Thursday, July 26, 2007

Information Technology and Marketing Synergy

How to find more clients you already have?

This is an interesting topic of discussion one of the things that intrigues us is if you have been in business for any stretch of time and already have a customer base, one that you have gradually generated over the years, and then it has cost you a sizable amount of time and capital to create. Yet as business owners we invest so much time trying to generate new customers instead of cultivating new sales from current customer, (you guessed it here come one of those examples again).

One of our clients maintained that our solution simple could not work for him because he has a real estate company. His view was once he puts a customer into a home or apartment the deal is complete there is no up sell for his particular product so at the close of deal, the bond with the customer also closes. We quickly showed him the error in that thinking, now we will show you his solution.

We explained to him the first thing he had to do was, acquire all the necessary data at the beginning of the customer relationship and have it in a usable format for later data mining. Remember know how to use your tools.

In his situation, the instrument is contact management software, by implementing contact management software, we were able to show him how to acquire the correct data for further sales with the same client or create a referral base from his existing client base. This is how we implemented it. First, we paid careful attention to his renter’s client base they are a potential for home ownership if cultivated properly. We designed a new informational chart for potential clients to fill out (only adding email address, level of desired home ownership, future career plans, schools, upcoming tests i.e. computer certification, health care certification , or relocation). The value of this new form was to determine the client’s projected financial growth in the next 2 -5 years. As for real estate brokers and mortgage brokers, you have clients that are fixed in a location for two- or more years (new lease), so they are definitely a captive audience. (Easy to keep in touch with).

The next step was to help him channel his marketing dollar. Our client never thought of a small cost effective house-warming gift. Have you ever had your realtor generously give you a house-warming gift? In this case a his and hers monogrammed towel set was the desired house warming gift. Cost to customer $30(that he recoups twice once from the office fee he charges second from the referrals and return clients).

The last step was to explain to our client how to mine the data for possibilities. Once completed it looked like this to our client.:

If the realtor's client was an apartment renter he had enough information to determine when and if his client could become a potential homebuyer (mortgage sale). The house-warming gift established awareness in the buyers mind (word of mouth sale). Every 3 months we advised our client (the Realtor) to send an email or postcard to his customers (lessees). We also showed him how to pay attention to his leases since he knew exactly when the lease would expire for each of his clients (future sale or apartment rental) which enabled him more return business. In the scope of 1 year, our customer increased his sales revenue by a little over 50% literally doubling his earnings.

Most importantly some reading this may assume this method would be incredibly time consuming and hard to implement. In all actuality, our client has more time on his hands now then when he was earning less. Why? He understood how to use his tools. Contact management software or a CRM solution are like gold to a small business it makes data management simple yet effective. You do not have take our word for it do your research and determine for yourselves, it will definitely if implemented correctly improve your bottom line.

http://www.voltagepc.com/