A lição dos nabateus

A propósito do que fazer com os resultados da construção da curva de Stobachoff da sua empresa:

• As curvas de Stobachoff
• Já fizeram a vossa curva de Stobachoff?
• Stobachoff rings a bell?

O que fazer com os clientes não rentáveis?

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Cuidado com os esforços para rentabilizar esses clientes.

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E, relativamente ao clientes mais rentáveis, para reflexão "Maximum Profit Per Customer And The 80/20 Rule"

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Em vez de maximizar, talvez pensar em "satisficing"... outra vez a lição dos nabateus.

#MEDO

Há bocado copiei estas palavras de Joan Magretta sobre o pensamento de Michael Porter:
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"First, you must choose a distinctive value proposition. Which needs will you serve, which customers, at what relative price? Have you staked out a positioning that's different from rivals?
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The third test of strategy, making trade-offs, may well be the hardest. It means accepting limits — saying no to some customers, for example, so that you can better serve others."

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Não sou marketeiro... mas no meu modelo mental esta afirmação é perigosa:

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""O espírito da Chevrolet é ser uma marca para todos""

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"alargando ou renovando uma gama que se adapta a todos os gostos e necessidades"

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Quem quer ir a todas, quem quer servir toda a gente... 

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Cuidado, é perigoso seguir este trajecto... Stobachoff - Stobachoff - Stobachoff

As curvas de Stobachoff

Neste postal "Segmentação retrospectiva dos clientes" referi um artigo de Storbacka "Segmentation Based on Customer Profitability – Retrospective Analysis of Retail Bank Customer Bases" onde é mencionado o Stobachoff Index.
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Uma pesquisa na net permitiu-me encontrar uma interessante referência em "The strategic value of customer profitability analysis" de Erik M Van Raaij publicado por Marketing Intelligence Planning (2005) Volume: 23, Issue: 4, Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Pages: 372-381 (obrigado ao Baidu) e outra no livro de Robert C. Blattberg, Byung-Do Kim e Scott A. Neslin "Database Marketing - Analyzing and Managing Customers" do qual retirei o extracto que se segue para memória futura na minha base de dados:
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"Van Raaij et al. (2003) report the first experience of a business-to-business company with incorporating customer value analysis into their marketing planning. The company, which we will call “DBM,” was a multinational firm in the market for professional cleaning products. It sold directly to end-users such as in-flight caterers and professional cleaning services, as well as through distributors. It divided its market into sectors such as healthcare, lodging, or dairy. Sales and profits had been leveling off after years of growth and DBM was worried about new competitors. Further non-product costs (e.g., costs to service customers) had been increasing. The company desired to assign these costs to individual customers and calculate customer profit.
DBM undertook a six-stage process to calculate profit at the customer level and then develop strategies based on the results:
1. Select active customers
2. Design the customer profitability calculation model
3. Calculate customer profit
4. Interpret the results
5. Develop strategies
6. Establish an infrastructure for future applications."
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"The company used the customer profit curve to plot what they called a “Stobachoff” curve. This is simply the equivalent of a cumulative lift curve. It orders the customers according to profitability, and then plots the cumulative profit accounted for by these customers as one progresses from the highest to lowest profit.

shows that in this example, 75% of the customers are profitable (the curve increases up to about that point) while 25% are unprofitable. Given that the top 75% of customers accounts for 120% of the profits, the remaining 25% really drag profits down.
In this case there are a lot of profitable customers but they are subsidizing a relatively small number (at least a minority) of unprofitable customers. Note that by adding fixed costs through overhead, the firm may be distorting the true profitability of the remaining 25% of the customers. Some of these may be incrementally profitable." (Moi ici: E qual será o perfil na sua empresa? Basta recordar Byrnes para ficar com os cabelos em pé. E a minha experiência a trabalhar com PMEs, pouco ou nada habituadas ao conceito de clientes-alvo também não ajuda a melhorar o retrato)

"In the low dependence, low subsidizing cell, all customers are profitable and roughly equally so. In the low dependence, high subsidization cell, most customers are profitable but there are a few unprofitable customers who drag down total profits. In the high dependence, low subsidizing cell, there are only a few profitable customers and the rest of customers are unprofitable but not highly so. In perhaps the most dangerous case is the high dependence, high subsidization cell. In this case, there are a few highly profitable customers,
and many highly unprofitable customers. This is dangerous because if those few highly profitable customers should defect, the company would suddenly be losing a lot of money."

