Know-How Exchange : Strategy

More and more my approach, especially for sectors like ICT (although I usually tend to break it down further eg ICT for Agriculture or ICT for Western Europe) is to use lifetime customer value as the metric for determining marketing effectiveness.

My rationale is this: ICT sales are largely consultative--meaning that they are sales rather than marketing events.

Marketing is involved in generating awareness but the sales force is the primary actor. This is not an academic distinction. But once the sale is made, marketing strategies and tactics come more into play in terms of continually touching the existing customer to keep them informed about upgrades, add ons, enhancements, complimentary products and so on . . . now marketing activities come far more into play and in a far more focused and targeted way.

So . . . . to make a short story long . . . you need to establish a methodology for determining average lifetime customer value, and set out a goal, where practical, to increase that average through smarter, stronger marketing activities. There are many methods for determining average LTV . . . I use a pretty straightfoward set of Excel calculations and there other ways to skin the cat as well