In today’s highly competitive economy, the pressure is great on businesses and firms to source for cost effective methods of increasing their clientele and identifying new markets for their products and services.
It is usually the case to find the business development manager scrambling to implement the most current, state-of-the-art market development tools that will provide adequate support to the overall business effort.
However, sometimes, the most valuable tools may already be resident within the organization, and this is particularly true in the services sector.
Services organizations usually operate in environments where there is an abundance of data to go around. They frequently collect data relating t their daily activities from the information of their day-to-day business operations, as well as customer account “demographics” and corresponding service usage patterns.
In many cases, there are also financial data available which can be gotten from the records of their daily transactions and other types of trend data. At every point in every business day, services organizations are collecting data and creating computer records. These records are stored for future reference and use in databases.
The majority of these collated data will stay in these databases and never really be used for anything in particular after being stored. Most often, they are stored for a period, usually due to legal obligations, or to fulfill contractual terms.
However, in a world where information has become an increasingly valuable resource, what better source is there to learn about emerging patterns of customer preferences and service usage patterns than from the information gathered from customers themselves?
The information goes beyond what they need, but what they’re using currently. Service organizations are actively searching for information that keeps them updated on latest market trends.
Marketing and business development managers would love to know what makes their customers “tick”; as well as what “ticks them off.” Operations managers would do anything to find out how they could improve the quality of their business operations, even by just a fraction of a percentage, as it has untold potentials for developing their business.
This is without mentioning the sales managers who would do just about anything to keep a half-step ahead of the others in their industry by always being able to identify a new market segment or land a top reference account in an emerging market.
In a nutshell, the production of internal databases is potentially able of providing the ultimate avenue for driving new marketing and business development information that can be efficiently applied to support the sales and marketing strategies to any organizations.
The main advantages of using primary data and information can manifest in both internal and external applications, like these:
Internal Business Applications:
Facilitating and expediting the planning of new products and services, identifying enhanced information that could be used to manage the company’s service repertoire in a more effective manner, improving the quality and structure of existing sales, business operational format, and administrative efforts, and creating better methods of delivering more effective customer services.
Customer Feedback:
There’s no way to know how to interact with your customers if you don’t know where they are. Information about your customers will provide their contacts and platforms on which you can reach them. From there you will be able to set up a service that will be aimed at communicating with them.
This step is especially useful for services like GuestPost.UK who provide help instantly. Your customers might want to talk to you and if they don’t know how there might be a problem which will further diminish your operational efficiency.
Marketing Applications:
Increasing the capability to focus sales and make them more targeted at your key demographic, increasing the ability of marketing strategies to focus efforts on the customer and prospect segments that have the most potential for business growth and development and to react more swiftly to the highly dynamic needs and requirements of the market and to expand the existing service and support capabilities beyond what is the prevailing limit.
You can also use information gotten from your existing customers in future marketing efforts. For instance, information about what social media platform them are usually on can go a long way in helping you determine where to focus on.
So if you’re a fashion retail service and you’ll like to know how you can bolster your marketing strategy, you could use a database to see the social media platform that is used most frequently by your clients. From there, you’ll be able to know whether to invest more on Facebook or Instagram in a bid to get new customers.