A curva de Stobachoff

Para recordar a curva de Stobachoff, para recordar o custo de perder um cliente, para recordar o custo de conquistar um cliente, esta interessante reflexão de Don Peppers "Are Your Biggest Customers Your Biggest Losers?"

Volume é vaidade, lucro é sanidade

"O britânico Barclays está a preparar-se para dizer a sete mil clientes para realizarem mais transacções com o banco ou procurarem outra instituição, de acordo com a Bloomberg. O objectivo desta medida é impulsionar as receitas.
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O banco britânico lançou um novo sistema informático, o Flight Deck, que classifica cada cliente da sua unidade de "trading" de acordo com o retorno que gera para a instituição. Assim, o Barclays pode dar prioridade à relação com os clientes que são mais lucrativos e descartar aqueles que não dão grandes contributos para o retorno do banco, segundo a mesma fonte.
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A instituição financeira britânica eliminou, desde 2014, 17 mil clientes devido às regras mais duras no que diz respeito ao retorno de capital. Com este novo sistema agora implantado, mais sete mil clientes do Barclays podem ter de procurar uma nova instituição financeira, escreve a Bloomberg."

Quem lê estes trechos não pode deixar de sorrir e recordar marcadores que este blogue utiliza há quase uma década:

• Stobachoff - aquele "classifica cada cliente da sua unidade de "trading" de acordo com o retorno que gera para a instituição" tem tudo a ver com a curva de Stobachoff

• Clientes-alvo - um dos primeiros marcadores usados neste blogue. A importância de perceber para quem temos de trabalhar. Ao decidir deixar de trabalhar com 17 + 7 mil clientes não rentáveis a empresa percebe que não é o volume que interessa. Ao perceber que o mais importante é saber para quem não trabalhar (volto sempre a Hill e à magia de 2008), ao concentrar-se nos clientes-alvo há-de perceber que há um padrão nos JTBD e nos serviços prestados
• Volume is vanity profit is sanity - frase usada aqui no blogue pela primeira vez em Julho de 2006. Como não recordar a empresa de calçado que me ensinou a metáfora da Arca de Noé em 2006.

Agora pensem nos outros bancos. O que dirão desta decisão?

Trechos retirados de "Barclays vai pedir a sete mil clientes para intensificarem transacções ou saírem do banco"

Como tratar os clientes actuais?

Um tema que costumamos referir e marcar com o marcador "stobachoff":

"One study found that, in business-to-business companies, the top 20% of customers are generally responsible for 150%-300% of total profits, while the company breaks even on the middle 70% of customers and the bottom 10% of customers cause losses. Similarly, a multi-industry study by McKinsey & Co. found that bad customers might account for 30%-40% of a typical company’s revenue.
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As an illustration, we provide the cumulative profits curve at a bank with which the second author has worked. This type of curve is often referred to as the “whale curve” [Moi ici: Ou curva de Stobachoff] because of the profit curve’s humpback, inverse-U shape. In this bank’s case, about 50% of customers contribute negatively to profits. In fact, the top 5% of customers contribute almost 75% of the bank’s profits."

E na sua empresa, como é esta distribuição?
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Trecho e figura retirados de "Should You Punish or Reward Current Customers?"

Stobachoff rings a bell?

"Your Unprofitable Customers Are Killing You"
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Uma lista de sugestões sobre:

• o que não fazer; e
• o que fazer

Para lidar com os clientes que dão prejuízo! Talvez a sua empresa precise de pensar no assunto. O mundo muda e isso não tem repercussões nas suas contas?

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Stobachoff rings a bell?

Já fizeram a vossa curva de Stobachoff?

