B2B Resource Allocation: Optimizing your CRM investment and coverage effectiveness, prt 2

If you watch the kids, they seem to be able to do everything simultaneously and to do so 24/7.
The rest of us have limitations. In business there are resource limitations - we can't do or be everything for everyone.
We live and work in a time in which each of us faces allocation constraints pertaining to use of money, time, and people. Furthermore, the competitive arena we operate in is wholly unlike that of just a few years ago.
Consider this quandary: If you have a million dollars, where do you invest it to maximize your return? How do you approach solving the problem and answering the question correctly.
[Personally, I always liked Len Schlesinger's 2 X 2 matrix he termed "the Marketing Optimization Model"].

The marketer’s Holy Grail is to get the right message, product, and/or service to the right person, at the right time, in the format that customers have indicated they prefer. In fact, this is the primary goal of an optimal allocation model.
An optimal coverage model would also:
• Support a retention – and loyalty-focused, customer-based business design
• Make effective use of the organization’s limited resources
• Make investment decisions based on reciprocal commitment or mutual interdependence of your Ideal, Best customer and channel partners
• Establish integration and synergy across the three functional areas responsible for servicing the customers: i.e., product marketing, sales, and customer service.
Stepping Back: there are two reasons that customer relationship Marketing is so powerful when implemented properly. First, the firm focuses on acquiring the Ideal, best customer, and, second, the company manages its customers as a portfolio of assets – investing its limited resources proportionately to the level of commitment that customers and prospects make to the organization.
My contention is that there is a fairly well-defined path the enterprise can take when analyzing and assessing its allocation challenges. This path is mapped out through the use of the tools, templates, and planning by the data-based, relationship marketer.
Resource allocation must also bring to bear the relationship marketer’s theories about managing the point of contact, managing the customer across their lifecycle of interactions with the company, managing the value of the customer portfolio, and managing knowledge across the company and across the value chain. Fred Reichheld called it “the customer corrridor, graphically illustrated above. In effect, this metaphor illuminates the challenge of resource allocation relative to your customers’ lifecycle relationship with your firm.
Specifically, there is a spectrum, or “continuum of relevant customer contact activities,” that needs to be mapped to create an optimal and effective resource allocation model.
The first step many organizations will need to undertake is to conduct an audit of their marketing, sales, and customer service activities so as to surface the key interdependencies between them, as well as with site logistics. Think of it as “the programming” phase of dealing with an architect. The Master Builder will want to know how you want to live and function in the new space. This is a reflective exercise. The goal is to be in a position to produce cooperation and coordination across and between all functional areas that deal with customers and their issues. We need to:
• Make visible and apparent where integration between the functional areas is necessary
• Make apparent where non-discretionary accountability must reside
• Revisit the current account selection process
• Revisit key account management practices
• Objectively verify whether an account is relationship – or transaction-oriented
• Assess the skills, training, and behavioral components of the relevant customer contact people in each of the functional areas
• Assess degree of cooperative, cross-functional teamwork along with supporting account planning, communications, and contact management tools