Making the most of your info

An oft-quoted business adage is that it is more expensive to win new customers than it is to retain existing ones. Depending on your line of business, the cost of winning new clients could be anything between five and ten times the expense of keeping an existing customer happy.

But how many businesses are sitting on a potential gold mine of sales leads without realising it? And, to make matters worse, you’re looking at it right now!

Yes…your computer.

Lurking within its innards is a mass of business intelligence that is disjointed, difficult to see but awaiting extraction.

Say, for instance, a company sells industrial cleaning agents. Customer A regularly orders 10 gallons and this normally lasts them six months. Instead of waiting for the client to get around to placing an order at the last minute, and then insisting delivery takes place half an hour ago, why not call or email them five months after their last order?

Before placing the call or sending off the email, a quick trawl of your inbox might remind you, for example, that Customer A made an enquiry about new flame-proof boiler suits a week ago. Be sure to chase that up, and mention the introductory offer on gauntlets as well.

Albeit on a small scale, this is data mining. Or, put another way, panning through your data so you don’t miss a trick.

The budgets of small to micro-sized companies probably don’t stretch all that often to the full scale data mining of larger businesses. These bigger concerns operate sophisticated Customer Relationship Management software that tracks each and every customer, their purchases, buying patterns, invoicing and a host of other factors to build up a complete profile.

Many sole traders and small companies do without what would be, for them, an overkill solution. Instead, most carry this kind of business intelligence around in their head. Whether this is the best storage medium for such vital information is open to debate. Instant access and ‘wireless’ mobility are two major advantages. What lets the head down is the lack of a reliable back up system, degradation and corruption of information, and, especially with older models, sudden and inexplicable deletion of relevant data.

A better solution, then, is to combine head storage with digital data. (No, not counting on your fingers).

Returning to Customer A, our trusty industrial cleaning agent-buying client, his or her contact details need to be stored somewhere. If this is in Outlook Express or MS Outlook, for example, why not add in personal details too as an aide to memory? Then you can ask casually, “How’s your leg, you’d broken it playing football the last time we spoke?” and be safe in the knowledge Customer A isn’t a fervent rugby fan or that you haven’t inadvertently mixed him up or her up with someone else.

A bit of the old chat doesn’t go amiss so long as it’s welcomed, opportune and you sound genuinely interested in the answer. Which you will, in order to keep Customer A’s details up to date…

“Oh, the leg? It’s fine, thanks.Plaster’s been off for a while and I’m doing a bit of jogging now.”

So, there’s a wee change that needs to be made when you hang up. Hopefully, this will be after winning some Brownie points as well as repeat business and healthy orders for flame-proof boiler suits and gauntlets.

In MS Outlook then, click on Contacts and open the relevant Contact. At the bottom of this window is a large text field where all manner of info can be stored for easy access which can supplement details of business calls you may note in the Journal for that particular Contact.

In this case, assuming a high smarminess level prevails, type in ‘Leg’s fine now. Ask about getting back in the first team next time.’

The above is obviously an extremely cheesy example for illustration purposes only. No doubt you’ll come up with much better uses yourself.

In essence, then, the fundamental aim of data mining is the answering of the following types of question:

• Who is buying what?
• How often do they purchase?
• Am I maximising sales opportunities with existing customers?
• Which customers should I spend time on to generate new business?
• Which parts of my business do I need to concentrate on as they are the most profitable?
• Why do some customers spend more than others?
• Am I offering the right goods and services to the right customers?

Whether it be a simple but joined up Contact and email system as described, or a straight-forward customer database, knowledge is power. Buying trends are grist to the mill for the small business owner who, despite a job title that says otherwise, is a salesperson at heart.

The majority of small or micro-sized companies do not need an all-singing, all-dancing Customer Relationship Management tool that brings up details of every past contact every time a customer rings up. A simple solution that informs the business who their customers are, when and where they buy, and allows some customised field information is sufficiently powerful.

By carrying out an audit of your digital data, patterns will emerge. Not only will sales opportunities appear, other spin off benefits will accrue. These will most likely include getting to customers and their needs better…Or the prompting of changes to business practices that saves you money.