Again, trend No. 1 is that management accounting must help the sales and marketing functions. A company needs to know the best types of customers to retain, grow, win back, and acquire—and those who aren’t. To maximize shareholder wealth, a company also needs to know how much to optimally spend retaining, growing,winning back, and acquiring each type of customer. This is because it’s an optimization problem. A company can unnecessarily spend excessively on loyal customers and
therefore destroy shareholder wealth. In contrast, it can spend too little on marginally loyal customers and risk their defection to a competitor. Without this information,
financial performance falls short of its full potential