Instead, it is the question. Small businesses, new businesses, unintentional businesses are still looking for the answers. When you are still concocting the winning sales strategy, determining the right pricing structure, exploring service channels and developing your company’s voice, you can’t plug a handful of purchased leads into a preexisting sales pipeline and expect a reliable return. When your business is growing 1 or 10 or maybe 100 customers at a time, you need to be able to follow each relationship where the customer leads it. Not where the software dictates it go.
At this stage of the game you need to understand your customers including who they are, why they buy your product, how much they can afford to pay for it, when they like to use it and why they tell their friends about it. Then you can start determining some sales and marketing strategies. If you are selling kids clothing online, you might see your mommy customers spreading the word on Twitter. If you are selling live bait to seasonal tourists, Twitter might not be the way to go . There are no magic growing beans for new businesses. The fun part is figuring it out as you go.
With this in mind I have a few suggestions for building a small business CRM (customer relationship management) tool that will grow with your business:
- Collect as much information as you can about your customers. At every point of contact reach out to them and be sure to save every nugget of information they are willing to give. Have an e-mail list sign-up in your retail shop. Keep detailed records of all purchases and decisions behind them (how they found you, what they bought etc). If they send an e-mail to your support team, add their signature data (phone number, address, company web site etc.) into your CRM as part of the logging process.
- Ask for their personal or business web site address. Or glean it from any e-mail messages sent in to your sales or support teams.
- Periodically surf the web sites of your best customers and collect any information that might be helpful market research (their business type, location, personal interests, etc.). Save it all in your CRM system so that you will start to notice trends (my 9:00 AM coffee clients are apparently all chess players, all our customers in Australia are service businesses, etc.)
- If they include any information about social media profiles, capture that in your CRM. Look for a link to any blogs they contribute to, their Twitter account, their LinkedIn account, etc. You may not be networking in social media, yet, but when you do it will be nice to have some friends there to reach out to. And it is a great way to learn more about the things your customers want you to know about them.
- Periodically survey your customers or potential customers about your product or service. Limit the demographic questions to 1 or 2 short questions (i.e., “what type of business”, “annual sales”, “number of customers”, etc.) and have the rest of the questions focus on ways that you can help them (ie feedback on your product, pain points they are experiencing, ideas for new features, etc.).
- Keep your data clean. Right now it might be easy to scan an excel spreadsheet and read through the business categories your survey respondents typed in themselves. But if you make that field a multi-select form (rather than a text field) in your web form then you will be able to more easily spot trends over time as you slice and dice your data with custom reports and graphs.
- Integrate your CRM with as many of your other applications as possible – with your mobile phone, your e-mail software, your invoicing software, your web forms, your shopping cart software, etc. You do not have time to do double, triple, quintuple entries for your growing network. And it is helpful to know that John Doe bought one of your products, but the real insight comes when you see that he has bought the same product every quarter for 3 years, always pays promptly, has recommended it to his friends on Facebook, always reads your newsletter and rarely needs customer support.
I’m Pamela O’Hara (@pmohara on Twitter) the co-founder and owner of BatchBlue Software, the maker of BatchBook small business CRM product and host of #SBBuzz, a weekly Twitter chat discussing small business technology. We’ve designed our CRM product to be as flexible and agile as the entrepreneurial businesses that are using it. We understand the importance of a CRM solution that helps you ask the right questions and manage the answers.
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