Leveraging CRM Insights To Improve Demand Generation Effectiveness By William E. Duffy, iKnowtion

Nearly 30 years have passed since Ted Leavitt, a noted Harvard Business School professor, extolled the virtues of focusing on customers as fundamental to building and growing profitable businesses in his book, The Marketing Imagination. Since that time, most Fortune 1000 companies have invested heavily in aggregating and analyzing customer information to gain insight into everything from product and channel preferences to the lifetime value of customers who use their services or buy their products. In recent years this practice has come under the heading of Customer Relationship Management or CRM.

This focus on CRM raises the essential question: Why haven't more marketers leveraged their CRM learnings to improve the effectiveness of demand spending?

Fundamental Barriers
There are consistent reasons why marketing managers have been slow to apply customer knowledge more aggressively. Two barriers often cited are, first, company structure and marketing execution and, second, the inherent challenges associated with measuring marketing effectiveness.

Since most businesses are organized around products or channels, product goals and strategies usually determine demand objectives and expenditures. The brand building, advertising and promotional resources that provide tactical marketing support usually operate in silos separated from the CRM efforts of the business. Because these activities operate independently, less emphasis is placed on the quality of new customers generated from demand spending or their longer-term value potential.