Planting Flowers, Pulling Weeds: Identifying Your Most Profitable Customers to Ensure a Lifetime of Growth »

JANET RUBIO, a former marketing executive with Dell, led the company into direct marketing by launching catalog programs and target-marketed segment programs. As a consultant, she developed databases and direct marketing programs for Xerox Corporation and Mercedes-Benz of North America. The relationship marketing program she designed for Mercedes won a Gold Echo Award at the Direct Marketing Association Conference in 1997.

PATRICK LAUGHLIN began his career at IBM, where he was ranked among its top sales representatives. Laughlin joined Dell as a marketing manager in 1992. There he developed a variety of innovative programs, including SMART, the Sales and Marketing Analytical Reporting Tool, which provided detailed intelligence about customers and prospects and tracked the company's performance against targeted accounts.
Ms. Rubio and Mr. Laughlin are partners at Direct Impact, a direct marketing agency based in Austin, Texas.

PLANTING FLOWERS, PULLING WEEDS

In the age of relationship marketing, the companies that achieve continuous growth are those that identify their most valuable customers, forge solid relationships, and create a fiercely loyal, immensely profitable client base. In Planting Flowers, Pulling Weeds, the high-powered marketers who created the Direct Impact System started at Dell deliver the tools and systems you need to sow the seeds to accelerate growth in your company and sustain that growth far into the future.

In this completely practical guide Janet Rubio and Patrick Laughlin introduce the Direct Impact Growth System (DIGS), which has spurred growth at Dell, Xerox, Mercedes-Benz, and other major firms. They explain how DIGS helps you focus your company's energy on its most profitable customers and, in ten clearly defined steps, they show you how to implement this comprehensive system and power your way to unprecedented growth.

You'll learn how to build value segments by defining corporate objectives; organizing your customer information; and building and leveraging long and strong relationships with your best customers and prospects. You'll discover a value segmentation technique that tells you exactly which customers to pursue most vigorously to generate exponential growth. You'll also find out how to maximize growth through organizational magnification and marketing and sales execution.

Complete with a directory of resources that you can use to supplement your company's specific implementation of DIGS, Planting Flowers, Pulling Weeds puts you in complete command of the most potent and effective relationship marketing system ever devised.