This video is about your list of business relationships. If you’re a business owner or leader and you want to get better sales and marketing results, check out what I have to say about one of the biggest and most-costly mistakes business owners make – lame list management, or no list at all.
What does it take to build and manage a great list of business relationships including prospects, customers who love you, customers who left you, vendors, partners, even family, and friends?
Caring, most of all. Then there’s the art and science (tech) of list management.
Here’s the list of 8 ways to better manage your contacts and business relationships.
- Size of your list. Size is not everything, but the bigger your list of contacts, the bigger your network and reach. This is important if the rest of the list aligns with your strategic plan of action. This means you have to do everything on this list to get sales results.
- Quality of your list. Quality counts big time. Measures of quality are based on how you build your list. You have to earn or buy your list through disciplined ads and promotion. You can’t steal a list and win customers for long. Karma will get you. Focus on quality.
- Engagement of your list. Engagement is when people open your emails, click through your landing pages, and buy what you sell. If you can’t or won’t engage, you’ll never get people to like you enough to give your products or services a chance. Engagement is a must.
- Fruit of your list. The fruit means the byproduct of size, quality, engagement and the list that follows. The fruit is abundant when you manage relationships well at all levels. Great fruit is customers and cash flow. If you stink at winning and keeping customers, you might not bear much fruit.
- Management of your list. Everyone who uses the system that manages your list must be aligned. This means quality in. Your contact information is up-to-date because everyone stays on top of the list and does what the administrator directs.
- Love of your list. If your prospects and customers don’t feel your love, they will do business somewhere else. Love is simple, not easy.
- Keeper of your list. This is the administrator on your team and if you own the business, this person is not you. What I mean is if you’re good at running a business, you need to focus on your highest and best use of time as the owner or leader and delegate list and system management to a qualified administrator who will maintain the integrity of your list, system and the users.
- Technology. I put this last for a reason. You need to have a written strategic plan of action to grow a real company or organization. This plan reveals your purpose, vision, mission, goals and all the other elements of a real plan. The reason this is key is your technology selection and investments are part of this plan. If you buy technology at seminars and blindside your team, shame on you. Empower your people to tell you what technologies for customer relationship management (CRM), email, social media, website, blog, etc.
If you care about your business then you will place far more value on your list of contacts or business relationships. It’s that simple.
In summary, focus on these 8 keys or disciplines for better managing your list of contacts and business relationships. I’m sure many of you reading this can add much to this list. Feel free to leave a constructive comment here on my blog.
If you’re like to discuss strategy, planning, team performance, and technologies, feel free to schedule a free ROI strategy session with me.
