Marketing
 
Many of my clients cannot afford to maintain a fully staffed marketing department; at best they employ a marketing assistant to assist one of the key executives who, as part of her or his job, has been given responsibility for marketing. My role is to strengthen this structure by acting as a part-time member of the management team.

I concentrate on developing programmes to achieve the following:
 
Building profitable business with and through existing customers

In almost every case the best way to generate additional profitable business is by working with existing customers to increase the retention rate and to convert them into "loyal" customers. Loyal customers buy more, give fewer problems and most importantly act as advocates for the company. The result of this work is that the customers' Lifetime Value increases dramatically.
 
Finding new profitable customers at the least cost per customer

Referrals from existing customers are the best source of new customers but contacting potential new customers by other means is also necessary. It is expensive to locate new customers using methods such as advertising or direct mail. It is important to develop procedures to measure the effectiveness of the content and delivery of each contact method so that the available financial and personnel resources can be invested in those methods that produce the best returns.
 

Maximising the profits generated from each customer

There are many factors that affect the present and potential margins generated by individual customers: pricing policy, size and frequency of orders, potential, product mix, payment history, and customer complexity - to mention a few. It's important to identify which customers produce the best results (or have the potential to do so) and to make sure that they are retained, and to identify which customers produce poor results and either improve their performance or eliminate them.