CRM, look in the rear-view mirror!

Customer Mateship Management has been defined in another post (here). In this post, I like to go back in time and have a look at classic Marketing, Sales, Support and CRM processes from customer life cycle point of view. Having these basics defined, helps me explain much easier why we need another stage in customer journey. Looking back to go forward!

In traditional customer life cycles, there are four main processes (*): 

• Marketing: The main purpose is selecting prospects from target market and turning them to leads or potential customers. (Target Market -> Lead)
• Sales: The primary objective is completing customer acquisition process and changing leads to actual customers. ( Lead -> Customer)
• Support: The main objective of this process is keeping customers satisfied by supporting sold products and services (Customer)
• CRM: Having CRM solutions implemented for the business, customers can continue their journey to the new stages, where more value provided for them:

1. In First stage, CRM solutions has been designed to turn customers to loyal customers, who return to business to buy new products and prefer using the same services even though there are similar (or even cheaper or better) products or services from competitors. (Target Market-> Loyal Customer)
2. From mid 90s, having loyal customers is not the end of the road for a business, they had to try to turn at least a number of loyal customers to advocates, who consider business as their partner and promote their products and services without expecting ordinary partnership benefits. Having advocates helps businesses to extend their markets and acquire new customers without expensive marketing projects. (Target Market -> Advocates)

You can see that the first three processes are limited to particular stages. However, CRM covers the whole customer life cycle from the beginning to the end, if we can define an "end" for customer relationship.

source: http://www.clicktools.com/what-is-clicktools/information-to-crm/

As I said before, having advocates is not the end of this cycle anymore and it is time to define new stages, which I proposed "Mateship" as a new final stage. To learn about mateship, please read my previous note in this subject(here)

Having all basic concepts covered, we can focus on the road ahead or CMM concept and model. I will answer to the question "Why a business needs mates?" in the next topic.

To be continued...


(*) Marketing, Sales, Support and CRM process have other objectives and responsibilities that in our context there is no need to cover them.