Business References Organized As A Best Practice

When things are easy, they’re easy and when they’re hard, they’re hard. Sometimes things are hard, sometimes not so much, and sometimes just plain simple. Changing attitudes and methods can resolve some of the difficulties we have to deal with. Keeping your business references organized is one way to make a hard thing much, much easier.

Regardless of what we may think, the truth is right in front of us, keeping track of all your customer reference data can be a real pain. All too often we have to gather information from dozens of different sources, whether its personal meetings, phone calls, PDA tags and show data. Integrating all that data into one place that makes it simple to bring it back to mind when you need it is essential if we’re to be successful in maintaining that great professionalism we all want to achieve.

Information is the key to us being our best in our jobs. When we get the data, put it in the database. Its that simple. Regardless of the source, whether its on the phone on the ‘net from a contact site, at a show from a business card or PDA data exchange or simply as a lead from a magazine or even a name mentioned in passing, having that information in the database means we can find it again in our customer reference tool. This takes a bit of discipline, as it is easy to become sidetracked into another project or call, but the discipline pays off in the long run.

Verifying and maintaining our database in a consistent manner is required as well. Customers expect us to keep track of them, so when they call, verify their information. This insures our databases are current. Many customers expect us to find them by their name, but we almost always have to have some other correlating piece of information to verify who they are. Noone wants to be embarrassed by having to call a customer back several times to verify info when it can be done once. By taking that extra 10 seconds to say “Is your email address still…” can save minutes later or even a lost sale from a customer who is disgruntled because you have to keep calling back for trivial information.

Granted, you can’t help losing contact with a customer who changes jobs or moves on, but with several reference points such as email address and cell phone numbers, that means your odds are a lot higher you’ll always be able to reconnect to the customer at a later time. Keep in mind that in today’s economy, just because a customer changes jobs doesn’t mean they’ll want to change vendors. Keeping track of customers and contacting them on a semi-annual basis means your database stays current.

Since your database is usually the core element of your business, keeping it updated is key, although it could be very labor intensive. Items can be replaced if you have a disaster, but your customer reference database is what your business is built on.

In today’s business environment, any edge we can have to be more successful is an edge we have to find a way to get. Customer Reference Insights is a place to find the tools and customer reference system to get those advantages for yourself. Check it out!