Decoding Emotional Purchase Decisions

I make a point to send a handwritten note to each one of our new customers; it reinforces the promise of Aston Martin’s unrivaled, custom-tailored experience. It’s not scalable, but it is memorable. We’re all time-poor, and this sends a message to each customer that we appreciate their business and that they’re well worth the time for us to put pen to paper in a time-honored tradition.

As we drive into our Second Century, Aston Martin will continue to champion the personalized experiences, even—or especially—those delivered via more distinctive, non-scalable methods. Yet we realize that if the charm of a handwritten note were a model for how we ran the business, the next 100 years would be as tumultuous as the first. To grow our business effectively, the handcrafted approach must coexist with the latest CRM technology. Tools like Salesforce help us to view consumer interests, responses, and behavior from a higher altitude. Before patting ourselves on the back for what might have felt like a successful campaign or event, CRM connects the dots, like an impartial engineer, to test whether our own sales and marketing engine is as finely tuned and as we’d thought. We analyze data on everything from email open rates to events, from test drives to new product introductions. The more data we gather, the better informed we’ll be at every turn.

An Aston Martin is an emotional purchase, and Salesforce helps us to decipher some of the motivation behind what moves our customers to act. Will horsepower, hand-stitched leather or the sheer beauty of the new DB11 encourage a prospect to take one home? Every bit of data gathered by our CRM technology helps Aston Martin to nurture its ‘customer-first’ mindset, analyze and improve our processes, conserve time, uncover patterns, and even optimize sales forecasting. As we embark on a brilliant second century, the predictability is as important as our progress.