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The Secret To Building Customer Relationships

Most successful businesses are built on customer relationships. Richard Branson built many successful businesses in many different industries but there was one common denominator across the board — his level of customer service was always topnotch.

Building relationships with potential clients and customers takes time and effort. You must have the right tools to get through the whole process more efficiently.

We’ll examine some of the best practices in building good customer relationships and how small businesses can implement a simple CRM app to accomplish that goal.

Manage Customer Data

Data management is the foundation for establishing good customer relationships. Customer information is the ‘missing link’ that connects businesses with potential clients and customers. It’s the secret to staying relevant with them despite the changing trends over a long period of time.

Many businesses have invested a lot of time and money in business applications to manage customer data. Fortunately, we can accomplish the same for just a fraction of the cost. For a typical small business with a limited start-up cost, this seems to be the best, if not the only option.

Small Business Dream’s mini-CRM allows small business owners to collect and control customer information very efficiently for less than a dollar a day. It specializes on the essential features of customer acquisition and simplifies them for the average person, as well as a follow-up system that constantly updates salespeople when a scheduled call, text, or social media message is up.

Additional features include Categories which enables business owners to segment their contacts making each survey, email campaign, and newsletter subscription very specific to different types of contacts.

Personalize Your Message

Customers still want the personal touch. Hence, we need to go beyond the usual ‘name, number, and address’, and learn about their ‘soft spots’ and circumstances that surround each purchase, customer query, or complaint. We need to know what makes them feel good because after all, customers make buying decisions based on how they feel.

To add a personal touch, we need to keep track of every customer engagement. Small Business Dream creates a system that treats every customer as a unique individual. Even as simple as having a Notes section to put down important details from a telephone call, text or email can go a long way in determining what makes our customers tick.

Once you have this information, you can easily personalize your emails from your list of pre-written messages without having to start from scratch. Just a simple mention about their hobbies, pastimes, recent activities, or even little things they cherish will endear your company to your customers. It makes them feel respected and cared for as opposed to just being a number or a tiny dot on the chart.

Personalizing your message also applies to social media. Although secondary to email in terms of communicating with potential clients and customers, we cannot ignore the fact that social media is very much a part of people’s lives. However, we need to cut through the noise by personalizing our messages and let them know we didn’t just hit the ‘auto-reply’.

If they ended up on your Social Connect, which is a part of the Small Business Dream contact management tool, you need sift through the list and connect (‘follow’ or ‘like’) to each one who has a genuine interest in your business. Comment on things they’re currently into and have your pre-written messages below them.

Even a little extra step of personalizing your email and social media messages can make a big difference in establishing relationships with potential clients and customers.

Provide Real-time Customer Support

Real-time customer support is almost non-existent in most big companies. Part of the reason is that these companies have already grown their customer base to a point where it becomes too much to handle. As a result, many customers feel they’re given less priority and they would start looking for other businesses who might have a respect for them as a customer.

Companies who are able to respond as quickly as possible to queries and complaints are highly regarded by customers. They might not have the best products and services, but the fact that they cared a lot about them makes them want to do business. The saying, “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care,” applies in businesses as well.

Small Business Dream has figured out a way to achieve real-time customer support with its Action List that updates salespersons and business owners if a new customer comes in through the Sales Funnel, or if an existing customer has just responded to a customer survey they have given out. They’ll find their way on top of the Action List, so sales people can link up with them right then and there.

Follow up Consistently

Following up with customers allows your business to accomplish two things. Aside from building trust and confidence with your customers, it’s also helps with customer feedback which is a valuable tool in improving products, services, and customer experience.

There are two approaches Small Business Dream can be used to follow up with potential clients and customers: newsletter subscriptions and customer surveys.

Monthly newsletters provide additional information about the service or product they just bought. For instance, you want your customers to maintain their hair’s luster and shine after a keratin treatment. You can invite them to your monthly newsletter about hair care and let them answer a few survey questions.

Follow-ups can also turn into cross-selling and upselling opportunities since some of your product or service can be tied to another one they just had.

