There’s a lot to be said for developing a better understanding about the relative value of your customers over time. Of course, it allows you see where certain cost-to-serve elements are out of alignment. And, it can provide much greater focus for your customer retention and development efforts.
But it also enables a powerful competitive strategy…
You see, for some strategically-minded companies, it’s not enough to simply manage their own customer mix—these companies also want to “help” manage their competitors’ mix of customers.
Make no mistake, this desire isn’t borne out of some sense of altruism. Nor are these companies doing this in the interest of fairness or to level the playing field. And they certainly aren’t trying to share the wealth of proprietary insight and intelligence they’ve managed to amass about customers and prospects in the marketplace.
No, these companies are trying to get their competitors to destroy themselves.
These companies know that most of their competitors lack a deep and actionable understanding of customer profitability and prospect potential. And as a result, these competitors tend to have some fairly simplistic perspectives when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.
For example, to these more tactically-inclined competitors, securing new customers is never a bad thing. To them, a win is a win—good, bad, profitable, or unprofitable, it doesn’t really matter. Queue the company-wide emails and pizza parties in the break-room!
These competitors will never once consider the possibility that they just won a customer that their opponent was perfectly happy to lose. They’ll never think for a moment that maybe their opponent knew something that they didn’t. They’ll never wonder if maybe—just maybe—this customer is more of an anchor than a sail.
And, they’ll never realize—until it’s too late—that they just won a battle that will eventually cost them the war.
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