What can a business database do for my business?
Databases are effective where you have large amounts of information within your business which are either essential to the running of the business, such as customer details, or essential to the growth, such as sales activity.
The more information that you have to manage the more useful a database is going to be. If you have ten customer contact records you can probably manage with Microsoft Excel, but if you have a few hundred and they need to be shared by a group of users, then a database is going to be extremely useful.
Put simply, databases provide the following benefits:
- Speed - you can use them to locate information far quicker than you could manually
- Tracking - you can use them to track when you contact a customer, when you made a sale, when you made a sales appointment
- Collation - you can use them to collate key information for mail shots or for analysis for example
- Reporting - you can use them to produce easy to read reports that allow you to view key business information
Once we have the information within the database we can enable functionality to work automatically with it - for example we could configure it so any customer who was late paying received a letter or a customer who you hadn't been in contact with for six months received a sales newsletter.
How can you help me manage my customers better?
The first question we would need to ask is what issues are you facing with your customers? If you have many customers who need to be invoiced each month or updated with some information then we would suggest adding in automatic functionality to contact them on key dates. If your issue is that customers are calling in with problems then we would suggest creating a section of your database for logging customer issues.
If you are concerned that customers are 'being lost' between emailing the business and being contacted by a sales person (perhaps the emails go astray!) then we could configure the database to receive the emails and log these so they cannot be lost. They could even be automatically assigned to a sales person.
How can a business database improve my sales?
You may want to run a set of campaigns aimed at different groups of customers, some may be existing some may be considered new. With the existing customers it may be a case of searching the database for customers who have bought in the past but not for a while and running an automated campaign to contact them (could be email or mail).
Alternatively, for the new customers it may be best to purchase some business data and feed this into the database and from here get the database to inform the sales team who to contact and to log their responses. Those enquiries that showed some initial interest could then be sent some marketing material automatically by the database and once again those responses could be monitored.
How can I view key data about my business?
Reporting is key to a successful business database - if you can't view key information about your data then you are not maximising the database to its fullest. Reports can either by dynamic, that is they can be manipulated directly from within the database or they can be static, as in a report that can be printed or saved.
Dynamic reports are great for 'what if' scenarios, delving into the data and playing around with the figures. This is a good process for trying to spot trends and areas where you could find new business or perhaps weaknesses with your existing sales team. You might want to find all the customers that haven't bought anything from you in the last 9 months or which sales people sell the most of a particular product or even how many calls do we need to make to achieve a customer meeting.
How much will a business database cost me?
The cost of a business database will depend greatly on the functionality that you are looking for but as a starting point an Innovate Software business database solution starts from around £1,995 + VAT. From here you can add as many features as you want, when you want - you don't have to put all the features in straightaway. That means if you want to start out with a really great customer database and then add in automatic emailing in a few months you can do so.