The Most Common Mistake Small Business Owners Make
Over half the small business owners I consulted were making the same basic mistake. They weren't capturing their prospects' contact information. One real estate agent was sitting on decades of untapped clients.
I worked with a real estate agent once who had been in the business for decades. He came to me wanting help marketing his open houses and drumming up new clients.
Before we got into any of that, I asked him a simple question.
"Have you ever reached out to your old clients? Just to remind them you exist?"
He looked at me like I was speaking another language. He had never done it. Not once. Decades of closed deals, hundreds of past clients, and he'd never followed up with any of them.
The Gold Mine He Didn't Know He Had
This guy had 26 big boxes stuffed with real estate transactions and documents. We spent days going through those boxes and digging through his old emails to put together a contact list of his past clients.
It was brutal, tedious work. But once we had that list, we started reaching out. Most people got a friendly email. A few got personal phone calls.
He had his best quarter in years. No new business. All of it came from people he'd already worked with.
After that, we needed a way to capture contact info going forward. We started with a physical sign-in sheet at his open houses, but over half the visitors ignored it. So we switched to a digital form on an iPad and made it required. He wasn't tech savvy, but the form submissions went straight to his email, which he was comfortable with.
The Mistake
This is the most common mistake I saw when I was consulting with small business owners. Gyms, restaurants, service businesses, you name it. Over half of them were not consistently capturing people's information.
Brick and mortar, online, real estate, whatever. Every business needs to collect contact info from prospects so they can follow up. And you should have it for your existing customers too.
It sounds like Marketing 101, but a lot of small business owners were never trained to do this. They didn't have a system in place, and without a system, it just doesn't happen.
Start capturing contact info from day one. A spreadsheet is fine. You don't need a fancy CRM. You just need to actually do it, because the longer you wait, the more boxes you'll have to dig through later.