Make sure you keep your company contact information up-to-date on a regular basis and take your time to add new contacts you gain throughout the year.
A good way to control if your contact details are up to date is by including your return address so that the post office will return the card if the address is no longer valid. It will also serve a dual purpose by providing your contact information to your recipients.
I am researching for a new blog post about how brands brief agencies when they want to run a pitch.
Add your answers to comments below, please.
There have been a few good quesitons around recently with Public Relations agencies in particular seeking ideas for competitions that can run on Twitter.
Running a competition is a good way of building new followers for social media communication channels – it also helps for brand awareness. A contest doesn’t need to be expensive, or complex but the prize must fit the audience and be desirable.
Take a look a the Social Media Experiment at Glastonbury 2010 running now which I learnt about from the Chinwag group on LinkedIn.
In order to win, visitors to the site are asked to join the competition group on Facebook and post a link to prove that they are a in a band, an artists etc. The winning act will then be chosen from the group at random in this ‘flash mob’ style competition.
We are often asked about how to pitch a brand in order to win their busienss.
Now a pitch is usually the end of a long process that starts with a chemistry meeting or a credentials presentation.
Here is an example from Razorfish who pitched for the jewellery retailer, Tiffany’s business.
If they delivered the free workshop and used that to develop ideas for Tiffany – how strong would their offering be if Tiffany decided to make it into a public pitch? They would have the inside track becasue all the ideas were developed jointly with Tiffany.
How do you approach new prospects – what can you offer them that makes it easy to buy and shows off your ideas without giving away your intellectural property?
Thanks to MZ Kagan and Scribd for the idea for this article.
Adeline Grosrenaud is London blogger with a blog dedicated to CRM. It may seem an out of date concept now that the social web is going mainstream, but I asked her to write about how CRM and biz dev proceseses can be mutually supportive.
She has a helpful check list of metrics that would be worth checking for your organisation.
While the term CRM is often just used to refer to CRM software, true customer relationship management is much more than that. A business ought to have a well thought out and written customer relationship management strategy and plan which has involved thorough research if they want to succeed in their given industry.
CRM technology and software has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last few years from starting as basic contact management solutions and now features a huge array of tools and applications that can be used for a variety of business processes. The most important use for most business seeking out a CRM solution is the development and automation of business development processes.
Ability to quickly and efficiently integrate new business leads from a variety of sources.
Ability to automate follow up on new leads quickly and in a organized manner.
Automation of up-selling and cross promoting other products and services.
Easy integration of new business development managers, representatives and remote teams or call centers.
Creating a streamlined platform for communication throughout the company.
Instant access to and generation of reports and financial projections.
Easy tracking of a wide variety of statistics and metrics.
These CRM features not only facilitate better and faster customer relationship management and sales but can help a business cut costs and improve the bottom line through a simple, streamlined and automated system. Perhaps the most important among these CRM tools for business development is the ability to easily track a wide range of metrics. This includes times it takes for your sales staff to follow up with new leads, how hard they are trying to follow up and convert sales leads and which members of the sales team are performing best. Good CRM programs also enable rapid changes in the business development process whether it be reassigning accounts to another account manager or changing sales letters and scripts and much more. The latest advances in CRM technology also make split testing a breeze. In this tighter economic times this has become even more essential as businesses strive to maximize ROI more than ever before.