The Contact Special Facts (Custom Fields) are where you may store demographic information about your customers and prospects. Demographics simply stated are identifying characteristics of a group of people. They reflect a group's likes, dislikes, interests, financial status, and concerns, etc. Tracking demographic information will help you sell more effectively and more often by allowing you to subdivide those generally interested in your services into groups with more specific needs. Then you can deliver sales messages which are more in tune with each groups particular interests, thereby typically generating a higher response from each group, and therefore from your customers and prospects as a whole. The more closely you can match your sales messages to the interests and concerns of individuals in your client base (or to prospects), the more effective and profitable your marketing messages will be! Once setup of this “business system” has been done in conjunction with the Marketing Funnels, using it is a process almost totally automated by Camelot, so that it is therefore practical to use, and so that it usually requires less effort to do than your old way of selling!
1. Decide what demographics you want to track, at least starting out. Ask yourself, what pieces of information would be helpful to know in selling your services? You can
modify your approach to get as sophisticated as you ever care to later.
NOTE: The following example is for the carpet & upholstery cleaner, but the same principles apply to any type of services.
EXAMPLE: For the carpet & upholstery cleaner we suggest that it would be good to know at least the following “personal” information about your clients and prospects:
a. Who has pets?
b. Who has children (often get things dirtier faster)?
c. Who suffers from allergies?
d. Who has very light colored carpet?
If the carpet cleaner knows that certain of his clients have pets, then you can send just these clients a sales offer that talks about how your service benefits them specifically as a pet owner (it removes pet hair and dander, controls odors, removes staining from “accidents”, is safe for their pet, removes many flea eggs, etc). In this sales piece, you may offer a free bottle of odor neutralizer or similar pet related
item with their order. You could get really creative and add coupons for pet food (courtesy of your local pet supply store), a discount off for grooming which you arrange with a local groomer (costs you nothing), or give a “toy surprise” to every pet with their order. There is likely a group of your client base that has not only pets, but also children, allergies, and very light colored carpets. Your clients who receive an ad/sales offer from you that is tailored to address all these points will be amazed that you know their needs so well and will typically be more responsive as a result. Since in this example we are tracking who has pets, who has children, who has allergies, and who has light colored carpet, there are several possible ads which we can write.
2. Outline information-gathering systems. You can do several things to get the demographic information pretty easily:
a. Survey all of your current clients; offer some incentive to participate
b. Have each client complete a survey card while the technician is in the home
c. Have your staff note things discussed in casual conversation on the phone daily. These notes are stored for the client on the Profile tab of the Contact Info screen.
d. Have your cleaning crews note what they observe casually while on the job and turn a “Client Profile Report” in with their papers that can be added to the com-puter records.
e. Review old paper records for services that match demographics, like pet odor removal service, which would make a client likely to need that service again.
3a. Select appropriate marketing pieces from the Power Marketing Kit and customize the content as you wish, and/or
3b. Write your own flyers, letters, etc. in Microsoft Word™ from scratch that address the specific needs of each main demographic group, then from the Tools > Mail Merge menu in Word turn them into mail-merge documents. Transforming your creations into mail-merge documents allows you to insert mail merge fields (blanks to be filled in) where Camelot will later automatically insert the correct personal information. Once you have written an ad or sales message, such as a letter just to allergy sufferers who also own wool carpets, and you have set it up as a mail-merge document and a correspondence definition (type) in Camelot, you can use it from then on without having to redo the writing and setup process! You can even have Camelot use it automatically by performing the next step,
4. Make your new marketing pieces a part of a Marketing Funnel for total automation. See the help for Marketing Funnels for more information on this extremely powerful feature.
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