The Kinds of Customer Information You Need to Succeed

When sales professionals go to work, they spend hours and hours compiling records on each of their clients and digging deep into the company directory to make sure that all potential contacts are accounted for. There is an incredible amount of significance to compiling lists of important contact information for each client. The sales professional needs to be familiar with every important contact within a company and he also needs to develop a professional relationship with each contact as well.

But there is a lot of information that sales professionals do not collect that could be valuable in establishing an even stronger professional bond with a client. It is said that people buy products and services from other people. That is why putting a little bit of the personal touch into your sales approach can help enhance your sales efforts.

* Birthdays

Are birthdays important to your customer contacts? Yes, they are. The way in which your staff reacts to office birthdays is the same way in which all offices react to birthdays. There is a cake and a little celebration to commemorate the moment. A sales professional does not need to be there for the cake, but if he can get a birthday card and a small promotional gift to the person celebrating a birthday, then that will go a long way to helping the client to remember that sales professional.

* Favorite Hobbies

Business professionals spend all day talking about business. Even the most enthusiastic business professional has hobbies that he likes to talk about from time to time. That hobby could be following his favorite sports team or collecting stamps. In the course of your discussion with all of your contacts, you should get into the topic of their hobbies and then make notes of those hobbies in your client contact management software.

This kind of information can make corporate gift giving a lot easier as well. If you have a client that follows the local professional baseball team, then you know that tickets to a game would be appreciated. This kind of inside information can give you an edge over the myriad of other sales professionals that are trying to get this client’s business.

* Family Information

You do not want to ask questions about a client’s family. That is a subject that makes some clients uncomfortable. However, many clients will bring up their families in the course of conversation. When the conversation is over, you should make some quick notes on the family members that the client mentioned. If the client felt comfortable enough to bring up those family members in a business conversation, then you can feel comfortable enough making notes about those family members.

The point to making these notes is to be able to react properly when the family member names come up in future conversations. It helps you to make your client feel more comfortable and it also makes the client realize that you are paying attention to every word he says.