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Trenching is a term I use to refer to the process of finding actionable information in customer data and using that to grow your business. Some people would call this data mining, but you don’t really dig for it and remove it. Instead, you move along a trench looking at the stratification, like a geologist. (Besides, data mining doesn’t start with the letter “t,” so that would blow my whole premise.) When trenching, you are trying to find answers to the following key questions:

·        What kind of customers should we serve?

·        What kind of customers do we currently serve?

·        How can we describe our best types of customers?

·        What patterns can we find in our customers that predict future life time value, potential offers or potential actions?

You can nearly always find patterns in the data: why people buy, when they buy, what they buy, what kind of offers elicit a response. If Tony buys only logo hats from me year after year like clockwork and nothing else, I’m probably wasting money sending him a shirt catalog 12 times a year. If Candlewic president Bill Binder has a customer who buys only soap supplies from him, it wouldn’t make sense to continually offer that customer special pricing on candle supplies. Maybe once or twice a year, he would offer special pricing to see if he could elicit a trial, but certainly not as often as he would to his known candle supply buyers.

Who owns your customer data in your organization? If you’re like most companies that have gone beyond a few employees, the data are all over the place. Finance owns one chunk, purchasing or shipping owns a chunk, marketing owns another, and sales has different pieces altogether. Many of the salespeople might have half their info scribbled on notes somewhere, and the other departments are each protecting their fiefdom from intruders. You need to figure out who owns all the pieces and pull them together so the data be-come meaningful. There are software vendors who want to help you with this, some of them quite good. But even the best software is only as good as the legacy data you can input. The data are only as good as the ongoing processes for gathering and sharing that data.

Some people will find this information of great value. Others will say, “Hey, Steve, I just own an ice cream shop. How is trenching data going to help me grow my business?” That’s a legitimate question, and here’s your answer. How difficult would it be to gather customers’ e-mails in exchange for a free sample? Maybe you can even ask for their favorite flavor, too, and get the entire family’s birthdays. Every birthday you send out a coupon. If you ever want to send out a survey, you’ve got your list. You’ve got the idea.