Best Practices For Keeping Your Business References Organized

When things are easy, they’re easy and when they’re hard, they’re hard. Some days things are easy and some days, they’re not. There are ways to minimize the difficulties and make things easier. 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.

In order for us to be the best we can be in our jobs, having that information at our fingertips is a key element. Put the updated data in the database the moment we get. 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.

To get the best performance from your database, it requires maintenance. We have to have ways to keep track of our customers and when they contact us, verifying their info insures our customer references are updated. 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. Save yourself the embarrassment of calling a customer several times by verifying all the info at 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. Simply contact your customer once a quarter or so to verify information. This way you can keep track of them and insure their information is current.

It may be labor intensive at times, but your customer reference database could well be your most cherished asset when it comes down to it. 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!