Management Strategy

Essentially, the Customer Engagement Life-cycle sets out the journey that your customer will go through from start to finish. It looks like this:

The above diagram is important as it illustrates several key points about the journey that your customers will take with you. First of all, it shows that your relationship with the customer starts long before the Sales Rep takes a sales call and it lasts long after completion of the first deal. Secondly, the journey is – or at least should be – iterative, leading to repeat sales and referrals to other customers.

Finally, depending on the size of your business, different parts of the process may be handled by different people, teams or departments. This approach should allow you to break down your CRM strategy into three bite-sized chunks – Marketing, Sales and Customer Service.

Plan to Nurture the Whole Relationship

The Customer Engagement Life-cycle is a useful concept for helping you to work out what your relationship with your customer really is at any point in time. Far too many businesses attempt to go from Know straight to Buy, ignoring the fact that a relationship takes time to build and the customer probably has a different agenda to you.

Note that I’ve emphasised the word “whole” above. Too many businesses view “nurture” as the campaign that you assign all of your cold leads to, so that you can send them that quarterly newsletter. That’s all well and good, but what about those customers who are in the late stages of buying, or those that have already bought from you three years ago? Don’t those relationships also need some nurture?

If you understand (or at least can accept for now) that this “Need, Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Complete, Repeat, Refer” life-cycle is probably the process that your customers actually follow when they build a relationship with you then your life in terms of setting a CRM strategy just became a lot easier. You now only have two simple goals to worry about:

• Understanding the stage that your prospects and customers have already reached

• Working out the easiest way to move them along to the next stage

I call this defining your Customer Relationship Nurture Plan. Once you’ve got that figured, all you need to do is implement a set of processes to follow that plan and then choose a tool that will help you to manage, track and measure all of the above.