And what could be better than that?
This pilot fish works for a company whose business is seasonal -- and that's putting it mildly. "Some of our customers buy only a few months out of the year," fish says, "but they always buy during those months and never buy during others. Those customers will spend all year getting contracts, buy all their materials in, say, March and then spend the rest of the year working them. Other customers buy year-round."
One day, the marketing manager comes to fish to ask for a "lost customer" report. How should I determine which customers are lost? fish asks. Marketing manager doesn't know, but she says she'll figure it out.
After she talks to several sales managers and their boss, the sales VP, they come up with a definition: If a customer ordered less this month than last month, it's a "lost" customer and someone should contact them and offer discounts or other incentives to get them back.
Wait, wait, says fish, you're missing something here. "I spend weeks trying to point out that given the seasonal nature of our sales, this is not a valid criterion," says fish. "With this criterion, they'll panic and give discounts to customers who wouldn't have bought, and they'll ignore customers that really are being lost.
"Eventually they all agree to the criterion I develop, which is to compare the customers' sales histories with their current sales."
That's the definition that's used for the new "lost customer" report -- a complex application that spans several databases and thousands of customers. It checks customer sales histories and kicks out an HTML version for the company intranet and other formats for spreadsheet manipulation. All in all, it's a nice piece of work.
And it gets noticed, too. "The marketing manager gets grand kudos for all her hard work on this fantastic tool that will help in our customer retention efforts, for her understanding of our company and customers, and her keen business sense in the form of recognition in company meetings and newsletters, a glowing companywide e-mail and, rumor has it, a midperiod evaluation and raise or a promise of a larger raise come January," fish reports.
"What do I get? A private e-mail from the VP of sales that says, 'I don't know how hard this was to do, but thanks.'"
