As your business begins to grow, you will need to carefully keep track of key information relating to sales, your customer and business contacts. ICT offers many tools to help you with this, from simple contact managers like Microsoft Outlook and Gnome Evolution to sophisticated Customer Relationship Management software like SugarCRM. When you venture has been able to run for about two years, you need to know the answers to the following questions:
• What is the profile of my typical customer? (sex, age, income etc)
• Which industries give me the most patronage?
• What products or services sell most in what geographical locations?
• What products or services sell most in what seasons?
• What products or services sell most in which industries?
• What products or services sell most in what organizations?
• Of your product/service mix, which one brings in the highest margins?
• What are the worst performing products or services?
• What are the relationships between the performance of a product/service with respect to time of the year? season? etc?
• Who is my most profitable customer?
• Which customer do we need to focus more|less on?
• Breakdown of product or service performance per quarter.
All these are questions that except for the most trivial business, will rely on data analysis to answer – hence IT applications to the rescue. The answers to the above question can help with marketing strategy, product strategy and consumer targeting.
ICT Business Integration
Insights, Rants & Thoughts on Making Infotech Work in Organisations
