I’m wondering if you’ve become an expert at mining.
It’s a critical skill if you’re concerned about keeping your business pump primed with new and returning customers – especially returning ones.
When I say mining, I mean mining your customer/order database.
Yellow pads, QuickBooks and shoeboxes
Regardless of what tool you use to keep track of customers and orders, using that tool like a shoebox can be a five or six figure mistake.
By “shoebox”, I mean stuffing receipts and sales data and similar info into it all year long and never referencing it again until it’s time to do your taxes.
The shoebox is your gold mine. It’s the asset that many businesses ignore.
Missing out
Let’s talk about Mary. She owns her own business and has 14 employees.
You would typically know this because you saw a profile of her business in the paper. How do you remember that fact?
You put it into your shoebox tool (such as a CRM, customer relationship management system), tickler file or *something* that organizes your data so that you can search for it later (I’ll get back to that).
Out of nothing more than gut feel, you know that Mary visits your restaurant 3 times a month and you also see her occasionally at events you cater.
What you may not know is that Mary’s business entertains clients twice a month and has an in-office staff appreciation lunch every other Friday.
Have you ever catered those events?
If not, does Mary know that you cater? She regularly attends events you’ve catered – so why doesn’t she use you?
Have you asked her?
It’s possible that her current caterer rocks the house *so well* that you might not ever get a chance to show your stuff. Hopefully that’s the kind of experience you provide as well, but that’s a discussion for another day.
One thing is certain – if you don’t ask, you won’t likely get a shot. Critical to that is *knowing that you should ask*.
The who
Have you let your regular customers know that you offer catering? More importantly, do you know which regulars would have a use for catering?
A message that is in context to the proper person is miles ahead of a generic message to everyone.
Do you know how to get in contact with the proper folks? Do you know when they last visited your restaurant? Do you know what kind of experience they had during their last visit?
Your CRM data should allow you to store info that lets you do just that. If yours doesn’t, get a new one or at the very least, find a way to export the data into something that allows you to search this info.
Ask yourself:
- Who has reservations this weekend who also owns a business that might need catering now and then?
- Who has reservations this weekend who hasn’t visited in two or three times their normal visit frequency?
- What regulars have we not seen in a month or more?
The answers to these questions will yield info about your customers and more importantly, about what you’re doing, how well you’re doing it and best of all – what customers are ideal candidates to have the catering conversation with.
If they do, who else does?
Here’s where the mining comes in handy…
If your regulars who are business owners are sorted by “What do the businesses do?” and then you look at the businesses that use you monthly, what do you ask for next?
Let’s sort them by what they do. Maybe the top three types of businesses are real estate agents, website designers and plumbers. You can guess, but you won’t know until actually you collect this data.
Now take a look at your entire restaurant database of regulars. How many of them are in those three lines of work?
Hmmm. Wonder if they need catering too.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.