Organize your Key Account Information

Key Account Lists

I speak to small business owners each day. All the owners or sale executives at these small businesses would like to make more money. A good way to achieve this is to increase sales to existing customers and to inactive customers of their business. Simple marketing programs can be used to gin up sales leads for the sales teams. Direct marketing campaigns can be kicked off, offering information or some other hook to cultivate buyers.

This is a reasonable approach and will work. Maybe not right away but with work and tweaking the marketing message leads can flow in. The leads are passed to sales and sales deals will follow. The roadblock to this  process is data.  Consider this: does your business have an organized, clean customer database? Does this database have current address, phones and email addresses?

If your answer is hmmm, you are not alone. Many very fine businesses have account data in many systems within the company and on sales peoples’ lap tops outside of the business. The first thing to do is to gather and organize this customer data. It may reside in ERP or your accounting system. Put it into a crm or online sales tool so you can use it.

Account data is not just a pain for smaller business. Medium and large companies have this pain to. MDM or master data management is a fancy term for managing accounts, customers, vendors and items. MDM can go very deep into item normalization, item rationalization and even the logic and business rules that apply to this data but a very important part of a companies master data is the account list. The account list, over the years can be dirtied. Say the young driver who is buying your auto insurance is now at the college address. He is now over 18 and renewals are still sent to the homestead. Perhaps  2 companies have merged and the client list is full of duplicates. This dirty data can cause pain even cause liability issues.

Smaller businesses can clean data faster than huge enterprises and do this scrubbing with too much trouble. Just get your data out of your accounting system, and off your salesteams laptops and put it together.  Then import into a sales tool and start cleaning. I do not think the sales gears should stop or even slow to clean your account data. Just clean, edit and delete as you go. Make it a policy that salespeople clean up there contacts and very soon your data will be usable for marketing and sales approaches to increase your sales and profits.