Regain Control of Your Small Business

Regain Control of Your Small Business Marketing
Why small businesses overlook the power of follow up—and how the right technology can dramatically help

By Clate Mask

Seasoned and successful small business owners understand the value of consistently appearing in front of their prospects and customers. Unfortunately, small business marketing isn't an exact formula, rather a careful mix of trial and error.

Within the sales and marketing function, customer and prospect follow-up are easily the biggest challenge and most prevalent cause of missed opportunities for small businesses. The best software lets you not only track the behavior of your customers but also to tailor your marketing campaigns to those most likely to buy what you’re offering. And if you’ve practiced frequency and timing, many more than usual will be ready to act when they get the message.

Here are some common misperceptions of managing customers and prospects:

1. “I’ll Just Try To Do The Follow Up When I Have Extra Time”

Arguably, this is the most common, really dumb idea in business today. You too can abandon your responsibilities, roll up your sleeves, and get involved in minimum-wage grunt work – stuffing envelopes and licking stamps. Or better yet, do all this stuff in your spare time.

2. “I’ll Create A Card/Folder Tracking System”

There have been pretty creative tracking systems built using multi-color file-folders, index cards, and multiple sheets of pre-printed labels. I’d love to see you try managing a 37-step multi-media, multi-step, multi-branch campaign to a list of 137,343 and not end up in the crazy house.

3. “I’ll Hire Staff To Manage The Follow Up”

Once people burn out of doing the follow up themselves, they usually hire more staff to help get it all done. And the really funny thing about staff is how quickly business owners hire someone to “fill a hole” and pay them $30,000 or $40,000 a year but then shudder and moan and gnash their teeth at the thought of investing 1/5th that amount in the tools to make their marketing successful.

4. “I’ll Just Outsource It”

I’ve seen people create relationships with vendors who will manage their marketing for them. I have seen this work fairly well for small runs of really simple print-only follow up.
But there are problems with this, as attractive as it sounds:

•I haven’t seen anyone who can handle an effective follow up that includes mail, email, phone, fax, etc.
• List maintenance becomes a problem because they don’t know when people are buying and can easily send follow up pieces to those who have already purchased or who have opted out.
• There is no outsourcing firm who cares as much about getting your mailing right as you do.

5. “I’ll Pay To Have Follow-Up Software Built”

I’ve known entrepreneurs hire software developers to create a program to manage follow up and keep it all straight. Some people make the mistake of hiring a college student, or some guy who’s “taking a break”, or a programmer who just doesn’t “get it”... and end up with something resembling half a car battery and a microwave held together by a few rubber bands.

6. “I’ll Buy ‘Off-The-Shelf’ Software To Manage This”

It does seem like with all of the technological advancements made that we should be able to go into a store and pick up a marketing software tool that will help us follow up.

Most entrepreneurs really don’t “get it” when it comes to direct response marketing and follow-up, so what kind of a chance do you expect software geeks to have?

Orchestrating your follow up becomes almost impossible because you have your prospect and customer information in a gazillion different systems. How would you send out carefully timed sequences where the email, voice broadcast and direct mail are all synchronized?

Until recently there has been no solution to help manage the complex tasks involved with multi-step, multi-media follow up. Companies have been forced to come up with “creative” ways to get the follow up done when it should be developed into an integrated all-in-one solution.

Customer Relationship Management (aka CRM) software is a critical tool in helping customers effectively manage their marketing strategies. It’s important to put an effective tool in place that answers your small business needs by truly automating one of the most important components of business: the marketing to, and ongoing conversation with, customers and prospects.

Clate Mask is the President and CEO of Infusionsoft, a Gilbert, Ariz.-based software company that helps thousands of small businesses grow more quickly and profitably. The company is focused on transforming the way small businesses drive and manage growth through its flagship web-based software, Infusionsoft—which helps small businesses grow fast by automating their marketing, sales and customer management. Infusion CRM centralizes, organizes and automates small businesses’ marketing, sales and customer management, resulting in better lead conversion, lower labor costs and greater lifetime customer value.