How Do You Find Profitable Customers? Get To Know Your Own

Original post: 7/21/2005

It’s late on Friday evening and you’re driving down the freeway on the way home. You’re hosting dinner for one of your marketing agency’s most importance clients: the CMO of Simplify, one of the new “no-frills” mobile Telcos, which has been growing like crazy since it was launched two years ago. During your regular weekly call, he asked you what he should do to acquire profitable customers. It sounded urgent. You remember his half-hearted laugh when you said, jokingly, “Try not to lose the ones you already have.”

The traffic is all snarled up and you begin to think about how you’re going to answer the CMO’s question.

Stepping beyond copycat competition

Simply is a good example of the cyclical behavior that many companies in hyper-competitive markets get sucked into. First, it acquired customers through expensive marketing campaigns tied to even more expensive subsidized handset-free minutes and free services offers. This brought in a deluge of new customers, many …