Customer Reviews

The One to One Fieldbook

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Whenever I sit through a lecture with a marketing guru like Don Peppers, I leave fired up and ready to tackle the world. However, the feeling doesn't last. There are seldom specific examples of steps you can actually take to put these ideas to work. As much as I warmed to the ideas discussed in his first two books (with collaborator Martha Rodgers), The One to One Future and Enterprise One to One, I was left with much the same feeling. So, when a copy of The One to One Fieldbook hit my desk, I was eager to see if we would finally get some specific tactical advice.

Like many business principles, one to one marketing can be summed up by the simple idea of treating different customers differently. The Fieldbook begins by outlining four steps for implementing a one-to-one marketing program: identify your customers, differentiate your customers, interact with your customers and customize your products. Then the book suggests detailed steps for planning, implementing, evaluating, and upgrading any firm's relationship-marketing program. Each chapter leaves you with specific, manageable, measurable tasks to improve your one to one marketing efforts.

I found the book less a "toolkit for implementing a 1 to 1 marketing program" than a crash refresher course in basic marketing concepts. That's not all bad though. Many readers will find the step-by-step advice on differentiating customers a real blessing to addressing this frequently difficult problem. Some chapters are better than others are though. I was especially disappointed in the chapter on information systems. Most of the checklists presented here are too "high-level" to be of much use. The chapter on channel management, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise - providing lots of good advice to improve your relationship with your channel partners.

As an added value, The Fieldbook comes with an electronic password that allows readers to access a special one-to-one group Web site. There you will find electronic versions of all the book's checklists, along with extensive bibliographic references and useful spreadsheets that will save you time.

More importantly, if you are shopping for Customer Relationship Marketing software, you should insist that your potential suppliers read this book. And take its messages to heart! Every CRM developer on the planet will quote the wonders of one to one marketing as they attempt to sell you their wares. Yet, very few of these people really walk the talk and provide software solutions that will help you implement these strategies! For example, I cannot think of a single CRM program that makes it truly easy to broadcast an appropriate stream of e-mail messages to various prospects at various stages of the sales cycle. This capability essential to effectively interact with your customers!

So, should you buy this book? Most definitely, yes. The dozens of checklists for implementing relationship-marketing programs, along with self-analysis tools and questionnaires for evaluating a firm's progress or readiness for such programs are worth the purchase price alone.

Rich Bohn

If you're looking for ways to start your 1 to 1 marketing or CRM program, this is where you should begin. This book is a practical guide on how to start and implement a 1 to 1 program.

Every chapter includes lists and meeting notes for what to do at every step in the process. I wish I had this book when I began developing relationship marketing programs. With this book you are not alone in developing a 1 to 1 program. In addition, the book has a very valuable accompanying web site where you can print off the check lists and other helpful interactive tools. Before you buy the book you may want to look through their web site at 1to1.com. There you'll find more information on 1 to 1 marketing and CRM than anywhere else on the web. Martha Rogers and Don Peppers have truely shown that they are the masters of CRM in this book and their other titles.

I read this book from cover-to-cover - a rare occurrence in itself - and found that the authors not only expressed their concepts and case studies in a compelling manner, but also created a wonderful blueprint for any company that is seriously interested in nurturing long-term customer relationships. It is a marvellous synthesis of Rogers and Peppers earlier works and deserves a place on every corporate manager's bookshelf. The only area that I would like to have seen addressed more thoroughly is that of the key (and often killer!) relationship between IT and other functions. Overall, however, this is a book that will inspire a new breed of competitive differentation. The authors not only support their information with a superb web site, but the information contained in this inexpensive book will save decision-makers tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees.

The authors call it a "book of lists" and that is how I use it - a valuable series of checklists for managing customer relationships better. Chapter two is called "Quickstart" and it has some compelling questions, example: find the customers who have complained about your product or service, more than once in the last year and babysit their orders, call them and check up on your progress". Just imagine that you were that customer and how much you'd appreciate that approach. For another book with some good checklists try Seth Godin's "Permission marketing"

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 cover differentiating customers by value, interacting with them and customising. The "Rules of Engagement with Customers" on page 98 are interesting. These chapters stongly send you in the direction of different treatment for different customers. For another book with some new examples of best practice, take a look at Cram's "Customers that Count"

Finally I recommend the section in chapter 11 on targeting sales force compensation and commission to retention of valuable customers. This is good practice in putting company strategies into effect. If this is of interest, also look at Burnett's "Handbook of Key Customer Relationship managment"

Peppers, Rogers, and Dorf arm companies with a comprehensive toolkit not only in hardcopy but in an ingenious fieldbook web site (www.1to1fieldbook.com) exclusively created for readers of their latest book. These resources combined promise to help any enterprise design, build, and manage 1to1 programs successfully.

