Marketing ROI 2 - Should Marketing (& Sales) be measured on customer satisfaction?

In my last blog, I started a discussion about measuring the return on investment in Marketing, suggesting that when it comes to sales and marketing we may well be measuring the wrong things, or at least ignoring elements that have a direct impact on the ability of sales and marketing to generate leads and sales.

In most cases measurement stops almost as soon as the prospect becomes a customer. At that point the new customer is introduced to a whole new group of people and functions to process the order, deliver the product, support the customer and so on.

These are often tightly controlled departments where the focus is on cost control and limiting the amount of service provided to customers – the opposite of what sales and marketing promise in order to win the customer. There is nothing wrong with that so long as the right expectations have been set from the beginning by sales and marketing. On the other hand if the wrong expectations are set....

There is a generally accepted rule in this space that a happy customer will tell 5 people, but an unhappy customer will tell 26 people about their bad experience.

So here is a wee thought. If you want to make sure that you keep on the right side of your customers perhaps you might want to include customer satisfaction as one of your key measurements and making sure that sales and marketing are part of that measurement.

'But surely that belongs to Customer Service?'

Yes and no is my answer. The yes part is obvious because after the deal is done the customer should be looked after by appropriately focused people.

At the same time, having run a few pretty beefy sales and marketing functions in my time, one of the things that can be extremely damaging is marketing and selling to the wrong kinds of customers in the first place. That is definitely the responsibility of Marketing and Sales.

For one large software firm I did some work with, one of the most costly problems in the business was inappropriate sales to inappropriate customers. It happened because the sales team was under enormous pressure to sell, sell, sell, which coupled with unrealistic sales targets meant that marketing and sales were more interested in making any sale than making sure they were selling the right products to the right kind of customers.

The result was actually a less profitable company with a poor reputation for two simple reasons:

• The cost in time, refunds and so forth to sort out the issues caused by sales to the wrong customers
• The cost in reputation that made it significantly more difficult to generate sales with the right kind of customers.

So bearing that in mind, do you think that customer satisfaction is something that should be included in the measurement of sales and marketing?

More tomorrow, but in the meantime it would be great to hear others’ views on this.