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)

Basear os preços no valor

Já devia ter percebido o meu erro... já devia estar de pé atrás e ter cuidado.
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Já por mais de uma vez escrevi que os empresários portugueses têm o mau costume de subavaliar os seus produtos e serviços.
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Errado? Não mas...
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Mas não são só os empresários portugueses!!!!
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Depois de Byrnes, depois da curva de Stobachoff que Storbacka desenhou para os bancos finlandeses já devia metido na cabeça que os empresários portugueses não são uma espécie à parte, nem piores nem melhores que os outros.
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Foi o artigo "Customer value-based pricing strategies: why companies resist" de Andreas Hinterhuber e publicado no VOL. 29 NO. 4 2008, pp. 41-50 do Journal of Business Strategy que me fez reconhecer o erro.
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O que tento e tento, algumas vezes com sucesso, é que os empresários mudem de software para definir o preço das suas ofertas. A esmagadora maioria define os seus preços com base nos custos ou com base nos preços da concorrência. Assim, muitos deles, desvalorizam as suas ofertas e deixam dinheiro em cima da mesa negocial.
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Só que para meu espanto, confesso, o mesmo se passa na Alemanha, Austria e Suiça.
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Ou seja, o mundo económico está cheio de pagãos... um mercado espectacular para divulgar o Evangelho do Valor!!!
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"pricing strategies can be categorised into three groups:

• 1. cost-based pricing;
• 2. competition-based pricing; and
• 3. customer value-based pricing.

Of these, customer value-based pricing is increasingly recognised in the literature as superior to all other pricing strategies (Ingenbleek et al., 2003). For example, Monroe (2002, p. 36) observes that: ‘‘ . . . the profit potential for having a value-oriented pricing strategy that works is far greater than with any other pricing approach’’.
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The increasing endorsement of customer value-based strategies among academics and practitioners is based on a general recognition that the keys to sustained profitability lie in the essential features of customer value-based pricing, including understanding the sources of value for customers; designing products, services, and solutions that meet customers’ needs; setting prices as a function of value; and implementing consistent pricing policies.
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Despite the obvious benefits of customer value-based approaches to pricing, a review of the literature suggests that these methods still play a relatively minor role in pricing strategies. (Moi ici: Afinal não são só os empresários portugueses que resistem)
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Cost-based pricing derives from data from cost accounting. Competition-based pricing uses anticipated or observed price levels of competitors as primary source for setting prices and customer value-based pricing uses the value that a product or service delivers to a segment of customers as the main factor for setting prices.  (Moi ici: Uma das mensagens mais frequentes neste blogue, a par da concentração do negócio, focalização na emergência do valor co-criado durante a experiência de integração na vida dos clientes-alvo)
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Backman (1953, p. 148) notes that ‘‘. . .the graveyard of business is filled with the skeletons of companies that attempted to base their prices solely on costs’’.  (Moi ici: Como podia resistir a este "writebyte") More recently, Myers et al. (2002) assert that cost-based pricing produces sub-standard profitability; similarly, Simon et al. (2003) contend that cost-based pricing leads to lower-than-average profitability.
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customer value-based pricing approaches are, overall, the best strategies to adopt in making decisions about new product pricing.
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Despite the fact that empirical research shows that value-based approaches are superior to other pricing approaches, it has not been widely adopted in practice.
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literature review reveals that value-based pricing approaches remain in a significant minority.

(Moi ici: Os autores fizeram uma pesquisa no universo que se segue para tentar perceber o porquê do pouco uso do preço baseado no valor para o cliente) A sample of 126 marketing managers, business unit managers, key account managers, pricing managers, and general managers were initially recruited for this study. These managers participated in in-house pricing workshops which the author conducted in the period 2006-2007. Companies represented included automotive, chemicals, information technology (IT), chemicals, industrial services and fast moving consumer goods. We held nine workshops at nine different companies in Germany, Austria, China, and the USA. The study design is thus cross-sectional, multi-country, and multi-industry.
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In response to questions about the obstacles to implementation of value-based pricing, a wide array of answers was received (with multiple answers being allowed and encouraged). As shown In Figure 2, six main obstacles were identified after clustering responses:

(Moi ici: Vamos procurar analisar cada um destes factores)
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Continua.

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."

