Marketing practice is in chaos: we’ve known that for quite some time.  What has been shrouded in uncertainty is what cutting edge marketing actually is.  The only generally agreed rule is,  customer centricity.

However,  the mist is clearing, and the way ahead is appearing – there are three additional rules.

1. Sales through service – not sales through promotion.

2. Engage through continuous conversations – don’t lobb messages at ‘customers’ over ‘organizational walls.

3. The business of business is social – the value of your network is now more important than your product USP.

Turning this into operational activity  means building innovative services in to transactions and value propositions,  understanding the customer’s experience in order to design a more engaging one, and harnessing new ‘social’ media and channels – face to face as well as technology.

When, presenting these ideas to a client’s marketing team in a workshop,  a young man sat back and said – so we’re going back to the values of the ‘corner shop’!  Exactly – technology has now given us the means of ‘scaling up the values and practices of the local, community, ‘corner shop’.  We’re leaving behind the era where cutting edge marketing was -  mass communication, quantitative market research, and customer acquisition.

It is the disruptive nature of the change to marketing that is causing the chaos – the way out is to rethink your business model (the way you make money),  revamp your capabilities and skill up  in the new thinking, new ideas and new practices.

Geological conditions often point to where diamonds may be found; similarly,  insight is more likely under certain market and organizational conditions.

According to research by Dr Brian Smith, it is more likely in areas of the market that are complex and/or turbulent.  So the current market for mobile communications may throw up more opportunities for actionable insight than the current market for confectionary.  Although in the latter case, turbulence in political and social trends is creating more insight opportunities. It is also found:

• when data from different sources is fused to create a big picture eg customer behaviour data, social trends, attitudinal market research, feedback and econometric models.

“Customer insight is lost down the cracks between different customer information departments” Julian Berry, the customer partnerships

• in cultures where thinking is valued and given time, and where different thinking styles are melded together  eg lateral thinking, emotional intelligence and problem solving,

Thinking is the means of productions.  You can no longer have the situation where one person thinks and the rest follow orders.

• in learning organizations,  where the insight behind the current strategy is recorded and understood,  and there is an organized process of scanning information, turning it into relevant knowledge and challenging what is known in order to distilling insight.

Have you worked out where the best place for insight is in your market and organization?

Much is being made this month of the birth anniversary of the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin on the 12th February.  So it is appropriate to look at how the new economic and social environment will affect CRM.

The climate of 2009 will see the nature of CRM mutate from ‘what customers give us’ to ‘what we give customers; and get back’. The idea of providing value for money to customer ‘tribes’ will begin to dawn as communities are explored.  A notion quite distinct from the previous view of CRM as individual cross-selling and retention for shareholder profits.

“2009 is a big year for CRM and a big deal. Transformational might actually be more than a political term.” Paul Greenberg

Customers well understand their ‘premium’ status, and those who give their time and money to companies will want more back to solve personal requirements. Companies who helpfully seek to alleviate the emotional and practical issues of recession will build trust. If companies continue to take the profit from customer knowledge, customers will just opt out of relationships.

Reciprocity for mutual benefit - not only between company and customer, but between customer and customer - is a fundamental part of this new thinking. Here, North America, with its strategic use of social software and experiential marketing, definitely leads the way.

Organisations that see themselves as ‘service platforms’ and build facilitative skills will have tuned into the right wave length. Which is why there is a growing emphasis on new business models utilising both technology and partnerships. Stephanie Seakins, principal consultant at OgilvyOne Hong Kong stresses that Asian companies “are now prepared to consider new thinking in order to recover lost reliability and credibility.”

Other signs of the CRM mutation are a change from ‘customer management’ to the more co-creative ‘customer engagement’, and the popularity of sales through service - where service is an entree, rather than an afterthought, that leads to the provision of a personalised solution. If you don’t listen more carefully to your customers your competitors and other consumers will.

According to Paul Greenberg, US author of CRM at the Speed of Light, CRM in 2009 is about understanding, involving and benefiting customers, and I would agree that that is a good summing up - as long as profitability is also added on the end. The secret of corporate sustainability is the constant balancing of benefit between company and customer.

Sales through service is a seductive little term that’s been around for a while which is about to get a big ‘heave-ho’ up the hype cycle. Its rise in the customer relationship lexicon comes from contact centres eager to become profit centres, but beware it’s simplicity,  the emphasis is on service not sales.

We were amazed to see that 9 in 10 call centres have introduced this practice, are in the process of doing so, or are currently considering making this shift. - CSO Insights, 2007 Survey on Call Centres

Sales through service revolves around a ‘conversation’, even if that is machine to human. That conversation can be kicked off by the company, but the approach is more often made by the customer when looking for a service.

Examples of StS are:-

• Key account managemers, whose role is to understand client’s needs and find solutions from his company. The best do this through personal conversation, like the IBM client manager for an airline who spends most of his time talking in the airline’s staff canteen.

• The Dyson field service team, who, whilst carrying out servicing in the customer’s home find out through conversation what issues and needs the customer has. They are well versed in all the products and connected to operations to put right any issues. Customers have been highly delighted with this ‘time saving’ service.

• John Lewis, who thought that leaving customers to browse was what they wanted, but customers thought staff were being aloof and unfriendly. After a 5 year sales through service programme, staff now acknowledge the customer, open up conversations, and close sales by matching product to need as closely as possible – even if it means selling a lower priced product than the customer had intended to buy.

• Amazon, who were founded on a sales through service philosophy.

• O2, who supply service contact centre staff with information on the customer’s risk of attrition, and the three best offers (sales or service) to make to that customer based on propensity modelling and the content of the call. Around 6% of their 50million annual calls now generate revenue, and customer satisfaction is reported to have risen.

All the examples emphasise that StS is not just about revenue generating sales, it is about exchanging value. That may be free upgrades, helpful advice, or customer care, in exchange for customer engagement, recommendations, valuable data – and yes, at some point sales.