Monday, April 21, 2008

Building a Community Around Customers

John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, one of the sites we listed on the blog roll last week, wrote an interesting piece on customer focus during a recession.  Similar to the post I wrote recently, John points out the importance of strengthening customer relationships to push through a recession.

One of the key points John addresses is how to “build community around your current customers,” and this is an aspect we’ve focused on through the evolution of ConcourseSuite.  Being able to not only target prospects and existing customers but also bring them closer to the company helps build stronger relationships. These relationships, in turn, lead to improved sales and opportunities to learn from your best contacts. Concursive enables businesses to reach out to customers with capabilities such as targeted messaging and surveys, but also incorporates tools to help foster tighter relationships with customers and other key groups businesses interact with every day.

Lastly, I think it's worthwhile to point out that we both came to similar conclusions: the silver lining of a recession is that it makes you reevaluate your marketing and sales processes and forces you to improve your overall business practices and better connect with your customers.  From Concursive’s perspective, these are core principles that should drive the use of CRM in any economic climate.

Jeff

1 comment:

Carlene said...

The systems that a business utilizes - CRM, ERP, etc. - are immensely significant tools to foster richer relationship with the clients. With these tools, together with the business' resilience and focus, valued clients continue to stay as other potential ones will also be attracted to the fold. This is the community where everyone involve will thrive.

Carlene Schnitzer