I subscibe to the “inside 1to1” newsletter from the the Peppers and Rogers Group. As everyone knows, Peppers and Rogers were the early proponents of the CRM philosophy, and have published some very successful books on this topic. An article in this morning’s edition was titled Customer Acquisition Makes a Comeback. The opening sentence is “After a solid 18 months of obsession with customer retention, the customer strategy pendulum may be swinging toward customer acquisition.”

Retention of the customer means the process of developing a loyal customer base, and making sure that they stay happy and provide more business. Acquisition means that the enterprise puts its efforts into finding new customers.

I was surprised that big business has actually been homing in on one of these strategies at the expense of the other. I thought that you had to do both. Fortunately as I read on, one of the analysts comments supported my feelings—“you need a balanced attack of both existing customer development and involvement in your brand coupled with smart strategies to acquire new customers.”

It struck me that for most businesses, Retention is more about CRM, and Acquisition about SFA. The marketing and sales departments will be involved in both initiatives – but the goals are distinctly different.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 4:51 am and is filed under CRM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.