Personas are cute; Customer Resumes are for real, for real

Hello marketing manager, CMO, communications director, product manager, ecommerce lead, webmaster and CEO, welcome to the internet and the mysterious land of non synchronous and "not my" data.  It's been a long journey on your wooden sailing ships, but you've finally arrived at the new world.  Now whatcha' gonna do?

Of course I visited Kevin Hillstrom's blog Mine That Data this morning, and I found a very informative post titled Customer Resume.  Not a surprise, because it's always good over there if you're willing to dig in.  Advice: don't go there if you're still interested in skating on the surface and acting like you get it.

Kevin points out a REAL customer resume (below) and then says plop that on a table at you next Sr. Managers meeting ask how collectively the organization would develop a strategy to find, interest, sell and re-sell more of them?  And I'm not just talking about products here.  Ideas, concepts and points of view need to be sold too!!

Typical view of a customer -

One order, on October 29
Spent $200 on one item

Your system could give you this, but you're probably not really looking -

Customer received a catalog on October 1
Customer did not return any of the merchandise ordered on October 29
Customer paid the standard fee for shipping
Customer did not use a discount code when placing the order
Customer is an e-mail subscriber
Customer only purchased one item
Customer ordered on a Wednesday, one day after receiving an e-mail campaign
Customer had a referring URL from a social media site
Customer ordered 28 days after receiving a catalog
Customer did not use a catalog key-code when ordering
Customer lives in a Zip Code Forensics zip code classified as "Online Bliss"
Customer ordered from merchandise division "X", and did not order from merchandise division "Y" or "Z"
Customer has not visited the website since
This was the first order placed by this customer
Customer lives more than 100 miles from a store

See, all of this is inside of your organization today.  It's "somebody's" data they ignore daily, 'cause there aren't ever any insights there.  Well, it's hard damn work brining all of this together and making sense of it.

Get to work!