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SmartPlans LLC 
Telephone (203) 947-6909  Email info@smartplans.com

The Profit Smart Customer LTV Profile and Analysis tells you specific characteristics about your customers that you might not learn any other way. To create a BtoB Customer Profile, we first computer match your customers to the Dun & Bradstreet national database of all businesses. This provides the basic information including your customers. Their primary line of business, multiple SIC’s, who owns them, sales volume, number of employees, years in business, and other baseline data.  

Then, we add to and strengthen the baseline data with enriched data from highly specialized sources. We consult closely with you to select the best data for your specific business, strategies and customers. The enriched data covers a wide range of information, such as specific people’s names and titles to economic forecasts and risk of doing business indicators. Other examples are the number and type of computers and network your customer uses, whether they have a 401K plan, and even how much they spend in certain business categories. If you sell to retail stores, we can tell whether a local chain store manager is authorized to purchase.

After the data building is complete, we analyze and evaluate the entire customer base and segments from many different viewpoints. We also research the customers who stopped buying for patterns to predict and influence future customer attrition and retention.

The result of our analysis and research is a comprehensive Customer Profile Analysis Report in three sections:

1. The Customer Profile

2. Strategic Program Recommendations

3. A New Prospect Targeting Plan.

The Customer Profile is the basic data section that provides overall information about the nature and character of your customers. It tells you how many customers you have in each SIC and size category and compares different tables nationally and regionally. It shows your customer penetration by major segment group. This facts section, and our analysis of your business sales methods, is the foundation for our recommendations.

Marketing communications sell more effectively

Today, the business software most in demand is CRM for Customer Relationship Management. Large CRM systems for contact intensive businesses, like banks, manage all communication channels and are major undertakings to install and use. An important objective of a CRM system is to implement segment messaging strategies and one-to-one personalization, rather than one-to-everyone messages. After all, every customer is different and responds better when they are treated individually.

The Customer Profile provides the useful knowledge and relevant details about your customers to craft meaningful, personalized messages. Your communications become more relevant, focused and effective. Even your general advertising and printed brochures can work harder. The Profile gives you knowledge and details about customers to create communications that hit their sweet spot.

Sell more to existing customers with targeted strategies

For most businesses, existing customers repeat sales are more profitable than new prospects sales. Customer sales are higher and the cost of sales is lower. The Strategic Program Recommendations are special methods and campaigns to increase sales among existing customers. We identify the prime targets by analyzing the customer segments of highest, middle, and lowest sales. Among the lowest sales segment, we identify which specific customers have the same profile characteristics as the highest sales segment. Then, we apply information we learned from discussions with you and our specialized direct marketing knowledge to recommend strategic programs to increase sales. We also analyze the segment of customers who stopped buying to make strategic recommendations for identifying and retaining customers at risk of leaving you in the future.

Furthermore, using the Customer Profile Analysis Report, we can help you define overall company marketing strategies and select a CRM system for managing communications. After strategies are set, we may find that simple, personalized E-mails using Microsoft Office 2000 is better (and much less expensive) than a high-end CRM system using elaborate filtering technology personalization. But whatever platform you use, it will work better, faster and more productively when you create a CRM strategy using a current Customer Profile.

Find the best sales prospects

Even if you keep every customer forever, you probably need new customers to grow. The Prospect Targeting Plan helps you reach new prospects. We create the Targeting Plan using the Customer Profile as a matching tool to find similar businesses in the D&B database that do not buy from you now. We can even focus the targeting to select on the same characteristics as your current highest sales customers. When these prospects start buying, you know the life time value of future sales (and marketing ROI) will be maximized.

A Customer Opportunity Analysis is affordable and quickly adds sales

If a Big Five Consulting company or advertising agency creates a Customer Profile, the project usually takes months to complete and is quite costly. These firms have layers of account service people, project managers, and management. (Many times an outside consultant like myself is needed to get the actual work done.) We specialize in creating Customer Profiles and marketing strategies. We are fast, affordable, and work very closely with you to maximize the sales and profit of your marketing investments.

Our business experience comes from years of experience working as Marketing Managers, VPs and Presidents of leading direct marketing companies. These companies were known for advanced customer management methods long before the term CRM was invented. We created BtoC and BtoB Customer Profiles and strategies for customer bases ranging in size from 800 to 2,000,000 customers. Our targeting plans range from simple prospect list rentals to sophisticated predictive systems using mathematical models and scoring.

The project fee for a BtoB Customer Profile Analysis Report (Customer Profile, Strategic Program Recommendations, and Prospect Targeting Plan) varies by customer list size, but is very reasonable. To generate the Analysis, we spend a day getting to know your business, customer data, and sales methods. Approximately two weeks after we receive your computer system data, you receive the Analysis Report. After you study it, we spend a half-day with you reviewing everything and helping you evaluate implementations.

We are working consultants and can help you put anything we recommend into practice. We are skilled in all forms of advertising communications, strategies and tools including E-mail and Web-based selling. We know special techniques with minimal marketing cost to generate sales at a high profit percent. We also use special software and methods for marketing decision making based on measuring the P&L’s of marketing investments.

The Customer Profile Analysis pays itself back in many ways

The Customer Profile Analysis Report package brings you multiple benefits, because it addresses the heart of your business: the customers. The benefits include:

1. Sales increase by applying new Customer Profile knowledge and strategies.
2. Customer retention improves.
3. Communications to customers are more relevant and focused.
4. Precise targeting identifies new prospects.
5. New methods are learned from cross-pollinate successful techniques from other industries.
6. Marketing expenses are lowered many times because communications are more focused, targeted and efficient.
7. If you are contemplating an acquisition, matching your Customer Profile to the acquisition quantifies and helps assess the real customer overlap and sales synergies.

There are many ways you can measure the value of the Customer Profile Analysis Report package. One is the dollar sales value of a “Top Ten� customer likely to stop buying from you that the Customer Profile identifies as “at-risk� and prevents the loss. Another is the value of a 5% sales increase, a realistic results from using the new strategy recommendations. (This gain, on a daily basis, also represents the lost opportunity cost for every day you delay in acquiring and using a Customer Profile.)

To evaluate the specific potential for you, please contact us. If we may ask some key questions about your products, customers and sales patterns, we will give you a preliminary results outlook very promptly.

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