Na sequência dos textos de Byrnes sobre os clientes que não são rentáveis, eis um artigo que vou procurar ler na íntegra "Are Many of Your Customers Unprofitable?":
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"What Kumar and Shah found about customer profitability should give many executives pause — even if their companies aren’t publicly traded:
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“In both TechInc and FashInc, we found an extremely skewed distribution of customer profitability — which was consistent with our expectations…. The average CLV [customer lifetime value] of one of TechInc’s High CLV customers was about 25 times as much as that of one of the company’s Medium to Low CLV customers. Interestingly, at both companies, the top 20% of customers contributed more than 90% of the company’s profits, because each company also had a sizable proportion of customers on which it lost money.
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The skewed customer profitability distribution meant the companies should apply different marketing strategies to customers in the High CLV segment than to those in Medium to Low or Negative CLV segments.”
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If, at both of the companies the researchers studied, one-fifth of customers accounted for more than 90% of the company’s profits, what does that imply about the remaining four-fifths of the companies’ customers?
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And is your company any different? Could a small fraction of customers be the source of most of your company’s profits? Conversely, do you know which of your customers are unprofitable for your organization – and how many of them there are?" (Moi ici: Esta bateria de questões devia ser levada a sério, muito a sério pelas empresas... já fizeram a vossa curva de Stobachoff?)

Um exemplo que gostava de estudar

É a metáfora com que fico na cabeça depois de ter lido "Manuel Azevedo trocou a reforma por uma fábrica de meias".
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Tem tudo para dar mal, com base no meu modelo mental, (mal não quer dizer necessariamente prejuízo, antes ineficiências, antes curva de Stobachoff com uma forma reveladora) a não ser que produzir meias tenha máquinas dedicadas e seja uma produção muito automatizada, onde seja fácil de aplicar o PWP de Skinner. No entanto, parece que dá bem!!!

"O objetivo é ganhar balanço para calçar cada vez mais pés com uma oferta diversificada, da meia básica ao segmento funcional e técnico.
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É um negócio construído sem marca própria, a vender para outras empresas, simplesmente porque impor uma insígnia “custa muito dinheiro e exige tempo.
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Um dos projetos futuros é começar a trabalhar a MFA como marca, mas sem investimentos em marketing.
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Para avançar mais rapidamente, a MFA tem um projeto de investigação e desenvolvimento a decorrer em parceria com o Citeve — Centro Tecnológico das Indústrias Têxteis e do Vestuário de Portugal para uma solução técnica a patentear que ainda está no segredo dos deuses.
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A trabalhar para captar clientes que tinham deslocalizado encomendas para a Ásia e estão, agora, a regressar à Europa,[Moi ici: Mais um exemplo do regresso do mundo 1] a MFA está pronta a seguir as indicações de quem compra, mas também oferece o desenvolvimento do produto, desde a prototipagem às embalagens.
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No seu portefólio de soluções funcionais cabem componentes antibacterianas, antifricção, antiestáticas, de regulação térmica, de gestão de suor e de compressão, entre outras.
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No mercado, a diversidade de uma oferta à medida de todos os pés reflete-se na amplitude da escala de preços de venda ao público “entre os €4/10 pares e os €60/par”. Na fábrica, um dos indicadores é o tempo de produção: a MFA tricota umas meias em 40 segundos e outras em sete minutos."

Ora aqui está um exemplo que gostava de estudar. Conseguem ganhar dinheiro com todos os quatro mundos?

Acerca do que não é "estratégia"

Excelente artigo "So, you think you have a strategy?" de Freek Vermeulen.
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Os teóricos que estão sempre prontos para amaldiçoar os empresários portugueses não perdem nada em ler o artigo e em perceber que o mesmo não foi escrito a pensar nesses patrões. E, no entanto, a vida não é um mar de rosas lá fora.
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"Most companies do not have a strategy.
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when it comes to strategy, I’d say there are three types of CEOs:

• Those who think they have a strategy — they are the most abundant
• Those who pretend to think that they have a strategy, but deep down are really hesitant because they fear they don’t actually have one (and they’re probably right) — these are generally quite a bit more clever than those in the first category, but, alas, are fewer in number
• Those who do have a strategy — there are preciously few of them, but they often head very successful companies

I often wonder why such bright CEOs and their deputies miss the most basic necessities of cogent and executable strategy. They fail because they:

