Secret No. 6: What Is The Most Important And Valuable Asset That Your Business Has?

Is it the beautiful building in which you are located?

Is it the money that you have in your business account at the bank?

Is it all of the products on your merchandising shelves?

Is it the stock in your warehouse?

How about your great employees? Is it them?

No, it’s none of these things, though all of them are important.

The most important assets that your busi­ness has are its clients and customers! Period.

Without them, you have no business.

“One of the most important lessons
of business is the value of concentrating
on the customers you have.”

Tom Monaghan

I surely hope that you have all of your clients and customers logged into a carefully organized database. It makes it so much easier to stay in contact with your customers if you have all of them in a database.

In addition, it makes implementing many of the marketing methods discussed in this blog much simpler.

A client once hired me to write two marketing letters, one to his active customers and another to his inactive customers. When I had finished writing these letters, I asked my client to send me his database so that I could handle the task of mailing out the letters.

What a mess!

There were about fifteen hundred names in the data­base, which turned out to be his accounting database. The only contact person listed for each customer was the person in the customer’s office who was in charge of accounts payable!

I’m sure that it was important to know who that person was when my client had invoicing issues. However, an accounts payable contact was not the person to whom we wanted to send mail regarding a new product offering.

To make matters worse, my client’s “active contact” database had at least five thousand names in it. On top of that, prospects and active clients were thrown in together. In other words, there was no separation into “current client,” “inactive client,” or “prospective client” files. What a disaster!

Lesson learned: I should have asked my client how his database was structured before I wrote the let­ters for him. My mistake!

We had to put the project on hold until he could find the time to get his database organized with the correct contact names plugged in for each active and inactive customer.

As of this writing, we still haven’t mailed those letters.

Time is money. Please don’t make this mistake with your most valuable asset.

If you don’t have a customer database, or if your database is a mess, it will put your business at a compet­itive disadvantage.

What are you doing to maintain the database records for your #1 asset

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