This fieldbook offers practical tips and tricks to management teams trying to make the most use of customer information in the Interactive Age. Additionally, these 1to1 thought leaders have culled a tremendous resource of recommended reads at the end of each chapter. When you visit the Web-site, these summaries also include a link to online merchants where you can purchase a copy!

Be sure not to miss the section dedicated to supplemental reads at the fieldbook web site, where specific chapters from seminal books by Peppers and Rogers are available electronically. Now you can quickly access key 1to1 content areas anytime, anywhere.

You'll also find all sorts of other resources - from the Gap Analysis Tool to numerous spreadsheets - that will help you create strategies to compete in the Interactive Age.

Anyone who wants to know how to strengthen customer relationship programs should buy this book. Actually, buy a book for each of your managers. You'll want all of them to have access to the fieldbook web site!

The authors of this book advise their readers to throw out the book on mass marketing because customers today want to be treated like individuals. In order for a company to achieve this, the authors present a concept known as one-to-one marketing. This book is offered as the complete toolkit for implementing a one to one marketing program.

Some of the key steps in this program include:

· Identifying customers and collect as much information as possible
· Differentiate customer needs
· Interacting and customizing is critical, specifically to learn the needs of the most valuable customers.
· Change your infrastructure and be prepared to start small and expand gradually.
· Develop a marketing database because the more customer information available, the more employees will want access to that information.
· Marketing communications are important. A company must learn to build technology and personality into the company's call center.
· Automate the sales system.
· Factor channel partners into the company's one-to-one game plan.

This one-to-one marketing program can not be implemented alone. The authors foresee resistance to this program but offer some keen advice on how to deal with resistance and overcome obstacles. As the authors see it, success will take time as the one-to-one relationships build. They argue the time to build is now.

All too often, the customer gets lost within the intricacies of customer relationship management. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers bring the customer back into the equation in this fieldbook designed to help companies implement their one-to-one marketing strategies. The book addresses the very questions that bring companies to CRM in the first place: How do I know who my best customers are? How can I customize my service for my best customers? How do I get my customers to stay loyal? For its clearheaded answers to these difficult questions, we from getAbstract recommend this book to all readers

What a fantastic book for every marketing professional to read. The authors have invested a lot of time and effort to make this book very informative and practical. It deals with the real business world and not some theoritical formula that works only in closed conditions. There are many examples of successes as well as failures of companies that have switched over to the 1 to 1 Marketing concept.
The book consists of 15 chapters to help one build the system of 1to1 marketing. The main highlights for me in this book were the following:
1.) Learning to treat different customers differently, separating them into three catagories
Most valuable Customer (MVC)
Most Growth Customer (MGC)
Below Zero (BZ)
and concentrating most of your companies effort and budget on the MVC and MGC clients.
2.)Gathering detailed information about the most profitable clients and maintaing a data bank to help all areas and product line to interact with the client on a profitable basis.
3.)Generating feed-back and interacting with the client based on the feed-back. Junking the typical model of customer help lines that do more damage than good for a company.
4.) Getting high-level management participating and to be prepared for the costs incurred when implementing the 1to1 marketing concept for the company.
One of my own important experiences is that management conceives the idea without asking the advice and input from the sales force. This can be disastrous for the 1to1 Marketing concept. Everybody and I mean everybody has to informed of why they are preforming a certain task and what effect it has on the entire company. Tell your employess what you are doing from the beginning, if you wish to avoid the pitfalls of internal conflicts and bickering.
At the end of each chapter there is a summary and a check list of items that should be done in order to implement the points discussed in the respective chapter. Don't forget... all companies are different and one will have to figure out which strategy to pursue for his or her industry.
This excllent book will definitely help your profits SKYROCKET to the moon. Do it before your competitor does.

The One to One Fieldbook is, by far, the most useful of all relationship marketing books.

For newcomers, it provides a concise introduction to the concepts of One to One Marketing as well as detailed references to where additional materials can be found in Peppers and Roger's other books.

For experienced One to One Marketers, The One to One Fieldbook makes it easy to apply the lessons of One to One marketing to specific situations.

The strength of the One to One Fieldbook is the way it easily relates concept to specific, actionable topics. Each chapter leaves you--or your team--with specific, manageable, measurable tasks that will further your cause and advance your progress towards a One to One future.

Specific references to topics covered in their own, and other relationsip marketing books, provide you with direction when you want to delve deeper into a topic.

I'm recommending it to all my clients and readers.

This is a good book for someone who is going about setting up a 1 to 1 marketing program for the first time in their company. I like the way it explains in a simple manner what goes into building a 1 to 1 marketing program.

The only drawback is that the free site from where one can download the templates that was included with the book is no longer available.