• Are not really making choices Strategy, above all, is about making choices; choices in terms of what you do and what you do not do. (Moi ici: O que vamos fazer e o que não vamos fazer!!! Terry Hill, Steve Jobs e Gordon Ramsay são/foram mestres nesta necessidade de concentração no essencial. BTW, o que é que esta empresa não vai fazer?)... companies don’t concentrate; they cannot resist the temptation of also doing other things that, on an individual basis, look attractive. As a consequence, they end up with a bunch of alternate (sometimes even opposing) strategic directions that appear equally attractive but strangely enough don’t manage to turn into profitable propositions.  (Moi ici: Pena que poucos conheçam a curva de Stobachoff ou os números de Jonathan Byrnes) Too many strategies lack focus.  (Moi ici: Concentração, concentração, concentração no que é essencial!!!)
• Are stuck in the status quo Another variant of this is the straightjacket of path dependency, meaning that companies write up their strategy in such a way that everything fits into what they were already doing anyway. This is much like generating a to-do list of activities you have already completed. Last year. There might be nothing wrong with sticking with the tried and true, if it so happens that what you were doing represents a powerful, coherent set of activities that propels your company forward. Regrettably, more often than not, strategies adapted to what you were doing anyway results in some vague, amorphous marketplace statement that would have been better off in a beginners’ class on esoteric poetry, because it is meaningless and does not imply any real decision about what needs to be done in order to be a vital company in the next one to three years. (Moi ici: Falta-lhes espírito de matador, espírito assertivo... são como os treinadores de futebol que tentam tirar pressão de cima da equipa. Lembro-me sempre das fotocópias que Mourinho colou no balneário do FC Porto - para aumentar a pressão sobre os jogadores!!!) ...
• Have no relationship to value creation Sometimes companies make some decisive choices, but it is wholly unclear why these choices would do the enterprise any good. Strategy is not just about making choices; executives need a good explanation why these choices are going to create the company a heck of a lot of value. (Moi ici: Só os escolhidos é que falam de valor, os outros falam de preço, de custos, de competição, de benchmark, de... Os eleitos pensam na vida, na experiência de uso na vida dos clientes.) Without such logic, I cannot call this line of thinking a strategy at all. ...
• Are mistaking objectives for strategy We want to be number one or two in all the markets we operate in. Ever heard that one? I think it is bollocks. ... but the real question is how. We want to be number one or two in the market; we want to grow 50 per cent next year; we want to be the world’s pre-eminent business school — and so on. These are goals, possibly very good and lofty ones, but in terms of amounting to a strategy, they do not. You need an actionable idea and a rationale — a strategy — of how you are going to achieve all this. Without a true plan of action, lofty goals are but a tantalising aspiration.
• Keep it a secret The final mistake I have seen, scarily common, as to why CEOs who think they have a strategy don’t actually have one (despite circumventing all of the above pitfalls) is because none of their lower-ranked employees actually know about it. A strategy only becomes a strategy if people in the organisation alter their behaviour as a result of it. ... A good litmus test is to simply ask around: if people within the organisation do not give you the same coherent story of how the company is to prosper in the future, chances are it does not have a strategy, no matter how colourful the Powerpoint slides. These slides may fade in powerfully on the projection screen, but (in the marketplace) they fade out into strategic oblivion."

Been there, done that and... moved on

Este postal é para iniciados... e receio confundir os não-iniciados.
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Uma das primeiras questões a colocar, para iniciar uma reflexão estratégica numa empresa é:
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Quem são os clientes-alvo?
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As empresas que não respondem a esta pergunta, ou que não são consequentes com a resposta, tratam os clientes como uma média, a miudagem, um perigoso fantasma estatístico (ver marcadores).
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Não trabalhar para clientes-alvo significa um passaporte para o stuck-in-the-middle, significa incapacidade para actuar num mercado polarizado, ou seja, o fim da linha para essas empresas que são incapazes de se definirem e de escolherem os clientes preferidos.
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Até aqui tudo bem e estou de acordo com Peter Fader "Customer Centricity":
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"Too many people think that being customer centric means doing everything that your customers want, and that's not the case. Being friendly and offering good service are a part of customer centricity, but they are not the whole thing. Customer centricity means that you're going to be friendly, provide good service and develop new products and services for the special focal customers -- the ones who provide a lot of value for you -- but not necessarily for the other ones. You need to pick and choose. Some customers deserve the special treatment, and if others want to buy from you, that's great, but they are not going to be treated the same.
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You are not going to ignore customers. You are not going to fire customers. (Moi ici: Depende, basta recordar as curvas de Stobachoff e os números de Byrnes. Ver marcadores) You are not going to treat them badly, but you will treat some better than others. You are going to be really careful about whom you choose to treat that way and what that treatment means. Does it mean you give those special customers absolutely everything? Maybe not. But you're definitely going to give them more consideration than customers who frankly are not worth that much to you.

