According to Heidrick & Struggles, the No. 1 focus for C-level executives in 2009 is the customer—acquiring new ones, increasing retention and improving their lifetime value, in that order.
Eighty-eight percent of the executives surveyed said acquiring new customers was important, and 87% said the same about customer retention.
Least important on their list of priorities were improving marketing’s impact on shareholder value, retaining talent and expanding to new geographies.
This makes sense in current economic conditions—if a business is struggling, further development gets pushed to the back burner. Talent is easy to come by when unemployment is high, and if sales increase, shareholder value will naturally follow.
The question is how to increase sales.
Most significant to senior executives was optimizing the efficiency of the marketing mix across the business (including digital marketing), followed by responding more rapidly to growth opportunities and improving the consistency of marketing and sales communications.
Few respondents were satisfied with their own company’s effectiveness. Only 15% of C-level execs were “very satisfied” with their optimization of the marketing mix, 14% with the speed of their response to growth opportunities and 11% with their ad efficiency in online media.
When it came to selecting which tactics were key in achieving growth objectives, research and analysis on return on marketing investment (ROMI) topped the executives’ list. Next was Web analytics. Third came customer relationship management tools such as Salesforce.com, followed by customer acquisition tools such as search engine optimization (SEO).
According to chief executives, getting new customers in a downturn might not be about working harder so much as getting smarter.
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