Identifying key customers for novel industrial products

Managers responsible for novel industrial products seek to identify their most productive customers promptly, as a basis for deployment of marketing and development resources. Using a trial-and-adoption model, based upon invoice data from sales of novel industrial products over a five-year period, Richard Cardozo, David Smith and Madhubalan Viswanathan show that initial interpurchase interval (the time from initial purchase to first repeat purchase) identifies high- volume customers, no matter when they first purchased. In addition to demonstrating the usefulness of a trial-and-adoption model in analyzing purchases of novel industrial products, this study also describes for the first time four distinct purchase patterns for novel industrial products.