Know The Customer Purchase Journey and History: A business list should be organized to help your business grow sales, so start by outlining your customer’s purchase journey along with the capabilities of your existing systems – sales, CRM, accounting, etc. List out what steps do your customers take before they purchase. This will help you outline the key data points that help identify the right customer and their influences.
Outline a Master record or set of data characteristics: What’s the most important data needed to best understand, serve and market to your customers or prospects? Define those fields as essential and start a master record of these key data characteristics. Then consider other related data characteristics that might help inform your sales and marketing decisions. For instance, if your customers are fast-growing businesses, a change in employee size or annual sales volume might be a valuable measurement to track.
Scan our filter criteria for businesses to see different data characteristic options. Consider data coming from other sources, especially point-of-sale (POS), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and how that data works together. Create the outline of a master record including and prioritizing all of these data points to serve as a basic template for your business list.
PRO TIP: Salesgenie allows custom fields when uploading your Customer Data that can be filtered and sorted, so you can include any of your customer fields like customer type, purchase history or offer history.
Validate key characteristics and addressing: Businesses change and evolve constantly -- over 4 million new U.S. businesses are started annually on average -- so it’s important to keep the most important details of your database accurate, from address changes to new leadership and additional locations. Salesgenie’s Customer Data Hygiene & Append Services help insure your business list is accurate.
Define data governance: Data is only as good as the people maintaining it. Who has access to the data and who is responsible for insuring accuracy and integrity? Be sure there are clear guidelines on what changes can be made by whom to your business list.
Scheduled Hygiene to Keep Data Clean: Data is only usable if it’s accurate. Set a regular plan to merge, standardize, cleanse and append your data so your business list stays fresh and up-to-date. Plan a “rinse and repeat” schedule to streamline this operation.
Define Customer Segments: There’s an infinite number of “Customer Types”, from best to worst, frequent buyers or not, lifetime value, and more. Define your most important (often most profitable or reliable) customer segments to focus your efforts. Salesgenie’s Custom Tags or Custom Fields allow you to quickly segment your database so that you can filter and search your customer data, just as you would a prospect list.
Personalize Where Possible: One of the advantages of a good business list is the ability to personalize your interactions with each customer or prospect, helping to boost responsiveness and trust in your organization.
Be Mobile: Having your business list at your fingertips, regardless of where you are or the device you’re on, is a key competitive advantage in today’s business landscape. Salesgenie’s Mobile App gives you access to your account including business and consumer lists on any mobile device.
Follow-up: More than half the battle of growing sales, following-up with your customers or prospects and updating records accordingly helps insure a healthy business list. Strive to have some connection with everyone on your business list, even as you focus your energies on those segments most relevant to your business needs and timing.