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A requirement behind customer centricity is the ability to understand customers at a fairly granular level  (Moi ici: O que chamo: olhar olhos nos olhos, olhar na menina dos olhos dos clientes-alvos) and to be able to identify the customers or the segments of customers who are valuable from the ones who aren't. If you can't sort out your customers -- if you can't look at them and know who is good and who is bad -- then you can't be customer centric. That's step one.
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Step two is having an operational ability as well as an organizational capability to be able to deliver different products and services to different kinds of customers. (Moi ici: Construir, adaptar, um mosaico de actividades auto-reforçadoras. Ver marcadores) That's tough to do.

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Nearly every company on the planet is product centric. You look at their organizational chart, and it's broken up by different kinds of products. You look at the incentives. You look at the language they use. You look at the performance metrics that they rely on. It's all based on different kinds of products. The whole business model is based on producing something or a set of somethings in really high volumes and at really low costs, and that's going to drop to the bottom line. (Moi ici: Recordar aqueles postais recentes: parte I e parte II sobre tudo ser serviço e a co-criação)
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That's more or less business as usual. I'm not suggesting that it's easy, and I'm not suggesting that it's going away tomorrow. But I am suggesting that there are alternatives. If you organize the company around different types of customers and have customer segment managers who are just as powerful as today's product managers are -- giving them the right incentives and the right resources and tools -- that can actually be a more profitable way for many companies to go to market.

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(Moi ici: Now, quite a finale!)

One of the things that surprised me in the book is you say that "the customer" doesn't exist. We've been talking about customers all afternoon. What does that mean? (Moi ici: Recordar os postais do Senhor dos Perdões sobre a tolice da homogeneidade dos mercados)

Fader: One of the things that drives me crazy is when I hear managers or entrepreneurs talking about "the customer," doing back-of-the-envelope calculations about what "the customer" will be worth or discussing how "the customer" will respond to this kind of product or that kind of offer.
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By talking about "the customer" or by talking about "the average customer," that doesn't do justice to the vast heterogeneity and the incredible differences across our customers in terms of their propensity to buy, to talk to each other and to respond to different kinds of offers.

(Moi ici: Agarrem-se às cadeiras, mais um promotor de Mongo) Again, step one of being customer centric is not only acknowledging the heterogeneity, but celebrating it; saying, "Wow, all this heterogeneity is a great thing because it lets us pick and choose different kinds of customers!" (Moi ici: That's the spirit. Mais do que reconhecer e aproveitar a heterogeneidade dos mercados, é celebrá-la, é fazer batota para a aumentar, é assim que se torna a concorrência imperfeita e se criam monopólios de facto) When we say "the customer," we are selling ourselves short. I think it's important to not use those words and to always have a plural there."

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Depois de tudo isto, não posso estar mais de acordo com Fader ... tal como estávamos de acordo com Newton, até que apareceu Einstein... depois de identificarmos os clientes-alvo... descobrimos que isso é, cada vez mais, insuficiente!!! And we moved on.

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Temos de equacionar a cadeia da procura... como aqui relatei em alguns exemplos, uma empresa pode criar um modelo de negócio em que quem paga, o cliente-alvo, não é o foco principal. 

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Para lá da customer-centricity, temos de adoptar a balanced centricity, o many-to-many... (aqui, aqui e aqui)

Segmentar porque os clientes não são todos iguais

"A paper company took this approach in developing a new offering (product plus services) for its North American customers. The company makes packaging material and is one of several such firms in the market, some of which are tiny shops while others are enormous global companies.
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Historically, the paper company segmented based on customer size— small, medium, and large. But several functions, including sales and customer service, had routinely pointed out this segmentation was not actionable. For example, some of the largest customers only needed the most basic features and were willing to pay less as a consequence, while others needed fully featured offerings. To make matters worse, many small and medium-sized customers valued features such as support services that had only been offered to large customers. What's more, many customers of all sizes complained delivery was too slow and needed to be “just in time.” Other customers, those with large warehouses that could stock plenty of paper, didn't care about just-in-time delivery. They could just pull it from their warehouses."
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So in thinking about how to design its new product and service offering, the paper company realized it would have a failure on its hands if it continued with the status quo segmentation."

