PointConcept

What is the most important thing a small business can collaborate about? Customers.

So why do many get this wrong? There are many reasons but the biggest is a lack of planning. Well not lack of planning as such, but lack of experience about planning. Lets face it a small business owner who is just starting out has so many things to think about. Staff, premises, equipment, phone lines, marketing material, etc thatit is easy put other things off until you have some customers. Then suddenly things start to go well and you have less and less time for admin. Then the new staff join and they are talking to your customers and writing things down on scraps of paper and in emails which no one else can find or read. Then they go sick and no one knows about the order or the problem.

From the outset every small business should employ some system for dealing with its customers and potential customers. Start the habit early and it becomes second nature. Not so many years ago companies had “customer complaints departments”. Some bright spark realized how bad this sounded and changed it to “customer relations department” Although a lot still only deal with customers when they complain. These departments had software written just for them, called customer relations management (CRM). But this was only for big companies who had lots of customers. While the software may have been the idea was not. Another bright spark realized that not all the people in a CRM are actual customers, some are just “prospects” potential customers or contacts.  So CRM also became “contact management”

And that is a good thing to start with. In its simplest form its an address book or file with notes. Moving up a step and lots of people use Outlook from Microsoft. Microsoft built CRM “capability” into Outlook and even released a version of Office 2000 for small business. However most small business owners did not want to go to the cost of a Windows server to get the full potential. Like wise they did not want to buy a separate CRM suite.

Then came the advent of “web 2.0″ and software as a service (SaaS) and the giant of CRM, Salesforce. Which is also a giant and so full of tools it can be totaly scary to someone who sells 200 units of widgets a month. But were one successful company leads other will be sure to follow, and also realise that there are people who do only sell 200 widgets and are happy selling 200 widgets.

What this means is that there are now small niche CRM and CM providers who create just what a small business needs. Without giving them a huge work flow.

So with that brief history lesson over and reminding us why we are here, I have a question.

Are you collaberating with and about your customers?

By the way there are no “potential customers” every single person you deal with is a customer of your service and your Brand. They may not buy your product but someone they mention it to might. I will come back to that.

If you are, well done. If not start now.

Start recording:

Contact details;

Size of company (if a company)

All correspondance;

All tasks;

When to talk to them again;

When is their birthday;

what clubs they like;

What they like about your service or product;

How much they bought;

Do they refer people to you, who, how many?;

Update on a regular basis.

You are now building a picture of your customers and its easier if everyone is involved, but also it is harder to miss that one opportunity to get a sale which starts a real earning customer relationship.

So back to what I said earlier. You have hundreds maybe thousands of potential customers, you just have not met or interacted with them yet. Once you do they are a customer, just maybe not a paying one. But part of the process of turning them into a paying customer is treating them like one and ensuring your staff do the same. The relationship you build before the sale can affect the size of the sale and whether there is a sale. But more, it creates a relationship which engenders return custom. Which has more value than new custom.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

So get talking and colaberate about the who, why, were, when how much of all your customers.