Lesson 4: Kick-off
Keeping track of prospects
Right after you launch your business, you're going to have a list of prospects or prospective customers. If you had a big launch event, you'll have a long list of people to contact. If you had a smaller event or if you didn't get many people who would be prospects, you will now be looking for more by making calls and sending out information. In any case, you will need to keep track of prospects.
One of the reasons you need a computer is to keep track of people. While it is theoretically possible to keep lists of names and addresses on paper, it would then be extremely difficult to sort them, send out information to some of them and to contact groups of them. To keep track of people and their contact information, a contact management program comes in handy.
One of the best contact management programs is MS Outlook but it was only up-graded to become really useful with Outlook 2000. Outlook 98 had some of the better features but before that the program was less useful. Outlook (not Outlook Express which is not very useful) can keep track of all contact information, put contacts in categories, send e-mail to groups of contacts, and sort contacts by any field or category. If you have MS Word as well, Outlook will initiate a mail merge to send letters to any group of contacts you choose. Those are basically the functions that you need for managing your prospects.
While MS Outlook is ideal and a ready-made solution, you can carry out pretty much the same functions in any spread sheet program by putting the contact information in columns and giving the columns a heading. Make sure the last name, first name, address, city etc. are all separate columns so that you can sort properly. Even a table in a word processor will do the job.
The important thing about prospects is whether they will become customers. To let you identify those who are almost customers and those whom you have only just contacted, it's useful to categorize your prospects by how close they are to becoming customers. Try A for almost a customer, B for intermediate and C for new prospects. Such a system will allow you to concentrate on A prospects when you need more business quickly and work with C prospects when you have more time. It also allows you to develop strategies for turning C prospects into B prospects into A prospects into customers.
Once you've got a list of prospects from your target groups, some will turn into customers and now you're really in business. That means a whole new set of activities and a new primary focus: your customers are why you're in business.
