Successful business owners will tell you that repeat sales is an integral backbone of successful businesses. For one thing, it is more expensive to sell a product to a new customer than it is to sell additional products/services to existing customers. Having a good knowledge of your customers using a Customer Management System is therefore very important.

On your Customer Management System, make sure you keep a track of the paying customers, what they are buying and when exactly they are buying what they are buying. Make this data available to your sales rep/team, to follow up on the data for marketing. This can increase your repeat sales rate astronomically.

2. Get More Referral Sales

Have you ever had to make cold calls, going through the stress and hassle of the introductions, warm-up message, and the effort it takes to confirm leads and make them into prospects and paying customers? A good referral system helps you skip this energy and time consuming process and get down to business at the first point of contact. If someone has been referred to your business by a family or friend, chances are they trust you already.

Keeping track of your referral system can be extremely difficult especially when you need to keep track of your customers too, but it can be made easy using a good Customer Management System. With a CMS, you get all your contacts in one place. You can easily pull up the database, and get the your ‘TOP CUSTOMERS’ in a group as potential customers you can get referrals from. Once the referral system is set-up, you can keep record of all the conversations you have with them on the CMS, and link those referrals up with those who referred them for better referrals sales for your business and of course increased profit.

3. Up-Selling and Cross Selling

Up Selling is sales technique that induces a customer to buy a more expensive version of a product or an upgrade. While Cross selling is the act of selling a customer additional or related products during purchase of a product. Both techniques are hinged on making more profits for the business.

When you know your customers’ behaviours very well through a good Customer Management System (CMS), it can help you better utilize up-selling and cross selling techniques and make them profitable. With a CMS, you know your customer needs based on the contacts he/she has had with your firm in the past. Intelligently analyzing this information will help you offer your customers what they are most likely to purchase based on their purchase history. You can also do campaigns to segmented markets as revealed by your CMS, and such up-selling and cross selling offers are best done either at the time of purchase or few days after when the product is still fresh in their minds.

4. Improved Customer Service, Interaction and Relationship

When your customers contacts you for resolution to an issue or complaint, they want a quick resolution. Nothing irks your customers more than taking forever to resolve handle their queries. Knowing your customer well through a good Customer Management System makes customer service easier than cracking an egg.

With the correct updated data of customers’ previous conversations, past issues, and preferences, your customer service representatives can quickly resolve customers’ complaints and inquiries. This keeps your customers happy and help keep the relationship cordial.

5. Predict Sales and Better Risk Management

It will be a big waste of time, energy and resources to keep doing the wrong things over and over again in your business. It is important to know what is not working and stop it and to know what works best and do it more. That is what a good knowledge of your customers’ behaviour through a good CMS do for you.

With a good Customer Management System, you can better predict how much sales will be made at a particular time period based on the data you have. It can also help you better manage risks, because the risks you take are now calculated and not just speculative.

The major goal of any business is to keep growing, make more customers and keep them, make more sales and invariably make more profits. For you to do this, you must know your customers and know them very well. And what better way to get started with that if not with a good Customer Management System.

Here are some free customer management templates prepared just for you.