CHAPTER 3
Lead Information for Identifying Valuable Customers: The Recipe
What if I could tell you how to treat any one of your customers in order to make them all profitable—would that be of interest?
Before you start reading this chapter, you should keep the concept of this book in mind. Chapter 2 is aimed for readers with strategic responsibilities whereas Chapters 3 through 7 are written primarily for project managers and customer analysts. Chapters 1, 8, and 9 are relevant for both user groups. This chapter focuses on where customer analytics becomes reality in the form of concrete analytical methods, data sources, and so on.
We start this chapter by showing some of the activities that you must complete in order to make a customer value estimation, which basically is everything that must occur before you group customers into value-based segments. Customer value estimation is a tool that should be used when doing individual contract negotiations with customers; in contrast, value-based segmentation is an organization-wide standardized way of prioritizing customers. In the second half of this chapter, we show how value-based segmentation can be used as an organization-wide tool for optimizing the way you invest your resources in your customer base.
As demonstrated in Chapter 2 and described next, there are many reasons why you could focus on the estimation of the individual customer value:
- You are in a market where historically many discounts have been given and you are ...
