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A marketing database is a system for keeping track of people and communicating with them. Contact-management programs, such as Act!, GoldMine, Maximizer, Microsoft Outlook and Sharkware can be used to build a database. For example, sales reps take their laptop database to appointments loaded with historical sales data--what, where, how often, and how much a customer buys. Salespeople out in the field, use "remote synchronization" to receive leads and updates automatically and then send their responses at regular intervals. The database may be used to measure sales productivity--for example, a salesperson's calling pattern. You can build a marketing database! Step 1. Define the purpose of your database. Will you use it to improve existing client relationships? To sort leads in order to turn them into prospects and customers? To enhance customer service? Step 2. Walk through your selling process. Define how leads come in, how you get an initial appointment, and what happens next. Step 3. Choose the database software (each package differs). Step 4. Pay for a local consultant who can help you customize the program for your industry. Step 5. Choose the information you track. Resist going overboard. Plan how names should be entered, so that a customer like IBM isn't also entered as International Business Machines. Make use of contact managers' drop-down menus or pop-up boxes that prompt users to fill in fields correctly. Step 6. Develop a simple rating system. As you enter more information, you must be able to tell at a glance how important each customer is to your company's growth. Assign each customer a score of one to three on several variables, such as sales, future sales, and referrals. Step 7. Rank leads. Put questionable prospects into a "holding" database and dead leads into a purge file. To sort out older leads, conduct a search by the date that the information was last edited. Copyright © 1999 by Gemmy Allen, all rights reserved. |