So you have scientifically classified your customer base and prospect pool, using not only sales or margin contribution from each customer over past 12 months (so-called Current Value) but you have also used data, estimates or proxies for each customer’s total sales or margin equivalent for all products/services within the categories in which you compete (so-called Potential Value).  As a result, you now have a defensible case to label every customer by class, eg Tier 1, 2, 3 … Gold , silver , bronze … A, B C, etc.  You are on your way to best practice B2B sales management system.

Whatever terminology you use, your bottom end class will , depending on your level of scientific granularity, be characterised by two sub-populations…those customers whose CV does not even reach the break even margin cut-off representing the cost of minimum face to face account management from the sales team.  And then those whose CV surpasses this level but does not reach the CV threshold value representing the lowest tier customers to be regularly visited and account managed by the sales team.

The question that should start to rattle around now as you consider this from a sales management system perspective is how best to customer relationship manage these two emerging subsets of your cellar dweller customers?  There are no absolutes in answering this.  One guideline to apply is to manage the lower of these two sub-populations responsively… equip your customer service or internal sales team to take and handle their incoming enquiries and/or orders if necessary. For the upper of these two sub-populations … equip your internal sales team or outsourced telesales team to make programmed outbound sales, promotional and/or order generation calls.

Click here read further into “How to develop your B2B sales management system with PV (customer potential value) proxy models – and why you MUST! (part 4)“