiatives.