Your Key to Success: Customer Share, Not Market Share

Multi-Channel Sales Strategy... Do your customers use your web site?  If so, you will earn more revenue.  That's the message from firms like Staples, which pursues an aggressive click-and-mortar, multi-channel strategy.  While an average Staples customer spends $600 to $700 per year, a customer visiting a store and using a Staples catalog spends twice that amount.  But the real kicker is that a customer visiting a store, using a catalog AND accessing Staples online spends $2,500 per year -- almost four times as much as a store-only customer!  (New York Times, June 25, 2001)

And that tracks precisely the message in Peppers and Rogers' new book, One to One B2B in which they argue that "keeping and growing customers, over time, plays a more important role for business than simply acquiring new customers."   In fact, one-to-one marketing is much more important for B2B (business-to-business) than B2C (business-to-consumer) firms because of the complexity of the sales process.  Real estate owners, managers and brokers will all benefit by customizing their offerings to match the needs of their customers.  

So here are three questions: Can your firm send personal e-mail to each of the companies that you've done business with over the past year?  Can you send this message to multiple persons within a company?  Can you vary the message depending upon the role of the person within the company? ...  Wow, that's a tall order, and my guess is that very few firms could answer yes.  But I'll bet that as real estate markets slow, more and more firms will begin to build this kind of account management capability. ...  What tools and strategies are you adopting to grow your "customer share"?

Hint: Here's a first step.  Encourage your colleagues to sign up for the Dispatch or send me an Excel file, and I'll add your entire office.  Help me get to 11,000 subscribers.  Thank you!

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com