SCORE Small Business Blog

Save Time and Build Relationships

Summary: Regular, meaningful contact with customers and prospects should be the engine for generating new business for your company. This series of posts provides a guideline to quickly create a customer contact plan for your business. And you can register here to join Heidi Tobias from Constant Contact and myself for a free SCORE webinar on this topic with lots of tips and tools.

When? Regular, Planned Quality Touches

It takes eight “quality touches” to build a relationship. Therefore, the goal is to communicate every 2-4 weeks to each of your contact groups. By creating a Contact Calendar, you can ensure your customer “touches” are timely but not pestering.

1.    Grab a year at a glance calendar. For each group (see last week’s post), mark down dates that may be relevant to your contact group:

• Holidays that trigger gift or personal purchases
• Dates pertinent to client budget cycles, planning and deadlines
• Deadlines for forms, taxes, filings, etc. where you might provide tips or business advice
• New product/service launches
• Key industry events (trade shows, fairs)
• Promotions or sales events

2.    In addition, you will likely want to touch customers and prospects at times that are tied specifically to the individual person. Decide on what events will trigger a response from you and note this on your contact worksheet. Examples of these personal contacts would be:

• Anniversary of doing business
• Birthday
• Thank you for referral
• Initial meeting follow-up

3.    Calendar “gaps” can then be filled in with informational newsletters or alerts. Leave a placeholder for these additional communications by marking them in your calendar.

Next week we’ll talk about the “what” so you leverage quality content (without stressing yourself out with weekly writing deadlines!). Or better yet, join us this Thursday for a live SCORE webinar on the topic. Tweet me (@roadmapmarketin) on your greatest challenges, successes or questions on email marketing and we will definitely include it in the conversation.

Jeanne Rossomme – President, RoadMap Marketing Jeanne uses her 20 years of marketing know-how to help small business owners reach their goals. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she held a variety of marketing positions with DuPont and General Electric. Jeanne regularly hosts online webinars and workshops in both English and Spanish. www.roadmapmarketing.com | @roadmapmarketin | More from Jeanne