Value your database and market your business with Quote & Print

The value and potential of a great database is often undervalued by printers and Mark Whitmarsh (pictured), long time user of Quote and Print software, extends his wisdom on how it can be put to good use.


So often in business, as in life, we are guilty of taking things for granted. A good example of this is Prospect and Customer Databases. Your database is extremely valuable, worth a good deal of money and you could, in theory, sell it tomorrow without much trouble at all.

Companies continue to neglect their database, with the main problem being that they have no policy or protocol in place for data entry, resulting in inconsistent information. They often enter incorrect information and also fail to update changes to existing information. Keeping a tidy database is just 'housework'. If you do not see the value in the database then you will miss out on the sales and marketing opportunities that go along with it. Your next potential major account may just be under your nose!

Some hard work has been done with your database; you have names, contacts numbers, addresses, etc. These companies and yours now have history. It does not matter whether it is a prospect or a customer, this is valuable information that has more than likely already used up some of your companies' resources to get to this point, and this means the process has cost you money. Let's try and get it back!

Your goals here should be to turn that prospect into a customer. To transform that inactive or 'occasional' customer into a solid active account, as well as to be proactive and work at retaining and/or strengthening the relationships with your already established major accounts.

Building your own database

Nowadays with the strict laws of the Privacy Act, it is difficult to obtain an accurate database so it is important for individual companies to compile their own. Purchasing them yourself can prove to be very expensive! There are many opportunities for a company to increase sales revenue with targeted direct marketing. It is easy - all you need to get started is to have an accurate database.

The measure for any good Management Information System is just how much information and detail can be entered or recorded against the prospect or debtor. This could include not only the usual names and phone numbers but also things like market segmentation, inactivity, sales call reports, a contact's favourite football team or even the noting and content of a past phone discussion.

Most importantly we want to be able to extract any of this information for reporting purposes. For example, you could send a “specific and unique” file to a mail house for your next direct mail campaign. What have you got to lose!

Print companies definitely need to market themselves better. We are just not good at marketing ourselves - strangely we are all too busy producing marketing, communication, print and graphics for everybody else but tend not to use it for our own self-promotion. Big corporate and other industry groups spend billions of dollars on marketing each day so there must be something in it.

I know for a fact that Quote & Print have had a real focus in developing the capabilities of their software in this area and they continue to do so.

So start getting serious with your 'database' and your 'marketing'.

Mark Whitmarsh (pictured above) is a long time Quote & Print User based in South Australian who, with his consulting business, has had the opportunity to review previous and current business practices. Mark is quite happy to be contacted on 0422 889 170 or printmissol@bigpond.com.