Paul Deane: What do you know about your customers?

This process is key to the success of any business. In the current print market it is critical to survival that this process is properly managed – and any marketer will tell you the fundamentals of sales and marketing are built around defining and understanding your target market.

The starting point has to be the centralising of data related to your customers and prospects. Yet print and packaging companies still allow sales people to keep their own client lists and record activity in their own personal systems. This is a major business risk.

All that information belongs to the business and should be kept in a central database where it can be maintained, analysed and backed up.

Having made a decision to centralise that data the business needs to decide on the information it needs to keep against those customers – do you categorise them by market sectors, potential spend, size of business, geographical area, or some other criterion? Whatever you decide, it will enable you to target these categories with specific marketing activity.

The way you classify your contacts within these customers is also important as it will enable you to tailor your communication messages according to the position they hold within the customer.

A managing director, for instance, is going to want a different message to a packaging buyer. It is vital that only one or two people are given the responsibility of entering the data into the database as the quality and accuracy of that data is key to your sales and marketing success.

Having got your database together you then face the challenge of ensuring all key customer activity is recorded in the database.

Sales and customer service people must record key activity against their customers. If they don’t, how can we analyse what we are doing with our customers?

Paul Deane is joint managing director of Shuttleworth Business Systems

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