Today the hottest new area of marketing is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) -- the discipline of identifying, attracting, and retaining a company¹s most valuable customers. Drawing upon more than ten years of testing, tryout, and implementation in hundreds of companies, CRM expert Jay Curry, and his Internet-expert son, Adam Curry, have written a clear, step-by-step guide to profiting from this exploding movement, with strategies that are aimed at the small and medium-sized business owners who need them most.
Jay Curry explains how CRM can help managers boost profits by implementing a customer-focused strategy. Using easy-to-understand graphics, he introduces the customer pyramid -- segmented as "Top," "Big," "Medium," and "Small" -- to help the reader visualize, analyze, and improve customer profitability. Success comes to those who follow this three-step Customer Marketing Strategy: (1) get new customers into your pyramid; (2) move customers higher into your pyramid; (3) keep the customers in the pyramid. Combining practical how-to directives with vital CRM reference information, the book includes a case study, "InterTech," that allows readers to see customer-focused strategy in action.
The final third of this practical, easy-to-read book is devoted to the Internet. Here Adam Curry introduces the "Permission Pyramid" and the "e-Customer Marketing Pyramid" to explain the nature of "virtual customer relationships" and how to use them to create, keep, and upgrade customers. This section includes mini-cases and tips to help managers use the Internet to complement current marketing and sales activities and ends with guidelines to test out the new paradigms of e-commerce.
Throughout The Customer Marketing Method, the emphasis is always on practical steps to "make it happen." It is essential and timely reading for owners of small and medium-sized businesses as well as managers of small business units within larger firms.
Tracy Emerick, Ph.D. Managing Consultant, RMI, author of Business-to-Business Direct Marketing The exciting part of Curry's approach is the involvement of the sales people in the customer marketing process, and the focus on supporting them with marketing effort to improve their sales with customers that count.
William Barrar President of Innovative Alliances and former CEO of a U.S. Department of Commerce Manufacturing Extension Partnership program Curry's unique customer marketing method finally gives an easy-to-understand, practical underpinning to the wide range of customer relationship methodologies, and it is as applicable for the small to medium-sized business as it is to the Fortune 500.
Robert Thompson President, Front Line Solutions Anyone thinking about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) should read The Customer Marketing Method first -- definitely before buying any CRM software. Curry clearly explains what CRM is, how to get started, and what the payoff is for companies that really understand their customers. Don't start your CRM project without it!
Barry Allen Executive Director, Consumer Business Network, Inc. The Customer Marketing Method should be the centerpiece of every business in the customer maintenance effort. Curry not only shows the way but provides the tools to maintain and proliferate your customer base.
