Background: An equipment maintenance company had several dozen very large customers with a variety of products it could service. The company kept no central records of what equipment the customer owned or the customer's purchasing history or service level preferences. Factors driving service sales were not identified or collected.
Situation: Sales staff and budget reductions required a prioritization of customers for immediate growth opportunities.
Analysis: The existing process of market assessment was revealed to be a completely oral process. Each salesperson had their own system of tracking customer equipment history, purchasing history, and opportunities.
Improvement: Fourteen customer decision factors were identified from past customer surveys. The importance of each factor to an individual customer was rated by a group of employees familiar with that customer, with a score ranging from one through five. Concurrent with that rating was the group's opinion of their own strength in meeting each factor, also rated one through five. Summing the difference of squares created a score that reflected how well the vendor met each customer's needs. Periodic calls with an assigned script replaced the salesperson visits for the 25% of customers for whom the vendor was least capable of meeting the decision criteria.
A central Customer Master File was created, consisting of:
Result: Sales increased approximately 5% as salespeople were able to focus on the higher potential customer. Travel and Living expenses went down by nearly 15%. Customer satisfaction survey scores increased significantly.