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IQSSL GMQE study materials
IQSSL GMQE study resources

IQSSL GMQE: Marketing and Customer Relationship Management

IQSSL GMQE · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Marketing and Customer Relationship Management

This domain tests whether you can market an intangible professional service, segment clients sensibly, and manage relationships so that satisfaction turns into repeat and referred work.

Core rules and concepts

  • Marketing is a value-creation system; selling is one output of it. Marketing identifies needs and shapes the offer before a tender is ever submitted.
  • The services mix extends the four Ps: product, price, place, promotion, plus people, process and physical evidence. For a quantity surveying firm, process and people are often the visible product.
  • Services have intangibility, inseparability, variability and perishability, so clients judge reliability and evidence of competence rather than inspecting a finished good.
  • Segmentation, targeting and positioning: group clients by need and sector, choose segments the firm can serve credibly, and state a defensible position against competitors.
  • SERVQUAL five dimensions: reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy and responsiveness. Reliability usually carries the most weight in professional services.
  • Customer lifetime value assesses whether acquisition and retention spending is justified. Retention usually moves it more than a small fee increase.

Worked example

A client generates LKR 150,000 annual margin, retention is 80 per cent and the discount rate is 10 per cent. Using CLV = margin x retention / (1 + discount rate - retention) = 150,000 x 0.8 / (1 + 0.1 - 0.8) = LKR 400,000. The arithmetic matters less than the reasoning: the value is roughly 2.7 years of margin, so a service failure that loses this client costs far more than the disputed fee. Conversely, a 5 per cent fee increase adds less than a sustained improvement in retention.

Traps that cost marks

Equating marketing with advertising; competing only on fee; treating a complaint as a transaction rather than a service-recovery opportunity; computing CLV without stating retention and discount assumptions; and segmenting by size alone when buying behaviour differs.