Clientes-alvo e rentabilidade

Um bom resumo do livro "Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink", publicado em 2010, pode ser encontrado neste postal "Proitability FAQ" escrito por Jonathan Byrnes.
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Tudo ideias que desenvolvemos e defendemos há largos anos neste blogue:
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"All of our management information and processes were developed in a prior business era. Our accounting categories are too broad to see which accounts and products are profitable and which aren’t – so people simply assume that more revenues equals more profits. Some revenues are very profitable, and a surprising portion produce big losses.
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Como dar a volta à situação:
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"(1) the right information – granular (specific products in specific customers) not aggregated; (Moi ici: Quem são os clientes-alvo? E quais os produtos e serviços que vão ao encontro das experiências que procuram e valorizam positivamente? E qual o mosaico de actividades que melhor servem esse binómio clientes-alvo e respectivos produtos e serviços) (2) the right priorities – first, secure and grow the profitable business, then improve the marginal business, then reprice the money-losers; (3) the right processes – mostly coordinating sales, marketing, and operations to get things right; and (4) the right compensation, especially for sales – matching compensation to real profitability, not just revenues."

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Os pecados capitais:

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"Three big mistakes: (1) assuming that more revenues means more profits; (2) failing to focus attention and resources on securing and growing the business that produces high sustained profitability – this makes a company vulnerable to focused competitors and reduces reported profits; and (3) failing to put anyone in charge of maximizing account and product profitability at the grassroots level (in contrast with putting lots of people in charge of managing budgets).

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In the prior “age of mass markets,” companies sought the economies of scale of mass production, coupled with mass distribution using arm’s length customer relationships. In that era, more revenues really did mean lower costs and more profits. In today’s “age of precision markets,” companies form different relationships with different sets of customers, each with different costs and profits. (Moi ici: Esta é a realidade que julgo mais difícil de percepcionar, ter o grau de abstracção suficiente para distinguir diferentes padrões em função de diferentes tipos de clientes. Há dias uma conversa com um empresário começou com ele a defender que todos os clientes eram iguais, não havia clientes-alvo no negócio dele, todos eram alvos. A conversa acabou com o momento de epifania onde emerge na sua cabeça a consequência dessa prática ...  ) Yet, virtually all of our management information and processes were developed in the prior era, when all revenues really were equally desirable. This is the underlying reason why almost every company has so much embedded unprofitability and why so many managers fail to see and build their sustainably profitable core of business."

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Já aqui contei os casos das empresas industriais que em 2009, apesar de quedas de 30% na facturação ganharam mais ou menos o mesmo... fartavam-se de perder dinheiro com alguns clientes. E outro ponto interessante, esses clientes com os quais perdiam dinheiro, não ficavam com esse valor extraído, porque faliram logo em 2009 ou 2010. Um deles presumo que foi vítima de pedofilia empresarial dado que trabalhava para a indústria automóvel.

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Na Economia o factor tempo conta, não é um universo newtoniano

"In the prior Age of Mass Markets, which occurred throughout most of the twentieth century, revenue maximization was the win strategy. Companies had relatively uniform pricing (for much of the period, manufacturers could actually set retail prices), cost to serve was relatively uniform as the product was just dropped at the customer’s receiving dock, and economies of scale meant that large production volumes led to diminishing unit costs. And diminishing unit costs meant more profits.
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In this situation, product management was indeed driving the boat. Their job was to maximize revenues. Most consumer product companies were characterized by a relatively small number of high-volume brands. In this situation, the cost of the small “tweaks” in products and packaging were small compared to the huge gains in scale.
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Over the past thirty years, however, our business system has changed enormously. We have entered what I call the Age of Precision Markets. In this new era, companies have instituted complex pricing varying from customer to customer, and even product to product. Cost to serve varies again by customer, and even by product within a customer. Products have proliferated into all ecological niches, and flexible manufacturing and outsourcing have enabled many niche products to achieve minimum efficient scale.
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Today, profit maximization requires a deep understanding of the interaction between pricing and cost to serve on a very granular basis (individual products within individual accounts). It also requires the tight integration of product management with the groups responsible for the second-order costs it so often produces. Chief among these are the critical costs of sales inefficiency and operations complexity – just what the top operations managers and sales reps were so concerned about."
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Trecho retirado de "Unlikely Operations Heroes – Sales Reps" de Jonathan Byrnes.