Читать книгу Six-Week Start-Up - Rhonda Abrams - Страница 61

People who do not seem particularly important during the early stages of your business may be very useful at a later date. It’s a horrible feeling to realize a few months down the road that you met the perfect supplier or distributor, or the person who could introduce you to the right investor, but you’ve lost the little slip of paper with their name, phone number, and email address.

Moreover, you’ll want to start building your database of potential customers, referral sources, and friends so you can later invite them to your “Grand Opening” and send them your email newsletters (Week Six). Believe me, when it comes time to start your marketing program, you’ll be glad you have an easy way to identify and contact people you want to communicate with.

So, right from Week One, establish a system for retaining and retrieving individuals’ contact information. The best way to do this is with a “contact management” or “customer relationship management” (CRM) software program.

Contact management is so important that big corporations spend hundreds of thousands—even millions—of dollars on huge, powerful CRM systems. You don’t have to. You can get by with a much simpler contact management application.

A contact management program can be as simple as an electronic “address book” such as one included as part of an email program, like Microsoft Outlook. As a start, that’s a good way to make sure you don’t lose important contact information.

However, you’ll probably quickly outgrow the contact capabilities included in email programs and will want to get a dedicated contact management software application.

Two of the benefits of cloud-based CRM programs for new entrepreneurs are that you pay as you go and that these applications can grow with you. So when you just start out and only have a short list of contacts, you can subscribe to a plan that suits your needs and your budget. Later, after you’ve grown, you simply upgrade to a larger plan—without interrupting your access to one of your company’s most valuable assets: your contacts. Two popular cloud-based CRM applications to choose from are Salesforce CRM and SugarCRM.