For any business, regardless of industry, it’s important to remember that there are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a week. For business leaders and marketers, allow the Pareto Principle to serve as a reminder that as resources become limited, prioritization of actions and projects that generate revenue is of the utmost importance.

How does such a principle apply to marketing departments or the development of marketing campaigns? Pareto hypothesized that 80% of results come from just 20% of actions. As we work to earn new business and gain new customers, we must remind ourselves that it is our current clients and their satisfaction that drive organizational success, not the sheer number of leads generated.

Over the past decade, the marketing world has changed considerably. Now, as we enter a new decade, we are seeing another shift. Greater emphasis is being placed on fostering customer satisfaction and customer relationships to generate more revenue in the same finite period of time. While this isn’t necessarily a novel concept and one that many organizations have in fact been sticking to, renewed emphasis on such a methodology yield amazing results.

A Sales Transformation

Within many organizations, especially sales departments, sales productivity is measured by the amount of activity occurring. How many emails, how many phone calls, how many initial client meetings scheduled, etc. However, at the root of it, sales productivity is really the amount of revenue earned within a period of time. Yet, we seem to not focus on this fact.

On a similar note, many marketing departments have become wholly fixated on the ability to tie leads back to marketing channels and campaigns. However, lead attribution and the customer data collected should not be used solely for marketing to show their worth, but rather as a way to develop and deliver targeted content that is consumer-centric.

The customer data that organizations and marketing departments are sitting on allows them to make informed decisions on campaign messaging, audience segmentation and so much more. Understanding this and mastering the ability to capitalize on this data accelerates company growth and can reinvent the manner in which organizations conduct business.

A Customer-Centric Approach

In the business-to-business (B2B) world, buyers have more options to choose from, more research channels to utilize to evaluate vendors and less time to meet with sales reps to determine the best option or best path forward. As a result, organizations need to become well-versed in a client-centric approach to not only earn new business, but keep these businesses as clients.

For marketers, the customer lifetime value (CLTV) metric is often one that gets overlooked when we’re in the thick of developing marketing strategies, onboarding clients and reporting campaign metrics. Customer lifetime value tells companies how much revenue they can expect one customer to generate over the course of the business relationship. CLTV is a metric that is at times underappreciated due to the fact that it can be difficult to define.

Using and gathering customer data and leveraging it to deliver an enhanced customer experience earns your organization more business. Conversions and revenue come as a result of putting the consumer first, rather than putting the advertising channel first. Investing in data collection (either a time or monetary commitment) and the talent to apply the data for more of an impact, can deliver better experiences and better outcomes for client organizations.

Through data analysis, organizations often find that there are a range of channels customers utilize, a range of devices they browse for products or information on, a certain period of time they look for a good or service and so much more. Proving and validating the worth of your products or services is a great way to incentivize current customers and clients to continue working with your organization. This in turn increases a brand’s CLTV.

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