After having their cars thoroughly cleaned and polished in your carwash, have them fill up a short survey form asking them about a few contact details, and if they want to be in your mailing list and avail of free car care tips, discounts, and free offers. For instance, you can inform your customers about the negative effects of using detergents on their car’s polish and why they should be using your car care products instead.

Small Business Dream’s Email Auto-responders and Survey Engine allow you to accomplish both with less effort. If you have prospects or customers that need to be followed up by phone, email or social media message, their names will show up on the Action List on that particular day. This makes sure you never miss on any of your potential clients and customers.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Improving Customer Acquisition with CRM

The biggest challenge facing small businesses is how they can get more customers and maximize their return on investments.

Fortunately, we can easily find ways to improve customer acquisition without having to spend a lot of money on traditional outbound marketing strategies. It only takes a little bit of creativity and trying out new ideas.

There are two main ways – offline and online. We will talk about both ways here.

Promote Your Business Offline

Everybody is online so why not try the personal touch. A lot of customers still like and require the personal touch.

Some offline customer engagements are as effective as a marketing strategy today as it was 100 years ago when the majority of businesses didn’t have a website. These include:

going to networking events
taking your business outdoors
sponsorship & giveaways

Meeting up with people in a friendly, non-selling environment like networking events increases your exposure without spending too much on paid ads. However, to be successful, you have to present your business in light of the customer’s needs, pain points and how your products and services can provide a solution to these problems.

The idea is to go and help people, and to show how your company can create value for them. It may not always lead to an immediate sale, but it can help grow your network and develop good relationships with potential buyers and customers.

Whenever possible, bring along something that reminds them about your business. It could be your business card, key holder, bunker ring, or any small gizmos you can carry along. I always carry bunker rings with me to networking events. Why? Because my potential customers will stick my bunker rings on their phones and every time they glance at their device, it will remind them of me.

Another way to help you with customer acquisition is to take your business outdoors by having your own space during special occasions or community events where people can find your company, products, or services. Talk with the organizers and make some arrangements to have your own booth set up.

Event organizers might also look for sponsors to reduce the overall cost of running the event. You can take this opportunity to have your company name or logo displayed in conspicuous areas for a few hundred dollars’ worth of donation.

Once you have talked to them and exchanged business cards, then it’s a good idea to put them into an online follow-up series so they don’t forget about you.

If you want them to get to your sales funnel, you can use Small Business Dream’s Customer Acquisition tools and have your landing page address or QR code printed on your Sales Funnel Card.

Most importantly, always make an effort to follow up with them as soon as you can.

Take Your Business Online

Promoting your business online is a sure way to improve customer acquisition using cost-effective marketing tools over the Internet. However, it’s tough to get noticed. Some of the best ways to increase customer awareness about your business include having a blog or website, a social media account, and a sales funnel.

Your blog or website can serve many uses for your business. It helps educate people about the benefits of using your product or service, provide useful information about the subject they’re looking on, and can be used for earning residual income through affiliate links, Google AdSense, etc. But most importantly, it helps maintain people’s interest and lead them closer to your goal – to get more customers.

Social media can also be used in customer acquisition, but because marketers have been using social media the wrong way, business owners have started to lose interest in it. They don’t have a system to follow up with fans and followers in a realistic way. Most of them aren’t even real, so business owners end up using auto-responders (‘robot secretaries’) the whole time. Most businesses don’t think strategically when it comes to social media but use a shotgun blast approach, hoping to catch somebody or something.

Small Business Dream is an inexpensive tool that helps business owners manage their social media contacts more efficiently with their Social Connect, and the Social Series in the Action List. Social Connect gives them the option to curate and import fans and followers to their contact list.

Since we don’t want our customer database to be stuffed with unwanted (fake, pseudonymous, or artificial) contacts, we need to screen them out of the social contact list, and leave the ones who show genuine interest to learn more about the company. This would allow sales people to work on the Action List’s Social Series more efficiently and get real results from using social media to get more customers online.

