What You Should Know About Your Clients

One of the most important things in building relationships with clients is knowing everything that matters about them. What matters? Everything that lets you give them value beyond simply delivering your product or service, and everything that makes it easier to sell them something new later on — or to collect what you are owed.

Below are some of the things it is important to know about your clients:

#1. Email

Routine business communication still happens mostly by email, despite the sheer number of chat applications around. Email also lets you send your company newsletter, along with news of special offers or promotions you are running.

#2. Contact person

It helps to know who you can contact about the various things you might need. This is usually someone who can quickly give you the information you are after — which might be the phone number of someone you need to reach, or an introduction to the right person for the subject you want to discuss.

#3. Decision maker

It hardly needs saying how important it is to know who decides on the products or services you sell. Use that knowledge to build the relationship long before you actually need something.

#4. Guarantor

Whether or not you offer your products or services on deferred payment or in instalments, it is important to know whether there is a person or another company guaranteeing that the client will meet their obligations.

#5. Credit status

When it comes to collecting later on, it is important to know your client's credit status, which you can then base decisions on. Before you start working together — and later too, of course — you want to know that they are not, say, subject to a frozen account, being sued by someone else, or even in insolvency.

#6. Credit limit

It is always worth setting expectations at the outset, for everything and particularly for money. Granting a client a credit limit is in a sense a measure of the trust that has been built up, and it matters that both sides respect it. So you should always know what a given client's credit limit is, whether they are close to exceeding it, and whether you need to act.

#7. Special price list

If you have a particular relationship with a client, you may be able to give them special prices for your products or services. It is important not to slip up and send them different prices, or to send the prices that apply to them to somebody else.

TiramisuERP lets you keep everything that matters about your clients in one place. Alongside the items listed above, you can record almost 30 further pieces of information about each client to help you build better relationships.

TiramisuERP is modern business software containing every module needed to manage a company's processes successfully: wholesale, retail, finance, service, POS, human resources and production.