Customer Cultivation
Use CRM to Grow Sales and Profits

In today’s business environment, companies seeking growth in current markets have the choice to focus on current or new customers. Making the most with current customers is the best first action to placing your company on a long term path for growth. Just like you don’t want to add more production to an inefficient process, you don’t want to add new customers prior to maximizing the value from the ones you already have.  Focusing on customers means focusing on growing profits.

Several core processes form the foundation

• Analysis – identify best most profitable customers, products they purchase, future needs
• Dialogue – motivate and enable 2-way communication timed to meet needs
• Delight – beyond customer satisfaction, defect-free products/services and more
• Relationship – recognition, rewards, referrals

Competitive advantage is achieved when your whole team aims to serve your customers and learn from them.  Your company grows by virtue of being the best at serving your customers and making a reasonable profit doing so.  That requires -

• Market knowledge – size, growth, competitive profile, new developments
• Customer knowledge – organized, accessible info about customer transactions & contacts
• Sales management – account management, relationship-building, cross-selling
• Customer delight – satisfaction, perceptions

There are 4 key tools the organization should adopt to enable and sustain Customer Cultivation as part of the culture -

1. Market research – for intimate market knowledge
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system – for sharing customer knowledge
3. Sales/Marketing system – for relationship building by the sales team
4. Customer research – for intimate customer knowledge/insight

Growth Roadmap

The MMTC Customer Cultivation Initiative integrates tools and technologies shown in the Growth Action Plan below as a proven means to success. A company's Growth Roadmap can be highly customized based on current application of the tools, technology and skills. The idea is to answer many questions you have about your customers and how to benefit and grow from them:

• How do I learn more about how our customers use our products/services?
• What are our company’s real competitive advantages?
• How do I identify which customers are most profitable and grow their business?
• How do I motivate customer referrals?
• What’s the best way for a customer to tell us when they have an idea for improvement?
• How do we win a greater share of my customer’s total business?
• How do I learn what matters most/least to our customers? 
• If an employee learns something about a customer how does he share it with all our employees?

For more information on MMTC's Customer Cultivation program, contact us at 888-414-6682 or via email at inquiry@mmtc.org.