What are the major sources of obtaining information about the clients business?

September 20, 2017

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Prospecting refers to the process through which a business attracts new clients. This, surprisingly, is not as easy as it may sound. It requires you to constantly come up with creative new ways to attract new clients. Here are four amazing sources for generating new clients for your business.

1. Establish a Power Base

Your power base basically refers to the people who will support you and your business due to the nature of your relationship. These are your friends, family, school mates, former colleagues and even that ex with whom you parted on amicable terms.

The power base is a very important aspect for prospecting because you will find that these will be your first clients. They will be the first ones to learn of your new venture and will be eager to show support. You must keep expanding your power base.

Endeavor to meet new people and create new relationships everyday. The more relationships you cultivate and the more friends you make, the larger your power base grows. Make a list of people who you consider to be in your power base and call them personally to pitch your business and request them to consider becoming your clients. Do not make the common assumption that they will automatically become your clients the instant you open shop.

2. Your Service Customers

There are customers who come to service items which may or may not have been bought from your company. They may be people coming to repair a broken watch, or replace a faulty phone battery or a person going into a tailoring for a retouch on his suit.

Service customers are a great opportunity for prospecting. If someone comes seeking to service a product, it means that they are buyers of the said product. Prospect to these customers by getting their phone numbers and giving them a call, or making a pitch for your business as you provide the service that they came for.

3. Your Previously Sold Customers

Some of your customers may go for long period without buying from your company. Always make efforts to reach out to them and find out the reasons for this. You could do this by making a call sending an email or even a text.

Remember to always collect client information as you serve them and keep it in a database. It is important to follow up on clients, even those that have not completely ceased from buying from your business. This ensures that you do not fall into obscurity, and that they do not stop thinking about your business.

Use this prospecting opportunity to update the customer on new products and any developments in the business. Also, make sure to ask for feedback on your products and service provision, and take any suggestions on places that you could improve on.

4. Your Unsold Customers

There are people that you made pitches to but did not close. Always revisit old cases and keep prospecting to them. The fact that you did not close them on the first try does not mean that they are impossible to change.

Remember that circumstances change with time. Their preferences may change; a company where they used to buy goods from may compromise on product quality or the customer may have an increased purchasing power. Always go back to your records and analyze the customers that were not sold and keep prospecting to them. Eventually, you will close them.

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12 Essential Data Sources to Understand the Customer Journey

12 Essential Data Sources to Understand the Customer Journey
Last modified: October 20, 2022

What is the magic ingredient that makes companies 23 times more likely to acquire customers and nine times more likely to retain them? Data-driven decision making.

Note the magic ingredient isn’t just “data.” Every organization has terabytes of the stuff lying around, with more coming in every day. What makes the difference is putting the data to work. It’s collecting, consolidating, analyzing, and generating insight—then acting on it.

[Check out our new 6-Step Consumer Engagement Guide co-produced with eTail]

It’s no small feat to move from a data-collecting to a data-driven marketing organization. According to the CMO Council, only 7 percent of marketers say they can deliver real-time, data-driven marketing engagements.

If you’re not in this wave of early adopters, the first step is collecting and consolidating your data. For this, marketers increasingly turn to customer data platforms (CDPs). This technology unifies many different sources of marketing data—including those from other technology, such as DSPs and DMPs.

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But to get a true 360-degree view of the customer, which is where CDPs excel, you’ll want to pull in sources from across the organization. Then, after the data is consolidated, CDPs keep updating the data as it comes in from these sources. This gives you an always accurate customer view that lets you activate campaigns based on targeted, segmented and personalized data. Start by consolidating these 12 data sources (and don’t forget to read our post on creating a Customer Journey Map next).

12 Essential Customer Data Sources

Connecting these customer data streams and consolidating them will give you a clearer view of your customers and their behavior. You’ll be able to see which web visitors also come to the store, which blog browsers also buy online and more. This more comprehensive understanding can lead to better personalized marketing that compels action.

1. In-Store and Online Sales Data

   If your organization has brick-and-mortar locations, it’s absolutely crucial to unite your real-world data with your online records. Both in-store and online sales data needs to be connected to your CDP to get a comprehensive view of customer activity.

   Sales data combines well with nearly every data type on this list to generate new insights and new opportunities for personalization. And the possibilities for targeted personalization are too good to pass up.

   For example, you could use in-store purchase information to offer a personalized newsletter featuring related items in the online store, or vice versa. The customer gets more relevant offers, so is more likely to bring in repeat business.

