Is it getting traffic? Is it marketing products and services correctly? Is it design and functionality of their website?

Excellent guesses.  These are all critical, but NOT the number one source of business failure.

Read on to learn about the #1 source of  failure and strategies on how to avoid.

What almost all small businesses fail to do is “fix their follow up” with prospects and customers.

What is fixing follow-up? Simple, it is maintaining communication to your prospects and customers so you can build a relationship with them and deliver the right message at the right time when they are ready to buy from you.  It can be hard work to market and sell to customers, not to mention costly. Many owners make this investment, but then lose touch afterwards. The more troubling fact is that most consumers have at least 7 or 8 touch points online before finally making a purchase. Some owners gain a potential customers interest, but then by the time they are ready to buy they have lost relevance or one of their competitors swooped in to make the sale.

How do I fix my follow-up? Well, below are 4 essential strategies.

1) Collect your customer info into a CRM. You cannot follow-up if you don’t know who your customers are. I’ve had someone brag to me that they were getting over 25K traffic to their small business company’s website. I said “wow, that’s great, what kind of follow-up communication are you doing with them”. They said “well, I just see that on my Google analytics, I don’t actually know who they are”. I looked at their site and they didn’t even have a single form to collect customer data! What good are 25K people if you don’t even know who they are?

Must do strategy – capture people on your website! Most people do this with newsletter or other web forms. Bookmark this site or join our feed as I will post many more articles on best practice for this.

2) Provide value and education first, marketing second. So I got people filling out a form, now I can blast them promotion for my products and increase my sales. Wrong. Well, partially wrong. That may work sometimes, but successful businesses build relationships and trust with their customers. Part of building trust is providing them value and education to help them in all aspects of their buying experience. If you continue to provide people value, especially when they don’t expect it, they will continue to purchase from you.

Must do strategy – Educate first, Sell second.   Incorporate education and value added nurturing campaigns to your customers.

3) Customize to your audience. Some people implement the strategies above, but are disappointed when they have little bottom line impacts. This is often due to fact that the messaging falls short because they try to make it generic for everyone. If I own a pet store and I send out an email newsletter that contains tips on pet maintenance for birds, fish, cats, and dogs all at once, it may find the junk bin quickly for those who are not interested in the majority of the topics. Find out information from your customers on who they are and what they want, then give them information that is relevant to them, it’s that simple.

Must do strategy – Ask questions to your customers to find out demographics and what information they want, segment this information in a CRM, then implement follow-up marketing tailored to their specific questions and needs.

4) Build an automated follow-up system. This last piece is the most difficult but by far the most important. How can a small business follow-up with tailored messaging to thousands of customers? Bad news – It is impossible unless you use automated software tools. Also, the tools you use must be able to integrate CRM and Marketing information and manage delivery of information to your customers.  Good news – This sounds like a technical nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be. I am a product manager (not a salesman) for a great software company that has one of many solutions out there that can do this quickly and easily. I may be biased but think it’s a great choice to solve this problem. Submit the form below if you’d like me to send you a free trial and more information about the solution.

I will not use this for marketing or to have sales guys follow up, I just like spreading the word on how business users can solve this challenge.

Also feel free to join me on LinkedIn and I am always willing to comment or take questions on various solutions in market place. http://www.linkedin.com/in/davealbertson

Dave Albertson
Small Business Growth Expert