Sales funnel is a very useful tool in customer acquisition when used with offline and other online methods. With Small Business Dream, business owners can easily create their own sales funnel like a pro without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and use the link for their Social Series and opt-in subscriptions online. They can also use the link offline through Sales Funnel Cards, tent cards, signboards, or directly through an iPad or tablet set up to the sales funnel in-store.

Build a Customer Base to Promote Your Business

Your first customers constitute the core of your business from which you can grow more customers. Coming up with a loyalty program, customer specials, customer referrals, offering discounts, and commissions, can help accelerate your business.

Although it might cost you a little bit of profit, you’ll have greater gains in the long run as your business gains momentum. Looking at it from an angle, think of it as being a part of your marketing expenses. But instead of them going to paid advertisements, they go directly to your customers who will benefit from them. The result is a happy customer base who will talk about their experience with your company to other people, and your business becoming an instant success.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Managing Customer Data for Small Businesses

In order to maximize CRM’s capabilities in managing customer data, we need to consider the important aspects of data management such as data gathering, organizing, updating, amongst other things. We’ll take a look at some of the data management strategies used by successful business owners and how we can apply them using Small Business Dream CRM.

Decide What Information to Collect and Store

When it comes to data collection and storage, we only need what’s essential to making the sale and how to get them to that point. It makes perfect sense, since we are dealing with large numbers of prospects and customers, and we don’t want our customer database to be cluttered with useless data.

The following customer information should be your top priority:

contact information (email, phone number, social media account)
location (address, country, time zone)
personal information (name, sex, age, date of birth, occupation)
transaction history (notes about recent customer engagements such as calls, emails, text messages, surveys, etc.)

Most people will have at least three ways of communication – email, phone number, and social media account. Communicating with prospects and clients by phone may seem old-school, but it still ranks as one of the best methods of sales conversions.

Email and social media accounts of your customers enable you to collect more information about them through surveys and customer feedback, as well as educate and communicate with them through automated and semi-automated messages.

Other information about the customers can be used as well. Countries and time zones lets you know when the right time is to make your scheduled call. Holidays, birthdays, and personal milestones helps maintain customer loyalty by adding a personal touch to your messages.

Of all these information about your customer, the transaction history will make up most of your customer data as they will be constantly updated each time you interact with them. Salient points from every phone call, text, email and social media message must be diligently put on record in order to stay on track with every customer.

Small Business Dream CRM has a place for each of the four types of information. Its Contact Manager has a very intuitive way of looking up every customer information, and is seamlessly integrated with other useful features such as the Action List, and the Survey Engine.

Adopt an Efficient Way to Collect and Store Data

Collecting information from prospects and customers is one of the most time-consuming aspects of managing customer data. With the advent of CRMs in business, companies have been able to collect customer information more efficiently through sales and marketing automation.

Nowadays, it only takes one, easy-to-use, simple CRM to collect customer information in a snap. Small Business Dream captures all the information you need from your customers through the Client Acquisition tools. This can save you many hours collecting and typing all the data by yourself – possibly losing it in the process.

Typing customer information on the fly is also very efficient with Small Business Dream’s user interface as it allows salespersons to add notes about their customers in more ways than one, i.e., through the Action List, Contact Manager, or customer feedback.

Centralize Customer Information for Quick Access

Salespersons should be able to access customer data, all in one place. Some companies make the mistake of having different salespersons collecting and analyzing different types of information from prospects and customers. Since only a particular data is available to some, this might create gaps in communication which either makes it too generic or completely miss the intended audience.

Getting full access to customer information, including records of previous customer engagements allows salespeople to stay relevant with them and avoid repeating the same action with a customer over and over again.

Having all the information about the customer in one app means salespeople can get back to their customers and continue where they left off. The Notes function in Small Business Dream’s Contact Manager gives a full history of all the customer engagements they have with a particular customer, each note time-stamped and arranged from the most recent ones for easy lookup.

