If your business wants strong relationships with your customers, prospects, and vendors, consider ways you can use your CRM, customer RELATIONSHIP management software, to put more emphasis on the meaning of a “relationship.”
While sales is certainly the lifeblood of a business, it’s important not to lose sight of how human factors can contribute to your success. Making an effort to show you care will build trust and loyalty.
Here’s some ideas for using GoldMine to help with that:
- If you find out someone has a special occasion (marriage, birth, etc.) or personal loss (death, serious illness, etc.), let that be a trigger to send a “greeting card,” or personal note, or even a small gift. Since I delegate that task to my office manager, I use GoldMine to do so and to provide my assistant with the information they need to handle my fulfillment request.
- Hurricane Matthew was barreling toward the East Coast. Using GoldMine I was able to identify records in the zip codes of its path. Then, again using GoldMine and Intelliclick, I shot out a brief personalized message to express concern and best wishes.
- Hearing word of a business winning an award or expanding, drop the owner a congratulatory note.
- Learning that a decision maker or major influencer at a customer or prospect is no longer with the firm, use that as a good reason to reach out to their replacement to give them background on your relationship with their predecessor and offer any assistance that may be helpful. An “undeliverable email” to their predecessor is a great tip-off that there’s been a staffing change!
- Key off of the anniversary of a customer start date as a trigger for just reaching out to see how things are going. Same could be said if sales with a customer have been dormant.
Keeping your message simple, personal, and focused on “relationship” versus any attempt to sell, will help your communication to be perceived as more genuine. So resist the template to do anything “promotional.” It is enough just to show you care!
Better relationships lead to longer relationships, greater trust, higher loyalty, and ultimately more business. And, the added bonus is that it’s nice to put “human factors” ahead of sales now and again!
I hope this has helped!
Bob Ritter, President
First Direct Corporation
