Customer master

The file that says what each account is: a stable identifier, a dated parent, two or three segment fields from what the customer is, a size measure not derived from sales, an owner, a status and effective dates. One named source per field. Names, contacts and notes stay in the CRM.

DefinitionThe file that says what each account is: a stable identifier, a dated parent, two or three segment fields from what the customer is, a size measure not derived from sales, an owner, a status and effective dates. One named source per field. Names, contacts and notes stay in the CRM.

Not the CRM's account list

Prospects, duplicates and typed fields. The master is the ledger's customers with fields owned by named systems.

Checked monthly

Every ledger customer in it; identifiers unique; parents exist; segments populated or flagged; one owner per active customer.

How it is used

One row per account with a stable identifier, a dated parent, and two or three segment fields the company maintains itself. Every measure joins to it, and its completeness is reported.

Example

Of 4,200 accounts, 3,900 have a segment, 3,400 a confirmed parent and all have a stable identifier. Revenue on accounts with a missing segment is $2.1 million, shown as unsegmented and not dropped.

Where it goes wrong

Names used as the key. A rename or a second spelling creates a new customer and breaks every history.

Articles that use this term

Data quality and reconciliation

A CRM data quality scorecard: five fields, five checks, one number per rep

How to score CRM data quality from the export rather than from complaints: five fields that every coverage and pipeline measure depends on, owner, close date, stage, activity date and account identifier, the check for each, the completeness and validity rate per rep, why the score is reported beside the measures that depend on it, and the rule that a measure computed on data under a stated score is shown greyed.

16 Sept 20263 min read Board and management reporting · Finance and FP&A teams

Automating the sales report: from a manual monthly pack to computed tables

A practical path for a sales operations or finance team that assembles the monthly sales report by hand: what to automate first, the definitions that have to be written down before anything can be computed, the four exports the whole pack comes from, the identity checks that replace the reconciliation week, what stays manual, and the order in which the pack's sections move from spreadsheet to computed table.

16 Sept 20263 min read Forecast and pipeline

B2B churn without a subscription: measuring lost customers from the ledger

How a company that sells on orders rather than subscriptions measures churn from its ledger: the definition of a lost customer from its own order cadence, churned revenue as the run rate before the silence, the churn rate by segment and by rep, the identity that ties churned plus retained plus new to the two periods' revenue, and why a fixed 12-month rule counts the wrong customers as lost.

16 Sept 20262 min read Data quality and reconciliation

B2B customer segmentation from the ledger, not from personas

How to segment a B2B customer base from data the company holds: the two or three fields that make a segment useful for norms, size, sector and channel, why behavioural fields like order frequency and product mix belong in the measures rather than the segment definition, the minimum segment size that makes a norm mean something, the test that a segmentation is good, and why personas do not survive contact with a ledger.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Baseline and norm: what this account usually does, and what accounts like it do

The difference between a baseline, an account's own typical level from its own history, and a norm, what similar accounts do when the relationship is full, why the two answer different questions, has this account changed and how far is it from where it could be, which measures use which, surge and dormancy against baseline, gap and share against norm, the case where an account is at its baseline and far from the norm, and the rule that both are stated on the line that uses them.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration · Industrial manufacturers

Catalogue fit per customer: how a manufacturer measures the product lines its customers could buy

A method for industrial and component manufacturers to measure, per customer, the product lines bought against the lines customers of that type buy, value the gap, keep direct and distributor channels from double counting, and reconcile to shipped revenue.

16 Sept 20263 min read