If you know your history the future will not trouble you. The first stage, which PricewaterhouseCoopers calls the customer acquisition stage, consists of 16 percent of the companies surveyed. Like a stereotypical car dealership, I would suggest these stage one companies exhibit institutional behaviors such as those of hunters. A whopping 76 percent of the companies fall into this class. I characterize this stage as ranchers.
Ranchers do a little better job than the hunters.
Ranchers take time to fatten you up first, then they eat you. The third stage is defined as strategic customer care. A particularly impressionable 8 percent of companies made the cut. I consider this stage farmers. Farmers have a particularly acute sense of the idea of sustained yield management.