E a sua empresa segmenta o mercado que serve? Qual é o critério que segue? E esse critério é útil? Qual é o segmento-alvo da sua empresa?
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Conheço muitas empresas que teimam em não segmentar o mercado onde actuam. Querem ir a tudo o que mexe, querem servir toda a gente... cuidado com a curva de Stobachoff. E... cuidado com as fiambreiras.

Trecho retirado de "Monetizing Innovation" de Ramanujam e Tacke.

Quem são os melhores e os piores clientes?

Há milhões de anos que neste blogue desafiamos as empresas a questionarem-se e a focarem-se nos seus clientes-alvo, em vez de tentarem ser tudo para todos e torrarem recursos (não esquecer a curva de Stobachoff) de forma ineficaz e ineficiente.

Um artigo publicado em Dezembro pela Harvard Business Review, "Do You Really Understand Your Best (and Worst) Customers?", fez-me recuar aos anos iniciais deste blogue onde focamos por muitas vezes a nossa atenção na necessidade de escolher os clientes-alvo:

"Companies often look at their business by focusing on geographic regions, specific brands or products, or by sales channel. This makes sense, because this data is always at hand, and organizations are often structured around geography or channels. But by looking at data and business problems from a frame of reference in which the customer is the atomic unit for analyzing revenue and profitability, these firms were able to gain a new perspective on the problem they were facing, either properly diagnosing the problem or stopping themselves from making a bad decision.

As you analyze your firm’s revenues and profits, or as you make plans for the future, what’s your unit of analysis?

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This lack of focus on individual customer data is often a mistake. Revenues are generated by customers pulling out their wallets and paying for your products and services. Revenue is the sum of the value of all the customer transactions that occurred in a given time period.

Many firms recognize the need to think differently about using customer data, but they do not know where to start. They are often trapped in an old-fashioned view of their business, structured around products or channels. How do you approach the task of getting your people to shift their perspective and start thinking about your firm’s performance using the customer as the atomic unit of revenue and profitability?"

Um conjunto de perguntas que podem ajudar a perceber quem são os clientes-alvo. Primeiro, as que se encontram no âmbito de "Lens 1: Who are our Best and Worst Customers?". 

"How many customers did we have last year? How do these customers differ in terms of their value to the firm? For example, how many customers purchased from us just once last year? How many customers accounted for half of our revenue last year? Half of our profit? If we compare, say, the 10% most profitable customers to the 10% least profitable, what lies behind these differences? To what extent are they driven by differences in the number of transactions, the average value per transaction, and average margin per transaction? Digging deeper, what about differences in the types of products they purchased?

The set of simple analyses that explore how different our customers are from each other lead to a fundamental conclusion: customers are not equal. Most people underestimate just how unevenly revenue and profit are distributed across customers."

Segundo, as que se encontram no âmbito de "Lens 2: How is Customer Behavior Changing?".

Terceiro, as que se encontram no âmbito de "Lens 3: How Does a Cohort of Customers Change Over Time?".

"Much like Copernicus changed the way people thought about the earth’s place in the universe, we have observed that taking a view of the firm’s performance using the customer as the unit of analysis can have a similarly profound impact on the way the firm thinks about assessing performance and planning for growth. This results in a mindset shift for organizations to move from talking about “what makes us money” to “who makes us money.”"

Acredito que o uso destas perguntas pode ajudar a analisar os dados para os transformar em informação que pode ser avaliada e usada para a tomada de decisões estratégicas, como perceber que há clientes sérios e honestos, mas que não são clientes-alvo, são mais um prego no caixão.

Sem mudar de modelo de negócio, qual o destino?

Em tempos escrevi aqui e aqui sobre as curvas de Stobachoff para os bancos finlandeses.
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Há dias escrevi, sobre os bancos portugueses "Para reflexão". E recordo:

"graveyard of business is filled with the skeletons of companies that attempted to base their prices solely on costs"

Ontem, li este texto "Aconselhamento fora do ritmo", onde se pode ler:

"apenas 7% dos inquiridos portugueses revelou que preencheu um questionário sobre o seu perfil de investidor, o que é uma falha muito grave dos intermediários financeiros, mostra o nosso mais recente inquérito aos aforradores. Não conhecendo os seus clientes, é natural que as recomendações que os investidores recebem sejam muitas vezes desadequadas. A falha é ainda comprovada pelo facto de apenas em 52% dos casos o investidor ter sido questionado sobre os seus objetivos de investimento, em 42% sobre o horizonte temporal de investimento e em 31% sobre a sua tolerância ao risco, todos fatores decisivos na escolha de um produto."

