Archive for April, 2009

Welcome to Tuesday Mornings today’s topic is “Relationships”. We been talking all about customer relationship management these past few weeks so today’s topic is going to focus all about your customer relationships. So what we mean by all these relationships anyways. Any questions that you have about customer relationship management are fair game today. We are going to talk about sugar CRM, the definition of a customer relationship, the different levels of customer relationships, what kind of relationship you want with your customer, what to say your customer to create those relationships and some tools to be able to manage those relationships.

Imagine trying to create a piece of furniture without a plan on what its purpose was and what it was supposed to look like. You would not want to start to randomly cut wood before you had a blueprint to tell you what you wanted to do. I know this sounds funny but this is exactly what many small business people do every day. It’s very important for us to understand what a customer relationship looks like so that we can cultivate them in our businesses. There is a lot of static concerning customer relationship management in the marketplace today. I’m going to try to clear up a lot of the confusion surrounding customer relationship management so that you will be able to take action on the information that I’m presenting to you today.

So what do you think that I mean when I say customer relationship management. I know that many of the people reading this are thinking that this is just another way of marketing to your customer. When you think of customer relationship management I want you to think about your marketing plan and how you’re going to implement that marketing plan to create your brand and your customer’s mind. I know that that’s a bit philosophical but that’s really what correctly implemented customer relationship management does. And at it’s very basic level customer relationship management produces top of mind awareness because you have an automated system of contact.

What kinds of customer relationships to you want in your business? What does a great customer look like for you? There are three basic criteria for creating a successful customer relationship:

First, customer Trust
Second, customer Affection
Third, customer Respect