customer? Making this determination and making the right decision must become a requirement for the sales organization under this new model. Handling the Low-Value Customer Not only must the sales and promotion groups consider the impacts of bringing in high-churn customers, they also need to be aware of the consequences of paying large amounts to acquire low-value customers. Although every telco would like to have many customers, it is important that those subscribers be profitable. If you run a promotion that subsidizes a customer for $500 and that customer generates $250 per year in revenue, then you have probably made a bad investment. Chapter 18 How Do You Cure the Blindness? The challenge, of course, is that it is difficult to infuse this kind of selection sophistication into most sales and promotion organizations because these groups have been structured based on the transaction delivery model. That does not mean, however, that the telco can afford to ignore the problem and steps must be taken to inject this kind of facility into the process. No amount of clever, expensive, or otherwise intensive form of loyalty management approach will help a telco that continues to acquire low-quality and high-churn customers. This kind of blind acquisition can easily gobble up any profit that improvements in other areas produce. Sales Segmentation The first step to make such sophisticated acquisition a reality is to generate new sets of data that can help sales and promotion groups determine which customers to acquire. The organization needs to learn who the high-value and low-churn potential customers are. This is not an easy process, but it is a critical one. By figuring out what kinds of customers to look for, these organizations can do a better job of bringing them in. Sales Measurements The next step is to set up the key performance indicators and sales targets that encourage focusing on the acquisition of the right kinds of customers. The cornerstone of this must be the development of techniques that prevent inves