Did you know that you are sitting on a goldmine?

Yes, your contact database is a goldmine from an information & sales point of view. I am sure that you have heard the saying that it is 6 times more expensive to get a new client than it is to get a new client.

So here is a technique and a tool that you can use to your own advantage.

The Ladder of Loyalty is an useful technique used to move contacts along a continuum from where they are mere contacts to where they become an advocate of what you stand for.

The idea is to go through your database and determine which of your contacts fall into the following categories:

• Advocates – These people love what you do and tell everyone
• Clients – Those people who will naturally call you when they have a need
• Customers – People who have already used you
• Prospects – People who can definitely use your services
• Suspects – These people might be able to use your services

You then develop strategies to move these categories starting with suspects becoming prospects, and so on. You move them up the ladder of loyalty.

Apart from doing this manually, I also found a brilliant piece of software called Xobni the other day. Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox. Xobni’s Outlook add-in saves you time finding email, conversations, contact info & attachments.

Apart from its lightening fast search capabilities and ability to link to other social network sites, it provides Xobni Analytics — its powerful tool for analyzing your own email behaviours over time.

What day of the week are you slowest to respond to email? What time of day do you send the most email? Was this January or last January busier with new email contacts? Who reacted fast to your requests? Who haven’t you contacted lately?

Who are the top 10 people you send emails to? Do you send more emails to your boss than your spouse? Xobni exposes all of this data and more about the people you communicate with — in Outlook, and automatically.

Check it out – http://www.xobni.com/

It might be a good exercise to first of all complete the ladder of loyalty exercise, then combine it with Xobni. It may just show you where you are lacking in engaging with your database.

Who knows what sales opportunities it might reveal.