Top Skills Every Advertising Media Buyer Needs in the USA

Strategic CRM is focused upon the development of a customer-centric business culture. This culture is dedicated to winning and keeping customers by creating and delivering value better than competitors. The culture is refl ected in leadership behaviours, the design of formal systems of the company, and the myths and stories that are created within the fi rm. In a customer-centric culture you would expect resources to be allocated where they would best 

enhance customer value, reward systemsto promote employee behaviours that enhance customer satisfaction and retention, and customer information to be collected, shared and applied across the business. You would also expect to fi nd the heroes of the business to be those who deliver outstanding value or service to customers. Many businesses claim to be 

customer-centric, customer-led, customer-focused or customer-oriented, but few are. Indeed, there can be very few companies of any size that do not claim that they are on a mission to satisfy customer requirements profi tably. Customer-centricity competes with other business logics. Philip Kotler identifi es three other major business orientations: product, production, and selling. 8 Product-oriented businesses believe that customers choose products with the 

Best quality performance design 

or features. These are often highly innovative and entrepreneurial fi rms. Many new business start-ups are product-oriented. In these fi rms it is common for the customer’s voice to be missing when important marketing, selling or service decisions are made. Little or no customer research is conducted. Management makes assumptions about what customers want. The outcome is that sometimes products are overspecifi ed or overengineered for the 

requirements of the market, and therefore too costly for many customers. However, marketers have identifi ed a subset of relatively price-insensitive customers whom they dub ‘ innovators ’ who are likely to respond positively to company claims about product excellence. Unfortunately, this is a relatively small segment, no more than 2.5 per cent of the potential market.  Production-oriented businesses believe that customers choose lowprice products. 

Consequently, these businesses strive to keep operating costs low, and develop low-cost routes to market. This may well be appropriate in developing economies or in subsistence segments of developed economies, but the majority of customers have other requirements. Drivers of BMWs would not be attracted to the brand if they knew that the company only sourced inputs such as braking systems from the lowest-cost supplier. Sales-oriented 

Businesses make the assumption

that if they invest enough in advertising, selling, public relations (PR) and sales promotion, customers will be persuaded to buy. Very often, a sales orientation follows a production orientation. The company produces low-cost products and then has to promote them heavily to shift inventory. A customer or market-oriented company shares a set of beliefs about putting the customer fi rst. It collects, disseminates and uses customer and competitive information 

develop better value propositions for customers. A customer-centric fi rm is a learning fi rm that constantly adapts to customer requirements and competitive conditions. There is evidence that customer-centricity correlates strongly with business performance.10 Many managers would argue that customer-centricity must be right for all companies. However, at different stages of market or economic development, other orientations may have stronger 

appeal.Marketing automation (MA) applies technology to marketing processes. Campaign management modules allow marketers to use customer-related data in order to develop, execute and evaluate targeted communications and offers. Customer targeting for campaigning purposes is, in some cases, possible at the level of the individual customer, 

Enabling unique communications

to be designed. In multichannel environments, campaign management is particularly challenging. Some fashion retailers, for example, have multiple transactional channels including free-standing stores, department store concessions, e-tail websites, home shopping catalogues, catalogue stores and perhaps even a television shopping channel. Some customers may be unique to a single channel, but most will be multichannel prospects, if they 

strategies and evaluation of performance requires a substantial amount of technology-aided coordination across these channels. Event-based, or trigger, marketing is the term used to describe messaging and offer presentation to customers at particular points in time. An event triggers the communication and offer. Event-based campaigns can be initiated by customer behaviours or contextual conditions. A call to a contact centre is an example of a customer-

initiated event. When a credit-card customer calls a contact centre to enquire about the current rate of interest, this can be taken as indication that the customer is comparing alternatives and may switch to a different provider. This event may trigger an offer designed to retain the customer. Examples of contextual events are the birth of a child or a public holiday. Both of these indicate potential changes in buyer behaviour, initiating a marketing response. Event-based marketing also occurs in the business-to-business context. The event may be a 

Conclusion

change of personnel on the customer-side, the approaching expiry of a contract or a request for information (RFI). Sales-force automation Sales-force automation (SFA) was the original form of operational  SFA systems are now widely adopted in business-to-business environments and are seen as ‘ a competitive imperative ’12 that offers ‘ competitive parity ’ . 13 SFA applies technology to the management of a company’s selling activities. The selling process can be decomposed into a number of stages, such as lead generation, lead qualifi 

cation, needs identifi cation, development of specifi cations, proposal generation, proposal presentation, handling objections and closing the sale.  software can be confi gured so that it is modelled on the selling process of any industry or organization. Automation of selling activities is often linked to efforts to improve and standardize the selling process. This involves the implementation of a sales methodology. Sales methodologies allow sales team 

members and management to adopt a standardized view of the sales cycle and a common language for discussion of sales issues.Sales-force automation software enables companies automatically to assign leads and track opportunities as they progress through the sales pipeline towards closure. Opportunity management lets users identify and progress 

opportunities to sell from lead status through to closure and beyond, into after-sales support. Opportunity management software usually contains lead management and sales forecasting applications. Lead management applications enable users to qualify leads and assign them to the appropriate salesperson. Sales forecasting functionality generally use transactional histories and salesperson estimates to produce estimates of future sales. Contact