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

Resource Allocation for the B2B CRM Practitioner

It’s no longer a secret. The evidence is compelling. It is well documented, both at the academic level and in practice. Enterprise-wide Customer Relationship Management (CRM and CEM) – when properly implemented - can achieve impressive results. The primary results:
• Increased sales Effectiveness and Efficiency
* Increased Profits
* Increase in customers served and products placed within customer accounts
• Increased Customer/Employee Satisfaction
• Decreased cost-to-serve
The second “secret” is that virtually every organization has limited resources: People, Money, Time.
Optimization of the respective coverage models - sales, customer service, marketing and channels - still has not been exhaustively studied. The models and tools of the eCRM practitioner provide almost a dot-to-dot like template with which to assure coverage optimization and hence optimal use of the firm’s limited resources.
The third “secret” is that our customers represent a portfolio of assets that we must proactively manage in order to maximize shareholder and stakeholder value.
Whether the resource is time, money, or people, the optimal allocation of resources is a critical issue, a critical challenge, for almost every business organization. Since no enterprise has unlimited resources, it is worth investigating how customer relationship marketing models can provide a critical key to unlock the answer to this problem.

In no functional area of business is this resource allocation problem more true than in sales, marketing, and servicing customers and/or prospects. In fact, the search for the optimal allocation of resources in these functional areas is something akin to the search for the Holy Grail.


In business-to-business marketing the characteristics of the target customer group can commonly be depicted visually as a pyramid, with the largest accounts at the top of the pyramid, and moving down through a group of middle accounts trying to grow larger and support the pyramid are "minor" accounts.
The pyramid graphically shows how, in most mature, competitive industries, the sales function (together with service and product marketing) is faced with:
• Price and margin pressure at the top of the pyramid, where the size of the targeted accounts is the largest
• Margin (cost-to-serve) pressures at the bottom of the pyramid, where the largest number of accounts exist
• An eventual overabundance of competition – once all your competitors realize where you are making your money - in the middle, where the most profit is initially available
• A shrinking middle layer

If, as has been suggested for the last 15 plus years, we elevate Customer Relationship Management, as core strategy, and Sales to a strategic boardroom issue, we can create the greatest synergy by applying the models of customer relationship marketing, customer insight, and knowledge management to the problem of resource allocation.
One Observation
In addition to the five key inevitable outcomes that result from a well-executed customer relationship marketing competence, other implicit problems are remedied:
• Increased sales
• Increased service levels
• Increased customer and employee satisfaction
• Increased customer and employee retention
• Decreased cost to serve
• Faster product introduction, i.e., speed to market
• More controlled management of product migration by targeted segment
• Decreased cost of doing business as a percentage of sales, i.e., sales expense to revenue ratio (E:R)
The Thesis
The planning tools, operational models, feedback loops, and performance metrics of relationship marketing
are templates that create optimal resource allocation and coverage models. What we have created and replicated across multiple firms in the B2B realm is a roadmap for optimizing the allocation of resources, together with the attendant analysis and implementation.

on the way to language

When the salesman starts talking do your eyes glaze over; do your ears close a little; do you begin to daydream about your kids or... ? What happens when you listen, or watch, the news? Do you change channels; perhaps watch Veggie Tales with your kids, or even better: turn off the TV? Is Language alive. Do metaphors enhance our lives? Does Language reveal or hide? Persuade or do damage? Or , as always is the answer "It depends"?

My concern here, though, is the language of daily living.

I confess that I may have been pulling my own Rip Van Winkle. Driven to learn, to make money, to nurture my children, and to find balance, I find that i wasn't fully engaged with the world. Particularly the way in which we of the world communicate, use language to shape our world.

Never in my lifetime has the use of language emerged with such singular and dramatic force: a force for change; a force to bring about unification; a force for getting truth out to everyone; a force for lies, distortion, and manipulation.


Over the past two years, I've noticed that the level of disinformation and actual yelling has increased if one listens to cable and other news' outlets. The business of government has been forced to a sluggish, muddied, grimy cesspool more like paralyzed sewage rather than a fountain of living inspiration and truth.

I've gone back to school to work on a PhD - across a number of disciplines: literature, philosophy, and business (or, history & business). I wanted to build on my business acumen and successes while improving my own ability to create, think, learn, and lead. I have read quite a bit of Heidegger. There is so much more to read, digest, and absorb before I can begin to try to share it.

I have found out that Language is one part of what makes us human. I have learned that there is something called "Fixed English" another version called "Free English" and that there is a still newer version called "Words that Work".

I've tried to remain silent and listen over these last few months. I haven't wanted to pollute the public discussion by yelling, which in today's world seems to have emerged as the WAY by which communicators get their message across.

One thing I have come to realize is that Language is the key to unlock the potentiality of the world again. Language creates world. Language allows the unhiddenness of truth to become unconcealed. In order for Language to retain and have the full force of its power to create world, we must engage in authentic listening. Not something we American are good at.

Which takes me back to the salesman whose elevator speech has just made my eyes glaze over and my head to nod.

I really do wish I had answers. I know that I believe that I do - at least in the world of B2B CRM strategy, sales, marketing, and a few other areas try some authentic listening for myself and for all of us. We then can use Language to create world.

Metaphors to sell by

Over the last 18 months have you stopped and noticed how often the news' media brings up how one party or the other has availed itself of an advisor, a word-smithing advisor, who can teach that Party's spokespeople how to achieve its ends through language, through choosing "words that work."

Now stop for a second and think back to all those "lessons" you've been given over the years telling you what to say under what circumstances in order to break down any possible existing or lingering resistance when it comes to your trying to sell something to a potential, existing, or former customer. In other words, how to sell.

Were the words you were taught to use in order to be a better salesman "words that work"? And, did they work long term allowing you to achieve loyal, raving customers, or were they transactional wins that left you having to start from scratch each time you dealt with this buyer? Is there even the possibility that such a difference might exist?

Now stop and think about it for a minute. Have you stopped recently; listened to the language of your sales force and its leaders? How do they frame the exchange of value - product, services, information, etc - that takes place between your company and your intended customers?

(Another complementary issue to contemplate is the fact that the language used by sales, by marketing, your call center personnel, and the other functional areas that are customer-facing may not be the same).

The evidence likely will point to the use of rational argument and battle metaphors. If that is the case, does the language we use when talking about customers, prospects, and our slice of the pie undermine our long-term effectiveness and hurt our ability to form long-term, loyal relationships?

Is the language , the metaphors we use when we sell, unwittingly obscuring a self-reinforcing attitude and set of behaviors that is hurting our long term customer retention efforts?

Are we phrasing our marketing efforts as "campaigns" - miniature battles? When we "penetrate" an account are we blasting through the ramparts in order to take prisoners? and so on.

If we are seeking loyal relationships with our best, core customers, what language should we use, what metaphors should we sell by?

Cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff argue strongly that our metaphors are embodied. Does such embodiment insist that the net new creation of metaphors is highly unlikely, nearly impossible? Let us know your thoughts and let's explore this together.