We Have “Customer Intelligence,” But Little Intelligent Selling/Marketing

I’m sorry for whining, perhaps I got up on the wrong side of the bed. Lately, I’ve been inundated with discussions on Customer Intelligence. PR folks are blindly sending me announcements from providers of Customer Intelligence solutions–though it seems they’ve applied no customer or any other intelligence in their outreach.

I’m deluged, every day, with emails and phone calls from sales people wanting to sell me Customer Intelligence solutions. Though, it’s hard to understand how, if those solutions were used in targeting me, I might be a prospect.

We have long had tools that provide varying capabilities of customer intelligence. Even the most rudimentary email marketing tools provide the ability to segment and target prospects/customers in very different ways.

Sadly, despite the capability/promise of these Customer Intelligence tools, applying them it takes Sales/Marketing Intelligence. We’ve long seen the capabilities of our tools, outstrip our ability to effectively use them.

Customer intelligence tools, or any tool is useless, if we don’t apply them thoughtfully and intelligently. But that takes work. It takes analysis, critical thinking, clear and purposeful customer engagement strategies.

Sadly, too often, organizations fail to do that basic work, instead choosing to blindly execute a volume/velocity strategy. Critical thinking in this world reduces down to, “If we didn’t get the response we wanted, we just double down on more volume and more touches…”

We have so much capability to understand and engage our prospects and customers in meaningful ways that create differentiated value. The problem is, we need to thoughtfully assess how we leverage and implement these capabilities in ways that are meaningful to them.

And that requires intelligent sales and marketing people.