Grow your Business – Make your Data work for you – How and Why

We have had some gorgeous weather recently and I am so happy that everything is really starting to grow in the garden (not the weeds!)  I love this time of year – it gives me the motivation to have a good sort out of many areas of my life and that includes my business.

Many businesses are midway through the second month of their financial year.  It is an important time to really focus on what we want to achieve this financial year – scarily the long summer holidays (when projects can be delayed until the Autumn) are not too far off now.

So,  if you haven’t got your contact strategy in place then now is the time to think about who you are marketing to and how to approach them in the most efficient way.  That in itself can be a daunting prospect, so I have written this blog to help you focus and work out where you and your business want and need to invest it’s energy and resources.

Where to start – Create or Update your Avatar:

My White Paper on “Avatars and how to create them” is an ideal place to start.

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.

My paper helps you do 4 very important things:

1. Understand why your business needs an Avatar

2. Understand how Avatars can be used

3. Understand how Avatars are created

4. Create your own Avatar by providing a step by step guide to help you

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.

What to do next – Look at your Data:

Once you know who your Avatar is you can set aside time to have a good long hard look at the health of your existing data and whether the structure of it reflects your Avatar.

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

To make matters worse, you may have several people in your company entering data. Unless you have predefined data input protocols there will be duplication, inconsistencies in data entry for company names, incomplete records, badly formatted phone numbers.  If these are unchecked it will seriously erode your data integrity which could have implications for how you grow the business.

By carrying out a Data Health Check 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.  You can then spend time enriching and categorising them on your CRM if you have one.

You can also establish, by understanding what you already have, if you need to source additional records.

Finally – Invest in a good Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system:

Having a good CRM for small business that stores all this data and allows you to manipulate it efficiently to reflect your Avatar, means this process is not time consuming or prone to error.

You may think that only larger organisations have a CRM, but have a read of my article 5 Reasons Why Small Businesses need a CRM to find out how a CRM helps small businesses too.

The investment of time in the growth stage of your business will bear fruit 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 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.

To find out more please email me on julia.blake@blakeconsultants.co.uk or visit my Contact Page