Have a System for Sorting and Prioritizing Contacts

Salespeople waste a lot of time calling up random contacts without doing research or even getting to know their potential prospects – what they want, who they are, or their business. This type of scattered approach could mean a lot of missed sales opportunities.

Small Business Dream can deal with these situations and makes it easier for salespeople to take action by simply following the system.

Here’s how it works:

Sorting contacts based on priority. Small Business Dream’s Action list sorts out customers based on their priority score (some CRMs use the term ‘lead score’). High-yield customers and patrons provide most of the company’s revenue, thus putting them on top of the list whenever a scheduled call, email, or social media message is due. New opt-ins and potential customers are considered high priority as well. Low priority contacts are dealt with afterwards. However, it’s important not to pre-judge and link up with all your prospects and customers regardless of their priority score as they could turn up into high priority contacts later on. Once the Action List is empty, you’re task is done for the day.
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Setting priority scores. Small business owners can only do so much with their limited time. Hence, they must be able to evaluate and set priority scores for each client to maximize their use of time. Small Business Dream’s Contact Manager contains a lot of tools that allows salespeople to make a quick assessment of potential clients. The Notes section in the Contact Manager contains all the useful information about the customer from phone calls, emails, social media messages, and answer to survey questions which serve as a guide for sales people in giving their priority score (scale of 0 to 10 from highest to lowest).
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Segmenting your contacts. The Contact Manager also has a feature to segment your contacts for your email campaigns, newsletter subscriptions, and regular updates about special events, promos, and discounts. With this feature, you’ll be able to stay top of mind to your customers with very little effort using sales and marketing automation aimed at specific type of customers only.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Grow Your Tire Shop Business FAST with this Simple, Tried and Tested Technique

Small-time tire shop business becoming huge success stories in a matter of months – you’ve probably seen examples from the Internet or the television.

Every business owner is thinking the same thing:

“How could I possibly grow my business FAST without spending a lot of money on expensive ads and gimmicks?”

The answer could be as simple as a CRM application that enables business owners to keep track of its customers and communicate with them through follow ups and updates at an automated or perfectly timed intervals.

Small Business Dream takes your tire shop business to the next level by keeping your customers actively engaged with your business in more ways than one.

The concept is very simple.

Small Business Dream enables you to:

keep tabs of your customer records all in one place
communicate with your customers consistently through an efficient follow-up system
use an effective content marketing strategy to promote your business
acquire new customers and high quality leads through the sales funnel
collect information through customer surveys to help improve your business

Let’s see how Small Business Dream can make a difference on how your tire business works from a day to day perspective.

Tire Change/Replacement

It’s late autumn, and you want to know how much winter tires you’re going to need for the icy months – just when the demand for winter tires starts mounting. Small Business Dream’s Survey Creator, helps you make an accurate estimate on the quantity, size, and makes to store in your shop weeks ahead by collecting these information from your regular customers or online visitors in exchange for discounts or exclusive privileges.

Tire Rotation and Balance

Educate your customers about the importance of rotating their tires (swapping tire placement) every once in a while and keeping it perfectly balanced to improve their longevity and driver safety. This, along with other useful information can be a part of your monthly newsletter via Small Business Dream’s online auto-responders or drip email campaign to keep your customers actively engaged and open more opportunities for conversions and repeat customers.

Tire repair/patching

What if a customer comes by with a punctured tire and just wants it patched as soon as possible. Opportunity? You bet it is! Here’s the deal. While waiting for their tire to get patched up, have them fill up a short survey on your tablet or notepad and leave their contact details in exchange for discounts or inexpensive giveaways.

Customer data for just a few bucks a month. Sounds like a perfect deal.

It’s amazing how a simple CRM app like Small Business Dream can do so much for your tire shop business with just a little bit of creativity and by thinking outside the box.

The 4 Content Marketing Steps To Increase Sales

Content marketing is one of the most successful methods of customer engagement used by businesses for centuries. Although the buzz around content marketing is new, it’s been around way before we had the Internet or the very first website in 1991.