There are no bad customers, only bad strategies (parte II)

Através de um tweet de Arie Goldshlager cheguei a este postal de 2009 "Can courting so-so customers be good for business?" onde este estudo é citado "Courting So-So Customers Can Be Good for Business".
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O que logo me fez recordar este postal "There are no bad customers, only bad strategies" e voltar a Storbacka e Lehtinen no livro "Customer Relationship Management" escrito em 2001:
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"The differences in the profitability of relationships in the customer base are generally significant. It is not unusual for over 30% of relationships to be unprofitable. In the worst case, as many as 80% of customers are unprofitable.
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The distribution of profitability in the customer base is often very dramatic. Management literature often cites the Pareto rule, which states that 20% of customers account for 80% of profits. This is not entirely true, however. The distribution of profitability is usually much more dramatic: it is not uncommon for 20% of customers to bring 180% of the profit. If you calculate the unprofitable customers' share of the profits derived from an entire customer base, the percentage is negative, which is why the percentage may be more than 100%. (Moi ici: Recordar as curvas de Stobachoff)
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The main purpose of analyzing customer bases is to determine the reasons for profitable and unprofitable relationships. On the basis of this identification, it is then possible to determine the profitability potential in the customer base. Taking advantage of this potential requires changing relationship strategies.
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A customer base can usually be divided into three different portfolios: The "protect" portfolio, the "develop" portfolio, and the "change" portfolio. The "protect" portfolio encompasses relationships whose value is great to the company. Strategies should be be created to protects customers from the "temptations" of other providers.
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Relationships in the "develop" portfolio hold significant volume and profitability potential, assuming the way they are developed increases customer share and/or simplifies the relationship structure (for example by decreasing the number of customer encounters).
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Relationships in the "change" portfolio are the ones which are clearly unprofitable. Their value to the company is insignificant unless they can be dramatically transformed. The management of these relationships can begin to resemble "terminal care" if change is not effected in the value."
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E agora voltamos ao ponto principal, relacionado com o texto inicial de Goldshlager, escrito por Storbacka em 2001:
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"The greatest profitability potential is usually not found in relationships which need to be protected. These relationships are already so good that it is unlikely that they will improve significantly. Preferred customer programs can thus be dangerous if they function as vehicles for automatic discounts or if they result in the heavy use of resources for handling customers.
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The greatest potential can usually be found in the "develop" and "change" portfolios. Because the number of unprofitable customers is often high, it is possible to achieve significant improvement in profitability even by only implementing small changes."
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Relacionado com isto, ainda, este artigo "It's Time to Fire Some of Your Customers":
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"business is not about growing revenue, but about growing profitable revenue with the right target customer. To get that right customer, you sometimes need to start by casting a wider net, figuring out which customers are the most attractive, and then temporarily shrinking the business before you grow it again. With each iteration, you get smarter and more targeted towards the ideal customer profile."
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"Why do so many of us fall into the trap of spreading our efforts evenly across our customer base, or even skewing them towards the lowest-potential customers? It is tempting to embrace every customer equally — and we naturally want to understand why the lower customer deciles are not behaving like the higher deciles. We want to believe that we can nurture and develop all customers to reach high potential levels over time. However, in the companies in which we have been involved, the data do not support that thesis. It is always tougher to change customer behavior than to find new customers similar to your existing top-buyer profiles." (Moi ici: Julgo que o autor embora foque a questão dos clientes não-rentáveis não percebeu ainda o potencial dos portfolios menos rentáveis se a abordagem, se a estratégia mudar...)

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?)

Uma via para aumentar a rentabilidade

Excelente resumo de “Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink” feito pelo seu autor Jonathan Byrnes em "Improving Profitability from a Granular Level".
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Chamo a atenção para os números " in my research and consultations with leading companies in more than a dozen industries, I've found virtually every company is 30-40 percent unprofitable by any measure, and 20-30 percent of the business is providing all the reported profits and subsidizing the losses. The potential profit improvement is often 30 percent or more within a year with comparable improvements year after year." (Moi ici: Recordar as curvas de Stobachoff)
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O que gosto de salientar acerca dos estudos de Byrnes é que ele escreve sobre empresas americanas... por isso, os empresários portugueses quando cometem o mesmo erro de trabalhar com clientes não rentáveis, não estão a cometer um erro intrinsecamente português. É a herança de uma época em que quem mandava eram os fabricantes e os clientes não eram tratados nem se comportavam de forma distinta.

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."