Grow your Business by making the most of your Contacts

Are you making the most of your existing contacts to grow your business?  Arguably the most valuable resource a small business has is their contacts, and yet this bank of data is often under utilised.

Making sense of your contacts and understanding how to use them to grow your business can be a daunting prospect and is often put off to make time for delivering client work.

As business owners we know it is difficult to balance delivering client work, running the back office  and looking after the pipeline.  But it is imperative that a small business has the foundations in place to grow, the pipeline must be looked after or you may find that work dries up and you are committed to paying for staff or systems without the revenue to cover the costs.

Many businesses find the end of August to the middle of September a lot quieter than the rest of the year, so why not make use of the time by making sense of the data you have so that you can hit the ground running from mid September onward?

So the good news is that now is an ideal time to think about who you have contact details for, who you are in touch with, who you should be in contact and who you would like to be in touch with!

When you have worked out the “who” you can tailor your marketing messages accordingly and work out how to efficiently deliver those messages. This will give you a much improved chance of your messages being read and acted upon – encouraging your clients along your product staircase or new clients to buy for the first time.

The aim of this article is to help you work out how to make the most of your contacts.

Step 1:  Understand your Ideal Client by Creating or Updating your Avatar:

The reason for having an Avatar for your business is simple – your business needs to have clear, relevant messaging that addresses the issues your customers or clients – and your prospective customer or client – are facing.  And to achieve this, the customer and prospective customer, needs to make sense of you.

Use the Step by Step Guide to creating your own Avatar which you can find in my Avatar Paper.  This paper will also help you:

1. Understand why your business needs an Avatar

2. Understand how Avatars can be used

3. Understand how Avatars are created

Even if you have already identified your Avatar, as a company grows the Avatar may change so it is a worthwhile exercise to carry out every so often depending on the growth you experience, or would like to experience.

Step 2: Look at your Data

Once you know who your Avatar is you can have a good long hard look at your existing contacts and work out how many fall into your “Ideal Client Category”.  You can catagorise them by the areas you feel are most relevant – eg Client, Previous Client, Potential Client, what they bought, what they might buy and when they last purchased from you.

You can then look at the health of your existing data , do you have all the important information you need, is it up to date and does the structure of it reflects your Avatar.

All data has a shelf life and it’s inevitable that it will need cleaning, enhancing and updating on a regular basis.

By carrying out this exercise you will know which areas are lacking detail, establish which segments of data need to be enhanced, which contacts need to be upgraded; downgraded or re categorised.

Step 3: Invest time in Enriching your Records

Once you have established what information is missing you can spend time enriching and categorising the records on your CRM if you have one, spreadsheet if not.  Dice and slice the records into manageable size chunks and set yourself a target number of records to look at each day so that the project doesn’t become too onerous.

Step 4: Invest in a good Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system

All of the above steps can be done without having a good CRM in your business.  But to make efficient use of the records which you have spent time and energy categorising, enhancing and updating then a good CRM in invaluable.  It will store all your data and allow you to manipulate it efficiently to reflect your Avatar.  So the sending of email communication is not time consuming or prone to error.

The most time consuming part of implementing a CRM is the enhancing of records to import – and so the good news is that you will already have great quality data to import.

It is not only larger organisations who have a CRM, my article 5 Reasons Why Small Businesses need a CRM is a good read.

Summary

The investment of time in making sense of the valuable resource which your contacts are, will bear dividends in the short, medium and long term – throughout the current, and next, financial year because you know that you will be communicating with the right person in the right company.

I have been working with CapsuleCRM for over 6 years and helped many clients increase revenue; reduce costs; make the most of their contacts; manage their pipeline; and deliver great customer service.

I do this by working through the Avatar creation process and then designing, creating and installing CapsuleCRM to meet the clients’ needs, offering a bespoke CRM to suit their business requirements.  Capsule really is a great solution for the small business.

I also carry out a limited number of Data Health Checks as a standalone service for clients – to give actionable insights into the health of your database, and I source quality data.

I hope that you have found this article useful.  To find out more please email me on julia.blake@blakeconsultants.co.uk or visit my Contact Page