John Wall: So as part of your business, keeping track of your customers and what’s going on in the business is a challenge. When you’re a small company, you usually start out with just people. You know. You don’t need any system at all. Maybe you eventually get to a point where you’ve got spreadsheets so you at least have lists of who you’re talking to and what’s happening. But eventually you’re going to reach a point where you need some kind of system to control and keep track of all this. So the most important thing, the biggest asset for your business, is your customer list, right? The people that you’ve talked to, so you can understand who’s where and where they are in the buying cycle, if they’re thinking about buying and then ultimately, to have a customer list, every company brags about their house list the people that have purchased from them, you’re able to analyze their purchase figure out if future products are worthwhile for them. And every time you gain a few new customers with the next product release, you have this list of people who are already sold on what you do and know who you are. They’re the most likely to buy. So we see this over and over again, where the first two, three years are really difficult, but once they kind of get over that first hump, they’re able to put out a new product and just tell all their friends and fans about it, and the sales come in, and that’s how you get to a stable business, pretty quickly. The other thing is to track your deals as you get to a point where, if you are adding sales staff, and things are getting more complicated, just having a list of, okay, here’s the things we’re trying to get closed this month. And so here’s, you know, if things go well, this is how much money we’ve got, or if things go poorly, this is where we’re going to have to find some extra money to stay alive. It gives you the temperature of the business. You can see how well you’re doing and where you’re going and stay against any budget problems, or keep yourself on track, and the last is to have a shared history. This is where the better customer relationship management systems have the functions, where you can look at everything someone has done over time, so you can start to ask questions like, well, which emails that we’re sending are the most effective, or which products are selling better than others, or which things sell quickly, which things take months or years to sell, and being able to get to all that data really helps you tune in your business and get more effective and figure out what’s going on. So get out there, build your house list. We’re happy to talk more over on the Slack group, and you can always check in with Lever if you have questions on this.

Are you working to find community and opportunity as a Massachusetts startup founder? Join MFN and get access to experts, networking opportunities, and connections within the statewide entrepreneur ecosystem.