What Does Activity Based Costing Have to Do With Customer Relationship Management? (page 2 of 2)

And because accounting also knows the revenue each account brings in, they can figure out the profitability of each customer. At the end of the exercise, accounting has a customer list of your most profitable customers. Unfortunately, it's a list that they own, and it lives within their department and their information systems.

There are two ways to deal with this problem. The hard way entails obtaining that list from accounting and merging it into your marketing systems. The problem is that if you do this every time you get a customer list from accounting, you'll begin to have multiple customer records in your marketing systems, and you'll lose the ability to have one view into all customer interactions. The easier way, would be to tie accounting and marketing together by utilizing the same database. Accounting still sees its data in the format relevant to them, while marketing can see its data, along with accounting's data, in a format that makes sense to them. If accounting creates a list of all the profitable customers and flags them in the joint system, you can use that list for your campaigns. Truly forward-looking organizations have realized that a key to effectiveness is having all your information in one place.

Just as no man is an island, no department can operate to its fullest potential on its own. Just as you partnered with accounting, you can work with manufacturing to ensure that the products you're about to do a promotion on are actually available, or to help you decide which products to promote, based on inventory levels. Or you could work with sales to share information on the quality of leads to help improve your company's ability to close deals.

The most creative campaigns in the world are doomed from the start if they aren't built using relevant information from around the company. By looking around your company for information and relationships that you haven't relied upon in the past, you can make your marketing more effective and your company more successful.


By Lisa Arthur, Vice President of CRM Marketing, Oracle Corporation