Calculate The Value Of Learning

Your organisation can benefit from customers in several ways by: learning from them, having a dialog with them, by supporting them and by innovating through them.  In this article I will elaborate on Calculating The Value Of Learning.

Last week we blogged about Customers Being Your First Line Of Defence and we finished the article by saying that your customers aren’t just another transaction; but they are people who add value across the line. But how do we calculate the value?

Learning From Your Customers
Firstly learning from your customers will enable you to increase the speed of your marketing, your sales, your development and in other business areas. Also, it helps you avoiding mistakes. You will be more in-tune with your customer and you will know what, how and when to voice your message and most of all how to listen!

Calculate The Value Of Learning
You can setup the following activities to properly learn from your clients, I have added the costs of these activities:

1. Setting up a private community $ 60,000
2. Starting a Social Media Monitoring Campaign $ 250,000.-
3. Dedicating one FTE on actively listening $ 100,000.-

The total costs of these activities will lie around $ 410,000.-

Let’s have a look at some of the benefits:

1. Reducing focus groups costs (more focus means, less waste) $ 60,000.-
2. Faster marketing real-time insights;$ 125,000.-
   (not doing unnecessary campaigns, will save costs)
3. Better strategy alignment $ 610,000.- 
   (employee productivity, decrease recruitment costs, better partner relationships)

The total benefits of these activities amount to $ 795,000.-
This means the net benefit is; $ 385,000.-. A whopping 94% return!

These calculations have been based on the following assumptions: revenues $500,000,000.-, customers 1,000,000, employees 2,000, rev/cust $ 500, rev/emp $ 250,000, rev/emp/hr $156.

 

Mission Control
A great example of a company that listens to all stakeholders is Gatorade, they benefit from actively engaging with their audience.  

Let’s have a look inside their Mission Control; 
  

Food for thought: which budget-line item do you allocate for these costs… is marketing the right one?

 

Source: charlene Li