Blue Chip Athletic is a small, 20-person athletic sportswear company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Their co-founder Gonz Medina shared with me how he has a passion for delighting his customers and ensuring he treats each one with tender loving care.
His secret to success is that instead of spending time struggling to get a new customer, he spends the bulk of his time generating new leads.
Here’s a bit of background to their company.
Medina explained that when it was just him, his co-founder, and handful of employees, they could keep all the important customer details in their head (or maybe a few yellow sticky notes and an Excel spreadsheet).
Today, with a growing company, it gets harder (near impossible) to remember all the details about customers, orders, and even employees. While there are many individual systems he could turn to for email marketing, landing page creation, customer database, and more, Medina knew that an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) system was best.
Here’s how he’s using small business CRM and marketing automation to help boost his business.
- When a customer orders something, they get a personal email from a Blue Chip Athletic employee confirming their order and sending shipping details. When customers place an order, one of the most important things they want is assurance and a level of expectation.
- Blue Chip Athletic sends a survey to each customer. If the survey is from 1 to 3 (one a scale of 5), that survey gets routed to someone who can personally follow up with a customer.
No New Customers…Lead Generation
Instead of trying to “make a quick sale” or ask someone to buy, Blue Chip Athletic’s focus is generating qualified leads. They do this by first offering something digital to the prospective customer to capture their email address, through a landing page. Medina will then incentivize the customer further by offering them a bumper sticker – which he will mail to them. If the prospect opts for the bumper sticker, he now has captured their email address and their mailing address and can nurture them further along the buying process.
Small business owners spend too much time trying to make a direct sale. What smart marketers like Blue Chip Athletic do is focus on generating qualified leads and nurturing those leads with information that’s useful to them.
Would you rather have 10 new customers a month (or whatever number will keep you afloat)? Or would you rather have 100 prospects a month that, through your nurturing, could be converted to 20 or more new customers each month?