What if you can have a tool that can tell you what your customers would be interested in for the coming weeks or months? The ability to predict customer behaviour based on real-time information about them could be your trump card in today’s customer-driven market.
Nowadays, almost every company has, in some way, developed their own means of establishing meaningful customer relationships, including loyalty programs, customer referrals, or even network marketing to some extent.
Using a simplified CRM tool such as Small Business Dream, we’ll see how smart companies are always a step ahead of the competition and are able to predict customer orders with reasonable success.
Getting down to the facts about your customers
Gathering important relevant information from your customers is the starting point from which you can develop a strategy to determine what your customers would likely buy or use in the near future.
Small Business Dream’s client acquisition tools provide companies with a very efficient way to collect customer information from high quality leads. There are two ways to accomplish this – Small Business Dream’s card scan function and the sales funnel.
Inasmuch as we want only the best, high quality leads, we need our client acquisition tools to target specific type of customers based on their needs and interest.
For instance, a customer walking in for the first time and giving his or her contact information or business card is a clear indication of a customer’s interest in learning more about the company and what it has to offer (physical customer engagement). Signing up to the mailing list through the sales funnel uses the same principle, but does so in a digital way (digital customer engagement).
Over time your business will be able to collect more and more information about your customers using Small Business Dream’s follow up and customer feedback tools. Once you have enough information, you can start connecting the dots and make some predictions about your customers.
The following details gleaned from Small Business Dream’s customer data are vital pieces of information which can be used for anticipating your customer’s response and buying habits such as:
- Time/Date. What particular time of the month or year do they make most of their purchases? What particular time of the day or week do they usually schedule their appointments? This information will prepare you when making your next inventory or accommodating old and new customers days or weeks ahead.
- Frequency. How often do they make their purchase or avail of your service? Do they take action to your drip campaigns and surveys often or does it take them weeks or months? Noting this customer habit will help you determine the likelihood of having repeat customers or converting new ones.
- Customer response. Your customers may not always give a direct response whether or not they would likely buy the same product or use the same service in the future, but the same can be accomplished in more subtle ways like asking them if they would recommend using your product or service to anyone or asking their own honest opinion about it.
Some companies use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to know exactly which products and services are often bought or used historically. Small Business Dream allows tech-savvy users to accomplish the same with just a little bit of wizardry using Excel spreadsheets. Information from your customers including notes can be instantly downloaded in CSV file and from here you’ll be able to process all the raw data presented in exquisite detail.
The big advantage of CRMs like Small Business Dream over ERPs is that it lets you deal with every customer on a personal level. It also allows you to make your own assessment of each customer and set priorities based on how they respond to your call. Small Business Dream, for instance, uses a scale of 0-10 to indicate which customers need more attention and which ones require less. However, it’s important to never pre-judge your prospects based on customer data alone as there are cases when low priority clients make major buying decisions out of the blue.
Small Business Dream CRM features
The ability to record your conversations with your prospects and customers, make notes, set priorities, and schedule next upcoming events all in one place makes Small Business Dream extremely valuable for both online and offline businesses. This CRM feature makes real-time customer engagement possible for tech-savvy companies, especially those with sales people working in shifts who need to get the facts right and make wise decisions on how to deal with a specific type of prospect or customer right then and there.
Small Business Dream makes it all possible by allowing business owners to categorize each customer for an easy lookup if they want to check on a specific type of customer only. For instance, they can view just the customers who have subscribed to any of their email drip campaigns and check on whether they wanted to know more or if an upcoming purchase is already in order.
Another feature which makes Small Business Dream such a jewel in predicting customer orders is its ability to create highly personalized surveys through the survey builder. A tracking code for Google Analytics can be embedded into your surveys, allowing you to monitor real-time statistics about your prospects and customers. Although Google Survey offers the same functionality, they are not as customizable as Small Business Dream’s survey builder and Google will require some fees to access some of their premium features. It’s also limited as to the number of surveys you can actually do each month using its free service.
Choosing the right CRM to predict customer orders
With plenty of CRMs to choose from on every turn, you might be thinking which one will actually help you with predicting customer orders.
Small Business Dream offers a helping hand to every business owners who want to grow their business FAST without spending a lot of money in the process.
Click HERE if you want to make use of our FREE FOREVER version, or avail of our Professional or Corporate plans if you want to scale up or avail of our mentoring services.