17 December 2001

• "There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions." – Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

• The Fish Rots from the Head. Author: Bob Garratt. Publisher: Harper Collins.

An organisation’s success or failure depends on the performance of its board, yet the vast majority of directors admit that they have had no training for their role and are not sure what it entails. Garratt argues that there is an urgent need for both a transformation in the way director’s competencies are developed and a need to learn new thinking skills to apply to the intellectual activities of direction-giving and implementing strategy.

• Website link of the Week

www.guinessworldrecords.com With the festive season upon us, this site will arm you with heaps of trivia for family get-togethers, office parties and the like. It’s also fascinating to realise what some people will do just to get their name in print.

In the industrial age, the formula for valuing a business was based on land and buildings, plus fixtures and fittings, plus stock in trade, and an intangible called ‘goodwill’. In the information age, all that has changed. The greatest asset an info-tech business has in terms of its saleable value, is its database. In other words, the value of a business is now determined by the quality of the ongoing relationships it has with its customers.

Investing time, money and energy into developing and maintaining an accurate database is one of the highest payoff activities any business can involve itself in.

The battle for customers in the future will be won by marketers who understand how and why their customers individually buy their products - and learn how to win them over, one customer at a time. - Rob Jackson & Paul Wang, Strategic Database Marketing.

Knowing how to win your customers over one at a time, is only possible if you know everything about the buying wants and needs of your customers. That’s exactly why investing in a comprehensive database is so important.

There are varying degrees of sophistication with database software starting with simple programmes which are a component part of word processing packages such as Outlook and Appleworks, right through to very expensive customised CRM programmes. Obviously your investment needs to be kept within your budgetary and overall business parameters.

But whatever software you decide on, make sure that it is linked to all other business transactions. There is nothing more time consuming than having to manually load quantitative information into your database about individual clients especially if your business involves a multitude of customers making multiple purchases every month.

Another key to maximising the benefits of your database may seem like a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but keeping you database up to date and as accurate as possible is essential. This is best achieved by delegating responsibility to someone on staff whose job it is to constantly update the database and cull where necessary. If your database runs into several thousands, this could almost be a fulltime position.

As the software becomes more and more sophisticated, it will be possible to tailor your communication with customers down to minute details. I recently heard of a Scandinavian magazine that now customises the advertising content of each publication on a customer by customer basis.

That raises the question as to how much you know about your customers and what would you have to do to be able to provide such a specialised service.

Database marketing has been around for some time, however with the new breed of software available, it promises to be the primary marketing tool of the future for most businesses.

Don’t be left behind. Put your maximum energies into this area of your business now.

Until next week, many happy customer returns!

Graham Harvey APS

Watch out for Graham’s new book Seducing the Vigilante Customer – winning strategies to guarantee the return of happy customers and healthy profits, available in all good book stores early in 2002.

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