2. Web Browsing Data

   The end goal of content marketing is for our audience to make a purchase decision. We need to connect web browsing data to sales data to prove that link and justify our budget.

   But great marketing is about more than proving your value. It’s also about ROI. Understanding how your audience experiences your content makes it easier to suggest more relevant next steps, offers, and experiences, including which solutions to offer and how to position them.

3. Survey Data

   You probably survey your customers. Maybe you track Net Promoter Score (NPS), product and service satisfaction, and employee helpfulness in a store or over the phone. But where does that data go? Ideally, you’d have a record of each person, the surveys they’ve completed and their responses. Survey data, when added to the data in your CDP, gives you a more complete picture and could help you identify your next brand ambassadors as well as those customers who are about to churn.

4. Customer Service Data

   Here’s where we leave the safe confines of marketing data and get into the organization at large. Odds are you’re continuing to nurture people after they’ve made a purchase. So, it’s crucial to know how they interact with the brand outside of marketing.

   Imagine if your next email to a customer included details from their last customer service interaction. Even a simple, “we’re glad we could solve your X problem, here’s an article that can help you avoid it or fix it in the future” can make a difference in how your customer feels about the brand.

5. Sales Department Data

   The Sales Department has several useful data streams for marketers. As we discussed in number 1, there’s sales data or the list of deals closed—incorporating that into your CDP can help trace the buyer journey and properly credit marketing’s role in generating revenue.

   Then there are the potential prospects, which can help your department create personalized content. Finally, there are the deals that didn’t go through for one reason or another. Combine that information with the other data streams on the list and you can go in for a highly-coordinated second try.

6. Advertising Platforms

   Knowing who is looking at which ads, and which ads are the most effective, is valuable information in itself. Combined with web browsing and online and offline sales data, it’s indispensable. Connect your Google Ads, AdRoll, and other ad accounts to your CDP to make both your ads and your supporting content more effective.

7. Web Analytics

   This is another data set that’s useful on its own. But it becomes exponentially more so when combined with the rest of the customer dataset. You can get a much greater context for bounce rates, time-on-page, click paths, traffic sources and conversions with Google Analytics or Adobe connected to your CDP.

8. Marketing Automation Platforms

   Your automation platform is already a repository for a great deal of data, but it can’t be fully comprehensive on its own. Connecting your HubSpot/Marketo/etc. platform to your CDP helps eliminate duplicate information, round out the view of the customer, and further personalize your nurture campaigns.

9. Loyalty Data

   What motivates your loyalty-program customers and how can you use that data to attract more consumers like them? It could be special discounts, gifts, or exclusive events. It could also be interaction with your brand on social media or unique perks like early access to much-anticipated new releases. Loyalty programs can be a source of crucial data that allows you to target your audience in a more meaningful way.

10. Mobile App Data

    Maybe your mobile app is part of your loyalty program but maybe it’s not. Either way, you’ll uncover rich insights by connecting this data source to all the rest. For example, Muji developed a mobile app after realizing website visitors often browse online and purchase in store. By knowing online browsing history, in-store purchase history and real-time store inventory, Muji used personalized coupons and well-targeted in-app push notifications to boost coupon redemption by 100%.

11. Legacy Data

    It’s highly likely your business has data that never got connected to the larger landscape. It might be lurking on servers, in personal hard drives, even on paper in filing cabinets.

    This data can be essential for understanding your customer journey and how it evolves. It’s worth pulling that old data in. And, of course, if you’re still storing unconnected data, now’s the time to hook it up to your platform.

12. Wearables and the Internet of Things

    Internet-connected devices, from smartwatches to coffeemakers, are already collecting and transmitting massive amounts of data. The practical applications may be a work in progress, but it’s important to understand what it is and how to collect it. This new source of data provides one more way for businesses to understand their customers—giving marketers who incorporate IoT data an edge.

Data-Driven Marketing Matters

The great marketer, author, and mysterious force of nature Seth Godin once said, “content marketing is the only marketing left.” Perhaps today, the logical corollary is: “Data-driven marketing is the only marketing we have left.”

These data sources will help you get to know your customers and create marketing that compels action. Customers won’t settle for less than personalized, relevant content and offers. Anything else is just a brief interruption, something modern consumers are well-trained to ignore.

Learn more about customer data platforms and how it works!

Tom Treanor heads up marketing at Treasure Data. He focuses on marketing, martech, CDPs and digital marketing. Follow him on Twitter @RtMixMktg.

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