Content creation is probably the most challenging and time-consuming aspect of acquiring and maintaining customer engagement. Rules have changed quite a lot since Google Panda, which now favors quality, substance, and relevance over quantity.

This gives users a much better experience by providing them only the most relevant information from online searches, and, from the standpoint of online marketers, an incentive to create high quality, shareable content throughout the Internet.

Defining Your Target Audience

Content marketing revolves around the target audience, customers and clients, who are the main source of revenue for nearly all kinds of businesses.

Defining you target audience should always be the first priority before starting off with any business venture. Over time businesses may expand or evolve to include additional products or services which could also mean redefining the target audience in every stage of a company’s lifetime.

For a small brick-and-mortar business the target audience could be just the people within or around the city who might be interested with what the company has to offer. However if the brick-and-mortar business has an online component then it could include a national or even international audience.

Setting the Tone and Purpose of Your Content

When you’re absolutely certain about your target audience, the next step is to determine the purpose of creating content. Depending on which stage of the sales funnel you’re currently working on, you could also set a different purpose in creating your content. Some of these include:

• To stimulate interest
•    To inform or educate
•    To entertain
•    To persuade

Content creation, to be most effective, should be a part of a larger system which works hand in hand with every aspect of the business instead of being a separate strategy on its own. Most sales funnels rely on a systematic approach to content creation to lead their clients from one stage to another.

During the initial stages of client acquisition, the purpose for creating content is usually to stimulate viewer’s interest.

Writing copy for landing pages is one great example of how content can be used to start a conversation with the clients. This may also include subscription to a free monthly newsletter or a quick survey for collecting relevant customer information.

Potential clients respond differently to different content. If they want to know more about the company, its products or services, your purpose should be to inform or educate the audience about the benefits and advantages of using or applying them, whether it’s in a form of free content, an informative blog post, infographic, or YouTube video.

The latter part which involves your prospects taking action requires a more persuasive form of content or writing. Content creators needs to be able to make the final push to lead conversion by conveying a sense of urgency and what they stand to lose for not taking action.

Following-up with your prospects is essential to lead conversion at this stage of the customer’s journey.

Being able to define the purpose of content creation allows businesses to accomplish their sales and marketing goals more efficiently.

Maintaining Interest

Holding viewer’s interest is the next important aspect of an effective content marketing strategy. It not only helps with lead conversion, but in the long run, it would also help increase the company’s visibility through online search or social media.

When creating content, keep the following characteristics in mind:

Usefulness – Viewing or reading content will use up some time from your target audience. Creating content that is useful is an incentive to spend more of their time viewing or reading them in the future.
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Relevance – What’s in it for them? Creating content that is on point to the viewers or readers is a sure way to keep an audience. This applies to email sequences where clients receive updates based on how they respond to a given call-to-action (CTA) or data gathered from subsequent surveys.
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Timeliness – Proper timing is also key to maintaining interest. Blog postings, for instance, should follow a certain schedule or pattern where readers could expect something new from time to time. This applies to any type of content whether it’s a YouTube v-log, new findings or research, press release, etc.

Improving Online Visibility

Online content can be used to leverage your marketing efforts due to the fact that it can be viewed or shared across multiple channels. This is particularly true with high quality, shareable content.

Marketing experts have already developed some of the most effective ways to increase visibility through search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, and social media.

Each method has its own ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ but for most startups with limited budgets, improving visibility can be achieved through social media and email marketing.

Some CRM services incorporate these two features to enable small businesses to communicate with their clients at very little or no expense at all. Link-building through SEO or paid inclusion in search engines through SEM, although quite effective in extending reach, could entail higher expenses.

A Better Alternative for Small Business Startups

Having a good sales and marketing app that goes hand in hand with creating content that really speaks to your audience is by far the most reasonable, if not the only way of starting up and growing a small business.

Small Business Dream goes beyond by offering client acquisition tools through its survey creator and landing pages along with sales and marketing automation features. Find out how at www.smallbizdream.com.