Managing clients is one of the most difficult parts of running your business – effective managing and categorising your clients will help you learn more about them, serve them better, coming up with better marking tactics, and generally have a more successful business. That’s why it is essential for you to learn how to efficiently manage and organize your clients.
Client Pooling and Organization
The most important aspect of managing your clients is organising them into meaningful and useful pools that you then use later for marketing or and business expansion:
- Organizing your clients based on needs, age or other meaningful criteria has been a cornerstone of marketing for the last century. You can target customers only in a certain age range or income bracket. With good organisation, you’ll see who buys your products and uses your services.
- Pooling also means you’ll recognize which subsection of people you’re failing to target. You can find out that you are failing to market yourself to people aged 25-30, and these people don’t use your services. Improving your services for that particular age group or giving them discounts will help you grow.
- One last advantage is recognising bottlenecks and efficiencies. If you find out most of your clients are from a particular city or only use your services through the internet, you can make informed tradeoffs between developing your website or your physical store. You’ll be able to grow in the direction of market demand without wasting too much money on useless things.
Meticulous Note Keeping
You can’t manage your clients if you don’t know how many of them you have, how much they’ve ordered, how many of them are returning customers, and how often they use your services. Whether you want to develop some kind of new distribution method for your company or you want to optimise some business processes, you’ll need this information.
If you have a small business with only a handful of clients, you can do your record keeping on a small electronic spreadsheet or even a physical notebook. The problem is this method doesn’t scale well and takes a lot of time.
If your company is medium sized, you absolutely need to hire someone to keep your records and organise the information for you so you can make better decisions. Preferably, you also need a dedicated contractor software to keep your records or management software for your clients.
Effective Methods of Feedback
Most Fortune 500 companies give money, coupons, or free/discounted service just to encourage their clients to give them feedback. This should illustrate how important feedback is to the business cycle. What’s the best way to learn more about your clients and their needs? Simple, by asking them why they are using your business, what they love about it, and what they think you can improve.
These questions will illustrate a few important things about your business:
- What’s your USP (unique selling proposition). This tells you what makes your business special to your client, and this knowledge will help you capitalise on your USP better.
- It tells you what you’re doing great. As the old adage goes, “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. This knowledge will help you recognise the parts of your business that work great and don’t need much improvement.
- It also lays your business’s shortcomings bare so you can somehow amend, improve, or replace them and make your clients happier.
Management Software
Whether you’re going to buy enterprise management software or ask a software company to create simple bespoke software to help you with your business’s operations, you’ll have a hard time surviving without management software. Nowadays, technology is playing more of a central role in the business world, and you have to capitalise on it if you want to remain competitive in the long run.
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