What is Your Most Valuable Asset?

Many business owners would say their inventory, buildings, and physical assets. Some would say their sales staff or their intellectual property, like patents.

Would you look at your balance sheet to decide? Your balance sheet lists all of your assets for your business right? Land, building, bank accounts, furniture, fixtures, inventory, vehicles, and all other real and personal property. Your balance sheet may also list your intellectual property like trademarks and patents.

So which one is it? Here is a clue . . .

Your Most Valuable Asset is probably not even on your balance sheet.

Another clue.

How does your business make income? Perhaps by sales to, drum roll please, Customers?

Your Most Valuable Asset: Your Customer List

Dan Kennedy calls the customer list your "herd". One of the techniques to keep it your asset is to build a fence around your herd.

Every business owner is concerned about the constant flow of new customers plus new business from old customers. Referral sources can grow older. There is a need to get referrals from customers who do business with you. After all, who knows how you do business better than someone who has done business with you?

Two of the three ways to increase your business involve your existing customers, not getting new customers. After all, those customers have already bought from you. The two ways are: 1. Buy more frequently and 2. Increase the purchase size.

There is also that issue of staying in touch with your existing customers, not only to buy more frequently, but just to buy from you again. I have been just as guilty as the next owner at staying in touch with people that have done business with me. Until we reorganized how our law firm does business two years ago, I assumed, just like many business owners do, that if I had done a good job, customers would think of me again when they might need legal services. Sometimes though, I would find out that in the speed of getting something done, the customer did not think of calling me because we had not talked, emailed, or written each other in more than six months (or longer).

For every month you do not contact a customer, the chance of their repeating as a customer goes down by 10%. After ten months, they are gone! So you must have a contact program that touches them and reminds them at least four times a year, and better twelve times a year. Because no matter how good a job you did, they will not remember you at the crucial decision time unless their memory has been refreshed.

This week, I am going to discuss a “How To”. In order to maintain your email data base and stay in touch, it is necessary to have the proper tools. Most email programs like Microsoft Outlook or Mac’ email have good ways to stay in touch but do not really deal well with large groups or provide a way that contacts can automatically update their contact information. There are others online like Plaxo that serve as an online address book but do not really fit the bill as an email tool.

Look at an autoresponder like aweber.com. Here is the link for the tour and basic information. http://www.aweber.com/?206786. This type of a tool allows you to have webforms to trap data off squeeze or landing pages on the internet as well as the capability of subscribing by sending an email to the list_name@aweber.com. For example, you can subscribe to my blog and Thursday emails by sending an email to lawlist@aweber.com.

Using tools like this one makes it easy to publish a weekly, monthly or bi-monthly publication to stay in touch with your customers.

How else can you put a fence around your herd? Legally, you can use non-disclosure agreements and/or non-competition agreements. After all, you do not want your best salesman to go to your best competitor and take your customer list with her!

The customer list is your most valuable, yet sometimes invisible, asset. Protect it by contact and building fences around it.