How To Build Lifelong Customer Relationships

Once you have completed this article by leading sales consultant Jim Cecil, you will have learned:
* How to use customer relationship management software to improve your business processes.
* Some resources to guide your CRM implementation.
* The reasons behind drip irrigation marketing.

No product or technology will change the very nature of your business in the next three years more than the merger of customer relationship management (CRM) software and the Internet. CRM no longer can be considered just an interesting approach to database management. It's about staying in-touch with customers intelligently. It's the driving force behind much of the technology investments that businesses will make in the next three years. The need to stay in touch with customers, to cultivate top of mind awareness, to create a preference for doing business with you, has never been greater or more difficult to accomplish.

Everybody, every customer and every prospect that you know must have already solved the Internet-based CRM issues or are staying up much later at night planning or trying to execute this massive top management mandate. With the advent of exciting new Internet-based communication methods, the ability to communicate effectively, respectfully and appropriately will differentiate the winners from the losers. Customers have an unprecedented number of choices in the marketplace--so the need to keep them up to date is imperative and urgent.

Keeping them up-to-date through a series of well-written, personal letters is the basis of my Nurture Philosophy. It is a totally new way of communicating with prospects and clients over time, a bit at a time--in drip irrigation fashion. It is designed to establish you and your company on the top of your customers' minds in personal ways that ultimately cause them to call you when they are ready to buy. The process supports and helps you to be more efficient and effective, and builds loyalty that keeps them buying from you.

While the implementation of any CRM is a daunting task, any alert integrator, consultant, or CEO can use a few well chosen resources and partners to personally get ahead of the curve on the hottest technology issue in a decade, CRM. I can sum CRM with a simple roadmap using a slightly disguised response I sent to an e-mail question.

Teri, a reseller using Goldmine Software, a CRM solution for small to midsized businesses, wrote to say she wanted to implement a drip-irrigation-type marketing (CRM) program and asked: What is the best way to get started?

Knowing only that she was in the technology distribution channel and not knowing much more about her specific needs, technical expertise, goals, targets or personal customer relationship management expertise, my response was necessarily a bit general. But, with that in mind, I walked her through the very basics of Customer Nurturing or, as she put it 'drip-irrigation marketing'. The result was a "do-it-yourself project" for her, a step-by-step approach that I present to you below, using some of the best books and resources on the market.

To get started I suggest you acquire and force yourself to virtually absorb the following information:

1. Order The Sales Automation Survival Guide by Dick Lee (or anything else this gentleman writes) about SFA or CRM technology and the process of helping people and software work together.

It's by Dick Lee at High Yield Marketing 651-483-2077.

2. Buy and read Enterprise One To One Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, using post-it notes and a big highlighter. Both authors are at the center of the universe, in my opinion, on the very concept and the technology of true one-to-one customer relationship management. It's the place to start and a valuable guide book through the entire process of CRM. You'll find their Web site at www.1to1.com

3. Visit www.permission.com where you can order the first four chapters of Seth Godin's book, Permission Marketing for free. Take them up on their offer. Godin argues that you must first get customers' permission to market to them by offering some kind of incentive, such as discounts, contests, or even opinion surveys. Only then can you begin to establish life-long relationships with them. After reading the first four chapters, consider ordering the full version. I believe the audio and hard cover version represent the best Internet focused marketing book ever written; Permission Marketing is about attaining and growing relationships, especially digital ones. Godin is the Internet marketer who created Yoyodyne>>FONT before selling it to Yahoo, where he is now a vice president, in 1998. Godin's credentials speak for themselves and my enthusiasm for his methods will soon be clear.

4. Next, visit my site, www.nurturemarketing.com and click on Free Stuff to download my free booklet, A Cure For The Common Cold Call, my 21 Best Ideas for making prospects and customers call you first. While you're at the site, take a tour of the web site and review the nurturing tools, study materials, and logical resources that we've developed and identified specifically to assist natural nurturers like you cultivate their customers and constituencies even better.

5. Then since you have decided on Goldmine, contact a Goldmine reseller or visit www.goldminesw.com and ask them to discuss Goldmine's unique automated process function which manages interactions between your sales and support staff and your customers. With that tool or one like it, drip-irrigation marketing becomes a pleasure and, better still, it becomes a delegable task. Imagine the productivity. Finally you'll have a process and a purpose for cultivating everybody proactively. You'll have an intelligent 'touch' program for every person you enter into your personal or corporate database. Best of all it provides a simple way to let your administrative assistant and the software do all the heavy lifting for you. Once created, an action plan makes your job as easy as 'assign and sign".

6. Once you've gained a good perspective on CRM and have your tools in place, it's time to tell your story in letters, e-mails, voice-mail scripts, gifts, offers, tips, appreciation and other acknowledgments. You are ready to craft your own personal Nurture Action Plan and to write the communiques to your customers. A lifetime of study will never make this one automatic.

Here are a few rules to follow:

When you write to a prospect, think seductively. Discuss their problems, their challenges. Make it obvious that you know their business and understand solutions at a higher level. Think helpful, respectful, intelligent, positive, relevant, and useful. Drip-irrigation marketing is professionally persistent but always worth reading.

Think about one person. Think about your most important customer or prospect. Think about positioning yourself indelibly on someone's mind and think carefully how you want to be positioned. Think about your differentiation, your guarantees and your key benefits.

Then start writing. If you get stuck send me an e-mail jim@nurturemarketing.com and I'll help if I can.

This is a big question and the answers I have given probably raise many more questions than were answered. This should, however, offer a good start. Remember, professionally managing relationships with customers is a transformational journey for you and your business. Study the process you develop very carefully. Observe the responses and the way they make you feel. The journey to one to one nurturing is a powerful and wonderful step upward. A step that will change your business and your life with as much certainty as the proverb, "...as ye sow, so shall ye reap".