Qual é a primeira pergunta?
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Quem são os clientes-alvo?
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Aquele trecho mostra claramente que não estão interessados nisso...
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BTW, fazer isto "BCP obrigado a reduzir mais mil pessoas até 2015" sem mudar de modelo de negócio... dá muito que pensar.

É sempre aquela pergunta: Quem são os clientes-alvo?

Em muitos dos desafios  em que colaboro com PMEs, para subir margens, para subir na escala de valor, para dar a volta, a maioria das vezes o "truque" inicial passa por isto:

"Failure to understand segmentation is a form of failure to understand your customers. It can pass unnoticed, a missed opportunity, but it can be much more costly.
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If competitors recognize distinct customer segments that can be attacked with very different strategies - and your company doesn't you can be vulnerable to a pincer movement from competitors, which can pick off your customers with more focused offerings.
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Failure to recognize segmentation, even in the absence of competitive attack, can also be a form of inefficiency. It means that you are significantly overserving some segments and underserving others, wasting resources that could be put to better use. This is a mismatch that competitors can exploit.
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Incorrect segmentation means that you probably do not understand your market position.
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Finally, segment blindness means you probably do not understand your profit pool or where you really make money.
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What are some of the signs that hidden segments, with true strategic implications, might exist unrecognized in your business? My experience, and our research, reveals a few clear indicators. The first occurs when the key measure of customer loyalty in your business varies widely among customers, and you do not know why.
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This suggests that there are groups of customers you do not understand in basic ways.
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Another indicator is an unexplained loss in market share in part of your historic customer base, suggesting that there is a distinct segment of customers being suddenly underserved (or better served elsewhere). A third indicator occurs when you or your largest competitor has not changed customer segment strategies for a long time. If this is true in a dynamic industry, perhaps you understand neither your customers nor their profitability. That constitutes a big opportunity to refocus."

É sempre aquela pergunta: Quem são os clientes-alvo?  Qual é o ecossistema da procura? Qual é o perfil da curva de Stobachoff da sua empresa?

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Trechos retirados de "Unstoppable" de Chris Zook.

Para acabar com o deixar dinheiro em cima da mesa - parte Ib

Continuado da Parte I.

Ainda sobre a primeira regra, para acabar com o dinheiro deixado em cima da mesa das negociações, "Rule One: Replace the Discounting Habit with a Little Arrogance", retirada de "Pricing with confidence - 10 ways to stop leaving money on the table" de Reed Holden e Mark Burton, vamos encontrar um tema recorrente aqui no blogue:

"One of the problems that leads to discounting is salespeople and managers who look for every opportunity to sell something. They don’t stop and ask whether any particular customer or order is good or bad for the business. This is one of the root causes that leads to excessive discounting: selling to customers who don’t and will never value the things you do as a firm. To make matters worse, these may be the customers who switch vendors, complain about everything, and extract all sorts of extra services that they don’t pay for. Why do we continue to serve them? Because we are trained to satisfy the customers, whatever it takes. Whether it’s smart—in other words, profitable—to continue to serve individual customers rarely enters the conversation."

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"The correct response is to take a step back. Within the global view of possible markets, identify which customers and markets you cannot serve at a profit. If some customers are marginally profitable, but others are significantly more profitable, is your company better off serving the former, or are you better off focusing resources on the more profitable opportunities? It’s a matter of defensive strategy.
It’s simply better for you that unprofitable customers are served by your competitors. It’s one less burden for you and one more for them. It’s important to determine which doors you do or don’t want your salespeople knocking on. If you don’t identify these doors, salespeople will waste their time and sell to customers that don’t value your offerings."

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The reality is that serving a large percentage of customers represents a loss for the business. The challenge, of course, is for a company to distinguish between the customers it can serve at a profit and those it cannot."

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"Because they are desperate for business, most managers don’t want to fire customers. We don’t like to do it either. The goal, of course, is to convert unprofitable customers into profitable ones. Before making a unilateral decision, we recommend that you have a candid conversation with the customers. Tell them why the relationship is not sustainable in its present form and let them know you are prepared to end the relationship. Some percentage of those bottom customers (larger than you may think) will understand and offer to keep doing business with you on some new terms."

