This morning I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the BmyOffice open day. Stacey kindly asked me to present a short workshop on ‘What is CRM?’ and it also gave me an opportunity to introduce to the audience ConvallisCRM, a CRM application that we have developed here at Convallis Software. This was a great opportunity for me to be able to introduce and promote my business, and in particular our expertise in the CRM sector and how useful it is to business to a wider audience, and at the same time help promote BmyOffice and the services that they offer.

Although I was nervous to start with, the feedback I have had was very positive, and those that attended also helped promote my business via social media channels such as Twitter that helped spread the word even further.

If you ever get the chance to do anything similar I would say go for it, sometimes when you are networking or marketing you don’t get the chance to let people understand fully your expertise, presentations give you the opportunity to do this and to get interesting questions or feedback from your audience.

In my last post I asked if you had a database, in this I’m posing the question that if you do have a database are you using that data to it’s full potential?

Databases can contain a wide range of data, and some very powerful business reporting can be obtained. For example, a simple search of your database could find a list of companies in within a certain general demographic e.g: Devon, and then you can filter your search down to find even more data such as a list of companies within a certain postcode area, or a specific category of business that you are looking for. This can help set up very targeted marketing lists that can be used in your business to get the right message out to the right person. Another good use of a database is to be able to track sales of your products, when sales were made etc. to allow you to see which products/services are performing the best. 

Using the ConvallisCRM software which we developed, which includes salesforce automation both of these searches can be acheived.  Using the query tool provided, we filter our searches and then can save our reports.  A lot of the searches that I personally do are for marketing purposes and I can export my search results to Excel and then use this data for mail merging purposes.

Databases are wonderful things and are used for so many parts of business and there are so many different ones for different things.  Why not take a look at your database that you use in your business and see if you are using it to its full potential?