• Newsletter Sign Up

• Business Links

  • AHRI
  • David Allen
  • Fistful of Talent
  • HR Magazine
  • HR Thoughts
  • Incentive Intelligence
  • Justin Davies
  • Life Hacker
  • Personal MBA
  • Productivity 501
  • Simple Matter of Software
  • The Coaching Institute

• Friends n Mentors

  • Miles Burke
  • Steve Pavlina

• Categories

  • Achievement (1)
  • Blogging (6)
  • Business (21)
  • CRM (10)
  • Development (20)
  • Education (2)
  • Goals (3)
  • Hacks (2)
  • HR (1)
  • Leadership (3)
  • Management (15)
  • Not for Profit (1)
  • Productivity (2)
  • Sales (3)
  • Start Up (1)
  • Success (21)
  • TGIF (1)
  • Uncategorized (1)
  • Vision (1)

• Tags

  3 12 elements alignment Business business planning dumb things engagement financial crisis goal Management manager managers managing momentum planning Productivity staff staff engagement staff retention Success team member tom peters Vision
• 

I got a letter from my broker the other day. Good to know he’s staying in touch. Not like most brokers who promise the world and you never hear from them again. The only problem was this letter was to invite us to a new home buyer’s seminar. We have bought and sold quite a number!

Right intention, poor execution.

We bought a car 4 years ago. Brand new. When the sales person moved car yards we received a letter from him letting us know and, if we were ever shopping for a car, please come in and see him. Feel free to refer friends. Nice enough. Except my name isn’t Paul!

Why is it so hard to get customer relationships right?

These errors mentioned above are, to some degree, small issues that maybe I should just get over. I’m just being small minded and picky.

Yet … and yet!

These people were trying to do something that should have been easy to do.

The car dealer signed me up for a car. I had to fill in legal forms with full name etc. How could you get that wrong?

My broker, who is a good friend and I will chat with him to assist him in this, was also trying to be ahead of the game. But what went wrong? Surely a simple flag on my account or something. The other point of issues was this was a snail mail letter. Let’s say he sent out 250 to make it a worthwhile mailing. That is $250 he spent with a flawed qualifying mechanism. At least an email would have been cheaper, could have been even further personalised and include links with valuable information.

A database needs updating.

In his great book First Things First, Stephen Covey recounts an anecdote someone told him: “Without a gardener, there is no garden.” This applies so well to CRM and databases. Without good information, constant updating you may as well not even have a database.

And yet, as you constantly update the database you wonder why you have to enter so much information. (For a full profile checkout Harvey Mackay’s Mackay 66! Now that is a profile!) The value of information in a database is never realised until you extract it.

Why flag my home buyer status? Why spell my name right? Simply because one day you’re going to use it and if it is wrong it blows up in your face.

It isn’t that hard. Updating a database is the easiest thing in the world. But it is the difference between significant success and the also rans.

Someone said that successful people don’t do anything different to unsuccessful people, it’s just that what they do accomplish they accomplish more often, better every day.

Comments