Choose or Lose

Making the Rounds cut is a big deal for prospective customers. Once they do, they are fed into a CRI system tailored to serve their individual needs. Welcome to CRI's freshman class.

The freshman class
Lisa Gudding is the very picture of a rising young sales star. At once enthusiastic and thoughtful, the 33-year-old account manager possesses the kind of disarming charm they can't teach at the Dale Carnegie school. "I never knew I could love work so much," she says.

Gudding is, as they say, a "find"--a loyal employee who over the past eight years has worked her way up from a position as a research assistant. Today part of her sales role is to help freshman customers find their way up the organizational ladder as well. CRI's sales criteria for first-year accounts, notes Gudding, are "much higher than when I first started in sales four years ago. The hurdle keeps going up." That means she must be ever more diligent in scoping out which of her freshmen have the potential to go all the way--to second-year "sophomore" status and eventually to "core" partner.

Making such assessments is part of everyone's job at CRI, where knowledge about customers is a currency more highly valued than product knowledge or even technical expertise. "You learn not only a function but also about the client, the client's business, and the competitive nature of that business," says Samantha Ball, who started at CRI in 1980 as a telephone interviewer.

From the moment Gudding receives a lead from Rounds, she's working on it--researching the prospective customer's company, its industry, and the background of the individuals involved. She plays the role of a reporter, uncovering what was lacking in the customer's dealings with other market-research firms and thus finding out where the real opportunity lies for CRI. But even more, she's a matchmaker. In the earliest face-to-face meetings with a potential customer, she's already thinking about which combination of CRI people would be the best fit for the account. "There's a conscious attempt to match personalities," she says--even if that means taking herself off the account.

Earlier this year Rounds gave Gudding a lead regarding American Century Investments. Gudding was clearly the right salesperson--her banking-industry experience allowed her to establish a quick rapport with the financial-services firm. ACI's Michael Henderson agreed to a meeting in Minneapolis, where he gave Gudding an indication of how much business CRI stood to gain. So far, so good.

That "freshman" looked promising indeed.

A dream team of your own
Once a potential customer has passed muster with Rounds and Gudding (or one of eight other account managers), it must also be approved by one of CRI's nine account teams. Each team, typically handling anywhere from one to five major customers, focuses on growing the business from its existing accounts. That way not only is it less tempting for a team to accept questionable customers, it's nearly impossible for it to do so. "We're able to say, 'Honestly, I don't think we can do this,'" says executive vice-president Jan Elsesser, who oversees the drive to grow new and current accounts. The account teams price all projects and put the kibosh on unprofitable-sounding ones.

But once prospects pass the team test, they are quickly lavished with attention. In most cases, before the first project even begins, the customer receives a phone call or visit from one of CRI's four most senior executives. "We do this initial interview with every new client," says Corson. That meeting is followed by a letter from a CRI senior executive summing up the customer's stated expectations for the project.

Not long ago, Elsesser chatted with several marketing-research analysts at ACI (which, to date, has given CRI three projects in quick succession). Angela Murray, one of ACI's senior marketing analysts, was happy to set up the conference call. "We talked broadly about my relationships with other research firms and how we can do things differently," says Murray. "Jan explained CRI's philosophy [of focusing on fewer customers], and that was appealing to me. You want to feel as if you've got some clout."

In turn, the team that is assigned to the new customer uses the interview to form its own plan for meeting--or even exceeding--expectations for the project, from designing the study to presenting the results. "Flawless execution" is what Robert Anderson, director of marketing research for Pillsbury Brands, calls it.

A variety of team members--not just the account managers and project managers--spend time visiting new customers to hear about their particular quirks and needs. "You learn to think like them and to know their culture," explains Corson.

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