There is a direct correlation between sales growth and the profitability as well as viability of a company.
The business model that delivers this is the strategic triangle, the 3Cs or the interplay between the company, the customer and competition.
The critical and fundamental component of this “trio” is the customer. Today, the customer has become the superb engine for revenue growth and prosperity. The customer is distinct, reliable and extremely value-adding for growing business. It has replaced the “alpha” salesmen and women in order of critical importance.
This hitherto hidden wealth has become the crucial audience and the magical touch-point for productivity and profitability. It also helps, most importantly, in expense reduction as a veritable means for profitability and growth.
ROR or maximizing return on relationship has become an indispensable component of ROI, return on investment. Customer advocacy now enables customers to prospect for companies, speed-up product/service adoption, leverage and exploit the power of the social media and engenders creativity and innovation for product development.
Let us further examine how customers and businesses are working together to achieve what the company cannot do alone. It builds solid and “rich” customer communities.
According to a Harvard Business Review publication titled “The Hidden Wealth of Customers” by Bill Lee: we can unlock the value of customers’ relationships by nurturing advocates, influencers and contributors by building them into customer communities.
Do you know that customer community effectively facilitates the building of brands, creating marketing gravity generating leads and improving marketing development strategies? It has become the most innovative and fundamental relationship building in commerce.
It is impossible for the social media to forge people into cohesive beneficial associations that can get meaningful work of generating and promoting sales patronage done.
Bill Lee describes those customer communities as “inclusive meritocracies formed around a common set of values.”
They embrace members empowerment over hierarchy, value-education over traditions and welcome, wholeheartedly, diversity as a source of creativity. These communities constitute the most natural way in which associations are developed and fundamental social building blocks “safely” and effectively put together.
Also, Yale School of Management recently published a book titled “Connected” by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. This is an advanced study on building highly beneficial consumer communities. According to the authors, individuals constrained by geography, socio-economic status and technology are “built” together through the “mathematics and science of networks.” This can be critically exploited for positive contributions to business and life, just like engineers study networks of power stations, neuro-scientists study networks of neurons and geneticists study the networks of genes.
Since these big connections are made up of thinking human beings who make decisions, the collective has the uniqueness of life of its own just like the computer or even the brain. The collective known as the human super organism or interconnected social networks, can therefore be very useful in a transcendental manner than the individual.
In other words, all the things that make us uniquely human can be managed as one to impact emotions, sex, health, politics, money evolution and technology. We can create, sustain and strengthen collective goals through this superorganism. Individuals in this collective exhibit the following characteristics; they pull together, they have sufficient empowerment, act with trust and also have commitment to one another. They therefore constitute touch-points or points of engagement on website social pages, lead magnets, email sequences, customer support groups, blog posts, point of sales, positioning packaging and collateral groups.
These superorganisms grow, change, reproduce and survive. Values flow from them. They touch and impact lives, transcend individual efforts as well as have unbelievable local and global consequences. They are extremely rich and cohesive goldmines of data and information for brand strategy or strategic steps in evolutionary customer journey and brand experience.
You can achieve active candidates lists from them, constantly and regularly expand the list, build trust, belief for products/services and opportunities, expand your horizon on purpose. You can make very useful connection with them and of course, raise incredible awareness on your business by getting out of your very little circle. They, because of their immense worth, have made customers assets and phenomenal objects for strategic focus.
Consumer-centric marketing must use them to constantly choose and segment target markets in homogeneous environments. This pool of connected individuals readily provides opportunities for getting, keeping and growing customers.
One thing that this strategic “connected” pool makes available with ease is the opportunity to maneuver. We now have a rich pool inside which very effective consumer navigation can be made and traction for productivity and profitability achieved within the shortest possible time.
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