Knowing Your Customers

There is one fact you need to know, whether you own a business or intend to start a business someday, and it is that one thing that can make your business thrive -- Customers are everything.

You could have a great business solution, a revolutionary company, a superior product or meeting a unique need. If no one buys your product or service, your business won't thrive. Your customer is more important than your product. Your product should keep evolving with your customer needs and preferences. So the most important business investment you can make is to invest in knowing your customer.

image: fortheloveofmarketing.com

Don't let all the customer data you get be their names and the other sales data you get while creating an invoice or sales report. You need to know what they think about your product, the unique ways they use your product, their expectations and what they would like to see you improve on. Don't be like the banks and just pile up bio-data of your customers. What you should be gathering is their interactions with your product, the needs they want your product to meet and their suggestions of how you can improve your products.

In every business, the customer is the king, whether you treat them like king or not.  But you are better off treating them well from the start than trying to re-win their patronage when they discover someone else who is treating them better. And to treat your customer well you need to understand the customer. You need to interact with them beyond the sales closure. You need to have a system that helps your know your customer better, track their activities and initiate a two-way communication between you two. You need a CRM.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. And a CRM software helps you automate and make strategic use of customer relationship data. Regardless of the business you run, you need it. In UrBizEdge we use BaseCRM. It's a fantastic CRM that fits our need. We've tried a couple of CRMs and decided BaseCRM worked great for our small team. It tracks our customer phone calls and collects a summary of each call discussion. Tracks our leads and handle the funneling from lead to prospective customer and a purchasing customer, and other recurring deals and opportunities. It tracks our email correspondence with our customers and help us keep in touch with everyone. It helps document relevant data about leads, prospects, customers, deals in the pipe and sales made. Best of all, you could automate keeping in touch with your customers, auto reminders.

For your business you might need a bigger CRM solution, like Microsoft Dynamics. But the bottomline is you need to know your customers well, even before they make a purchase (when they were simply leads). And you need to be in  constant touch with them.

If you need extra free advice on which CRM software will suite your company, you can always reach us at info@urbizedge.com

To your success!