How do you make a decision, Part 1

I have said in my previous blog that as a wholesaler we had a quiet month in May which enabled us to have a good look at our sales and marketing and make some changes.

One of the things which became apparent was that we needed a proper Customer Relationship Management tool. Currently we rely on a mixture of Outlook, memory and scrappy bits of paper which perhaps isn't the smartest way to manange the most important part of your business!

So I have spend a couple of days looking at which CRM to chose. As a wholesaler we did not seem a natural fit to many of the CRM systems available so I made a spreadsheet and compared the cost per month per user with the benefits they offered. These included number of contacts, pipeline, dashboard, reports. You name it, I compared it.

And after all this research which CRM did I chose and how did I make the decision? Easy, someone I respect recommended a company. The spreadsheet was closed, the work forgotten and I just went for their recommendation.

It brought home to me that the process of making a decision was very different when you have knowledge and when you don't. How we source new knitted and crochet toys suppliers, where we have a great deal of information, is very different to how we look for print suppliers where I have no idea what to look for. If you do not know exactly what you are looking for then recommendations are an exceedingly powerful tool.

If you think about it Facebook is trying to exploit the power of recommendations in its commercial model,and companies like Trip Advisor already make money out of personal opinions and recommendations.

If you don't have any recommendations on your website (and as a soft toy wholesaler I can put my hands up and say we don't have any on ours) then you may be missing out, especially if you are selling something complicated or unique. If you sell licensed product then the recommendation has effectively been made for you. People know that if they are ordering Peppa Pig or Marmite plates, they are going to get a certain standard of product. However if you are selling unlicensed or hand made products they made need the extra re-assurance that a recommendation would give them

What do you think? Comments very welcome on our Facebook page