I once worked in large Defense Department organizations as well as medium and small corporate businesses and let me tell you, I have witnessed insurmountable damage done to organizations because of ineffective timing. I used to keep notes on how many customers actually said anything nice about their experience with our business, and how to make products or services we offered better. I watched trends and patterns and really received no quantitative input as to what was really wrong. It wasn't until I started personally talking with customers about what we were doing wrong that it hit me. Over a period of about 1 year 90 percent of the time the answer or problem was most often had to do with timing. Customers stated that using our products or services during a certain period of time or during certain circumstances just wasn't right, or at least off a bit.
The timing of introducing or even reintroducing products, services and promotions must be executed with a certain degree of precision in a customer segment and executed with the utmost care. Some of the organizations do not consider timing as a viable part of their customer needs analysis (CNA). Certain customer segments are very mobile and very volatile, moving about and circling many different types of options and sporting many likes and dislikes. These type of markets need constant surveillance and analysis, and organizations that work with these type of customer markets must effectively monitor and record trends and match it with proper timing or they will quickly get passed by like a Porsche on the Autobahn. Somehow your organization must find a way to allow marketing, sales, and management personnel to identify and capture critical, mobile customer market segments from a central point, and analyze them without missing a change or swing in market position. All of this should be executed with a written plan, or at least some assimilation of documented direction. Old school marketing techniques are still viable in putting the rubber to the road, but are sometimes overshadowed by technology and its powerful abilities. Let's face it, with today's technology and technology savvy employees, your business should learn to use these technologies through centralization. When a company manages customers at the center of its network nothing should come in or go out without the knowledge of the entire marketing team. . By centralizing your customer analysis functions you can monitor timing and its easier to change positions, make decisions, and group or re-group priorities based on these timing issues.
