March is here!
What will you do with your customer list?
Do you know what to do with your customer list?
And do you know why your customer list is important?
If you’re like most window cleaning businesses, you may not know this, but your most valuable asset is your customer list. It tells you who your customers are, who hasn’t bought yet, how much they spend when they do buy, how often they buy, and much more. It is the lifeline of your business.
I’ve had people ask me what I would do, as an entrepreneur, if I had to start over again today. In most cases, my response is that everything would be okay if I lost my company but still had my list. It’s that important for a successful business.
And yet, I’ve encountered many who spend zero time thinking about or working on their customer list. And that’s because they don’t completely understand how to utilize it.
I’ve met some folks who delete their contact information if a prospect doesn’t book a job! They say, “They didn’t buy, so why should I keep their information?” WHAT??!!
We milk our house list for everything it’s worth! And you should too! We’ve already booked out our Spring months which puts us AGAIN in a perfect environment to scale – yet again to the next level in growth as we hire up for an onslaught of brand-new business for this year. I call it force-feeding your business to grow. Reread this paragraph!
What to Watch For
One metric is extremely important to keep an eye on in your business. That’s the number of new clients added to your database each week and month. These additions are the one sign that you’re generating leads. And leads turn into revenue. You should be using your list to predict your future revenue.
You also need to evaluate the quality of your list’s data. Clean your database list to get the most current data on each customer’s record. Cleaning your list means, who moved, who moved away, who has passed on, etc. These need to be updated or removed, so no mailings, emails, voice mail blasts, etc., go out to them.
You can also manually call leads and verify that list data. That’s because having clean and complete data is key to having a strong and usable list.
First, look at your list and see if you have the full contact info for everyone on the list, including name, email, phone number, and mailing address. If not, that’s exactly the place to start. You’ll need as much of this data as you can get for marketing to these leads in the future.
3 Major Categories
After you’ve gained all the necessary contact information for your clients, segment your list into 3 different categories.
- Current Customers
- Aging Customers
- Prospects
It is helpful to have additional categories, like top 50 or 100 customers, customers by service, etc. Many times, your CRM can filter your list into different categories. This way, you can run various campaigns to try and sell, resell, or upsell. But at a minimum, these first 3 categories will be a good place to start pouring your best efforts into.
Once you’ve sorted all your clients into their respective categories, you’ll have a fresh list with clean, segmented data that’s useful. I have clients who’ve generated $100’s of thousands in extra revenue simply by segmenting their data and tailoring different offers to different groups on their customer list.
But they were only able to do that once they had a clean and complete list. Once you have yours, you can start to have some fun with various marketing campaigns.
It all starts with your list. If you haven’t given it much thought until now, then yes, you have a lot of work ahead of you. But the work will be well worth it.
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Are you in business and losing traction, stuck, or wanting to go to the next level and don’t quite know how? A quick 20-minute call will start you on the journey. Go to Calendly.com/JimDuBois.
Jim DuBois is founder of WindowCleaningBusinessCoach.com, a No-Results No-Fee business coaching company. Email [email protected] or call 704-343-8867 for more information or any questions you’d like answered in this column.