Question: Do you know where money comes from?
Answer: Money comes from other people.
If you’re in business, those people are called your customers.
And if you want to make enough money to avoid the dole queue, you need to know as much as possible about your customers.
Things like…
- Their name
- Their phone number
- Their email address
- The company they work for
- The company they used to work for
- Their boss’s name
- Their spouse’s name
- Their kids’ names
- Their birthday
- How they like their tea and coffee
- Every order they have ever placed with your company
- When you last spoke to them
- What you talked about
- How much you quoted them for a project 6 months ago
- Every email you’ve ever received from them, and every email you’ve ever sent them
- How many times they have opened your email newsletter
- What they have clicked on when they read your email newsletter
- Whether they like Marmite or Vegemite (OK, maybe that’s a bit weird but you get the idea…)
So how well do you know your customers?
Do you actively manage your customer relationships? Do you use CRM software?
I believe that every organisation needs a CRM, from General Motors all the way down to the local rugby club.
At Mogul, we use WorkflowMax, and we would be stuffed without it. Once you get more than a handful of leads, prospects, and customers, your brain simply cannot juggle all this information effectively. You will forget things, you will let people down, and you will fail.
It’s especially important to integrate CRM with your email marketing and online shop. Amazon.com are experts at this. Their CRM-based marketing is one of the reasons they are so dominant in e-commerce. They send you recommendations based on your previous purchases – and they are uncannily accurate – to the point of seeming telepathic.
I don’t think they know if I prefer Marmite or Vegemite, but with the amount of data mining they do, they could probably have a pretty good guess.
(Actually, I like both)
