Years back, I started a marketing consulting practice. I got started by working with local small business owners, like gyms, restaurants, and Service Businesses.
I got to see the inside of several types of businesses, and also see up close how these business owners thought about and operated their business.
And y’know what?
I’d wager over half of them were making the same basic mistake.
The Most Common Mistake
The most common mistake I saw small business owners making was they were not consistently capturing people’s information!
Doesn’t matter if it’s brick and mortar, online, real estate, or whatever. Every business needs to capture prospects’ information so they can follow up.
You should also have information for your customers.
This may sound like Marketing 101, but many small business owners were never trained to do it, or didn’t have a system to keep them disciplined.
Your List is a Gold Mine
For example, I worked with a Real Estate Agent, who had been in the biz for DECADES. He wanted me to help him market his open houses, and to come up with ideas to get him new business.
So I asked him…
“Before we focus on getting new business, have you considered getting repeat business?”
The thought had never occurred to him!
“When’s the last time you reached out to your old clients to remind them you exist, and that you’re there to help them?“
He said he had never done it, and he had decades’ worth of contacts. But he had no way to readily contact everyone because he hadn’t been capturing that information.
He was sitting on a gold mine, and he didn’t even know it.
Eventually, we scoured through his email history and boxes of paperwork to put together that list of old clients.
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. This was brutal and tedious work. He had 26 big boxes full of real estate transactions and other documents. It took days to get through it.
Start this practice from the beginning. You’ll avoid a lot of pain and headache.
Once we had the list of contacts, we started getting in touch. Most of them received friendly emails, and a few got more personal phone calls.
And it worked like a charm. He had his best quarter in years! Without getting any new business.
He was ecstatic, but we still needed to put something in place to capture people’s information going forward.
So I made this client have a sign-in sheet at his open houses. That way, he started collecting a list of leads and prospects, and not just clients. Over half of the people ignored the physical sheet, so we moved to a digital sign-in form on an iPad and made it mandatory to enter.
This client was not tech savvy, but this system sent the form submissions to his email where he was comfortable.
Keep It Simple
It’s simple, no matter what business you’re in, you serve PEOPLE. And to have a relationship with people, you gotta get their contact info!
You don’t need a fancy CRM, automation, or follow-up sequences. Keep it simple. Start with a simple spreadsheet, a google doc, or good ol’ paper and ink.
Start capturing contact information on your prospects, leads, and clients from day 1. You’ll thank yourself down the road.
I’m going to teach you what I think is the single most important formula in business, R+R=Profit. This helped me create my first successful ad campaign back when I was a newbie copywriter.
Instead of pushing prospects through your sales funnel, parrying their objections and practically dragging them along each stage, why not try a more natural approach? Let’s pull them in by telling engaging stories filled with empathy. Let's invite them into our world by sharing eye-opening insights that shift their beliefs.
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