Hello! And welcome to the grand opening of Get, Grow, Keep, our spanking new group blog focused on the remarkably old business problems every marketer faces: namely, how to get, grow, and keep your best customers.

The Timeline of innovation on Wikipedia’s History of marketing entry makes it clear – the accelerating pace of technological innovation is a double-edge sword. Increasingly, we have new ways to glean insights about our customers, new ways to interact with our customers, and new ways to measure and improve our performance. But all these “new ways” also mean we marketers have other “new’s” not explicitly listed on the timeline: new tools to use, new strategies to devise, and perhaps most importantly, new (customer) expectations to meet.

And here we are. As a marketing organization, we struggle with the same challenges our customers and prospects face.

We are starting to ask new questions like:

• How can we evolve as an organization and develop better relationships with today’s highly empowered customers?

And we are continuing to ask fundamental questions like:

• What is the best way to create a single view of our customers?
• How can we uncover insights about our customers to drive our marketing decisions?
• What are the best solutions and strategies for executing integrated, cross-channel communications?
• How can we best develop and view metrics to measure and improve our marketing efforts?

Answer these questions correctly and you can acquire new customers, increase the value of current customers, and retain profitable customers longer—leading to a growing and profitable customer base. Answer incorrectly and you risk high attrition rates and low acquisition rates, and more to the point, you may end up acquiring and keeping unprofitable customers too.

We offer this new blog as a platform to talk with you, not only about the challenges of getting, growing, and keeping customers, but also about current customer intelligence/CRM industry news, events, ideas, and trends. From time to time we’ll invite industry leaders, analysts, professors and customers to provide new perspectives through guest blog posts. Not surprisingly, we are determined to have a lot of fun along the way as well.

What does success look like for this blog? Simply put, we’ll be measuring ourselves against our ability to encourage conversations, lower the usual customer/corporate barriers, and give you access to our key contributors.

Fortunately we have a fantastic group of core contributors, consisting of experienced and new bloggers, covering a range of marketing roles. Our team includes:

• Justin Huntsman (that’s me), and John Balla. We’re both field marketers focused on creating opportunities for our prospects and customers to learn more about our company and solutions.
• John Bastone is our global SAS Customer Intelligence product marketing manager. He's a direct marketing enthusiast with a current focus on “all things web and social."
• Mark Chaves is the director of media intelligence solutions for our Customer Intelligence business unit. His current focus is to guide the solution strategy for our marketing mix analysis and social marketing solutions.
• David B. Thomas is our social media manager. He blogs regularly at Conversations & Connections, the SAS social media blog.
• Matt Fulk manages our database marketing team and is leading a project focusing on buy-cycle marketing and list development optimization using SAS Marketing Automation.
• Alison Bolen is the editor of blogs and social content at SAS. You’ll find her regularly at the sascom voices blog.
• Deb Orton is our director of field marketing, responsible for leading a group of talented marketers "across the chasm" from traditional marketing approaches to social, digital methods.

Our names above are linked to our Linked-In profiles. We’d each be delighted to connect with you and to hear from you via comments to this blog, or our new group Twitter account @SAS_CI.

This blog is going to be great fun. Welcome!