Internal Records and Database Systems

To spot important opportunities and potential problems, marketing managers rely on internal reports of orders, sales, prices, costs, inventory levels, receivables, and payables.

The Order-to-Payment Cycle
The heart of the internal records system is the order-to-payment cycle. Sales representatives, dealers, and customers send orders to the firm. The sales department prepares invoices, transmits copies to various departments, and back-orders out-of-stock items. Shipped items generate shipping and billing documents. Because customers favor firms that can promise timely delivery, companies need to perform these steps quickly and accurately.

Sales Information Systems
Marketing managers need timely and accurate reports on cur-rent sales. Walmart operates a sales and inventory data warehouse that captures data on every item for every customer, every store, every day and refreshes it every hour. Marketers must carefully interpret sales data, however, to avoid drawing wrong conclusions.

Databases, Data Warehousing, and Data Mining
A customer database is an organized collection of comprehensive information about individual customers or prospects that is current, accessible, and actionable for lead generation, lead qualification, sales, or customer relationship management.
Database marketing is the process of building, maintaining, and using customer databases and other databases (products, suppliers, resellers) to contact, transact with, and build relationships with customers. Information captured by the company is organized into a data warehouse where marketers can capture, query, and analyze data to draw inferences about individual customers’ needs and responses. Marketing analysts use data mining to extract from the mass of data useful insights about customer behavior, trends, and segments.

The explosion of data brought by the maturation of the Internet and mobile technology gives companies unprecedented opportunities to engage customers. It also threatens to over-whelm decision makers.
On the other hand, some customers may not want a relationship with the company and may resent having personal data collected and stored. The use of behavioral targeting to track customers’ online behavior for marketing purposes allows advertisers to better target online ads—but some consumers object to the practice. Chapter 17 discusses database marketing in the context of direct marketing.