Tantas e tantas vezes voltamos ao tema, ele é decisivo: quem são os clientes-alvo? Que procuram e valorizam?
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Como é a curva de Stobachoff da sua empresa? Qual a  percentagem de clientes com os quais a sua empresa perde dinheiro? Não tem clientes que geram prejuízo? A sério? Kotler e Byrnes apontam para cerca de 40% a quantidade de empresas americanas com clientes que dão prejuízo.

O primeiro grande desafio de um BSC

O primeiro grande desafio de um projecto BSC é o de escolher os clientes-alvo, é o de desenhar o ecossistema da procura e o de identificar os pivôs que fazem o circuito girar numa cadeia de relações win-win para os intervenientes.
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É aqui que entra o interesse em traçar a curva de Stobachoff, é aqui que entra o interesse em traçar o diagrama TOWS, é aqui que entra o ponto de, a partir do diagrama PESTEL, desenhar um simulador de cenários.
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Claro que isto pressupõe admitir que os clientes não são todos iguais e que, se calhar, alguns clientes certinhos e direitinhos, que pagam a tempo e horas, se calhar, não são clientes prioritários para a empresa. Escolher clientes-alvo não quer dizer que se expulsam os não-alvo, significa que eles não são prioritários.
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Esta abordagem nem sempre é fácil, muitas empresas têm um preconceito contra o conceito de clientes-alvo:

"Um cliente é uma raridade, um cliente é um bem escasso, está-me a dizer que devo abdicar de clientes?" 

No limite, sim!
Outra questão costuma ser:

"Eu até percebo que existam trade-offs numa empresa industrial, numa empresa que fabrica coisas físicas, mas numa empresa de serviços, isso também se aplica?"

 O que acham, também existem trade-offs numa empresa de serviços? Ou é indiferente servir o low-cost e o premium?

Pense na sua empresa

Uma corporação.
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Duas unidades de negócio.
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Duas marcas.
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Diferentes modelos de negócio: diferentes clientes-alvo, diferentes ecossistemas da procura, diferentes prateleiras, diferentes propostas de valor, diferentes mensagens de marketing.
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Custa-me a crer no que se segue mas:

"The brands, [Nespresso e Dolce Gusto] which he says have similar profit margins of about 25 percent, are the biggest players in the global coffee-pod business."

Pense na sua empresa, uma unidade de negócio, muitas vezes uma única marca e a tentativa de fazer tudo para todos sem critério. Pense na curva de Stobachoff, no tecto de vidro e nos dinossauros azuis.
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Não está na altura de pôr um pouco de ordem?
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Não está na altura de fazer escolhas?

Trecho retirado de "Nestle's Coffee Business Is Competing With Itself"

Um sinal

Ando há dias a tentar convencer-me a reservar um tempo para escrever uma brochura de 3 ou 4 páginas sobre a curva de Stobachoff, para distribuição aquando do arranque de projectos BSC.
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Talvez seja um sinal do meu anjo-da-guarda, a advertir-me para me dedicar a essa tarefa, o ter encontrado este texto "Firing Customers to Flatten the Whale".

"the Age of Diverse Markets" (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

Os trechos que se seguem são retirados de “Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive” de Jonathan S. Byrnes e ilustram algo que escrevo aqui há muitos anos. Basta recordar a curva de Stobachoff:

"to determine which parts of its business were making or losing money. When they saw the results, they nearly fell off their chairs:

• About 18 percent of their customers, which we call their Profit Peak accounts, accounted for about half of their revenues but produced over 130 percent of their profits.
• About 30 percent of their customers, their large money-losing Profit Drains, accounted for about one-third of their revenues but drained off about 50 percent of the profits earned by the rest of the company
• About half of the company’s customers were Profit Desert customers who accounted for about 20 percent of the revenues and produced less than 10 percent of the profits."

When Edison’s managers saw this, they immediately understood that their price war strategy was a response to the profit-draining customers’ demands, while they were essentially ignoring their critical high-profit customers.”[Moi ici: Demasiado comum. Recordo a espécie de esquema Ponzi]

 E pensa que só acontece aos outros? E como é na sua empresa? Ainda na passada quarta-feira ao telefone tive uma conversa surrealista, parecia um case-study acerca do que são custos afundados. A diferença é que numa empresa o que acontece com ela fica com ela, o mesmo já não se passa quando o decisor é um ministro.