Customer Prospecting and Acquisition: A CLM Perspective
The business world has left behind the days when the only customers a business could have were the ones that chose to walk up to its doors. Today, a business needs to make itself available for the customer, and even then, it is up to the customer to make a choice. If the customer was ever a king, it is now.
Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a tool that has been making headlines in the business segment for various reasons, and the foremost among them is the fact that this model comprehensively simplifies every process related to the customer. While enterprises have always learnt to focus on products and services, CLM chooses to base strategies on the data collected and analyzed from the customer segment. While CLM gets to work on the various aspects of a customer lifecycle, we know where it all begins.
Customer prospecting and acquisition are the primary stages of a customer lifecycle and hence the most important too. After all, on which platform would your business strategies work in the absence of a solid customer base?
Customer prospecting and acquisition: The challenges
In a scattered global market, the realization ratio of customer prospecting and acquisition is increasingly difficult to acquire and measure. Added to this, the high levels of competition and the increased access and options the potential customer of today has, from his mail inbox to the text messages on his mobile.
How challenging is acquisition compared to retention in the actual selling phase? Well, the chances of selling a product or service to an existing customer is pegged at around 60-70% while these chances drop down considerably when it comes to selling to a new prospect – a low of 5-20%. Even so, 62% of marketers believe that customer acquisition is the primary focus of their marketing efforts and strategies, thus laying emphasis on the importance of this particular section of the customer lifecycle. This, in spite of the fact that 70% of the companies claim that customer retention is actually seven times cheaper than customer acquisition.
These statistics show that streamlining the customer prospecting and acquisition process is extremely necessary – to ensure a higher rate of success compared to industry standards and to keep the costs low. CLM comes to the rescue here, providing solutions that enhance the process.
CLM solutions that overcome these challenges
CLM offers multipronged tools so an enterprise can tackle the challenges of customer prospecting and acquisition effectively. Here is an insight.
Picking out promising prospects: Analytics, segmentation statistics and several other tools help a CLM structure to garner the most promising prospects to build a business’ customer base. Based on strategies such as referrals, online behavior and even the social media component, picking out prospective customers is an easier task with CLM in the mix.
Access based on multiple factors: A CLM structure allows a business to gauge several factors for customer prospecting and acquisition, ranging from the demographic component to the location of the customer in relation to the product or service.
Mobility: In a business world where mobility is an increasingly relevant factor, CLM offers a business access to relevant data, no matter where the business heads or relevant personnel may be located. In a global market, this advantage is quite an asset.
Real time feeds: Business decisions can no longer be held up until those popular weekly meetings. Real time data allows a business to provide changes and solutions that are quick decisions on paper and timely moves in the market.
Analysis and implementation: The data acquired through CLM channels can be stored and analyzed whenever required, thus helping business and channel heads to take decisions based on authentic data, instead of relying on changing market trends on shaky predictions.
At Conneqt Business Solutions, we implement a wide spectrum of CLM tools and strategies to enhance the customer prospecting and acquisition probability of your enterprise. Our CLM case studies are witness to the success we achieve in every sphere related to CLM and other business strategies, and will help you learn more on how Conneqt can help your business access the advantages of CLM too.