No doubt you will have been receiving all sorts of Recession busting emails or “How to stay afloat during the credit crunch” and I don’t know about you but I get pretty fed up of them. So I won’t even go there because everything we talk about you should be doing in good times and bad, in fact you should just be doing them!

We have now become more involved in helping companies, through acquisition by Green 4, capture their data, and more importantly market effectively to that captured data and have seen some stunning results. Also for many football and rugby clubs by integrating with their ticketing and merchandising  they see a full picture of their customers and what they are doing. This is making their marketing highly targeted and highly effective. You know that someone who has bough a shirt one season is a good prospect to by more merchandise from you so a campaign can be sent aimed specifically at them.

I have mentioned before how important it is to make sure you use the data you have. Too often do I see people faithfully using systems to capture data but they just don’t work it! They don’t get the maximum return you should be getting.

It does not just have to be about leveraging your data for marketing. Being warned in time about stock levels, knowing how the room occupancy or training rooms and hotels rooms and given times and knowing whether certain suppliers are more likely to deliver late or not are all ways which companies we know try to make themselves as efficient as possible.

So gather the data and then work the data.

Well Hero solutions is now owned by a company called Green 4 Solutions (www.green4solutions.com) now allowing us access to their Microsoft CRM tools and addons which are flying off the shelf to various sporting teams around he UK and Europe. So now as well as our usual bespoke development we can offer customised CRM solutions as well which is very exciting to us.

So what does this mean to our current clients? Well nothing because the same team are still here and the same work is being done so apart from being even busier than before it is business as usual

I also would like to take this opportunity to all our clients and suppliers who we have worked with over the last few years and I look forward to a continued fruitful relationship in the future.

Finally this also means we have a new address out in the county which is. Kimcote Court, Kimcote, Leicestershire, LE17 5RU.

On a personel note I'm very excited at the prospect working with a new set of companies, especially in the sporting sector. Despite my slightly rotund appearence I do partake in physical activity and watch out for the new Leicester Marathon website which will have a blog of mew as I head towards my very first Marathon

If you are going to set up a new business as a letting agent then please make sure you sort out your database of potential clients and of properties. It always amazes me how they fail to capitalize on potential clients by not capturing the right data or in some cases any at all. The amount of times we would ring up and ask for a property to be told it was gone and then they would just let us go without gathering our details. Surely they would have other properties we might be interested in or at least get us on their data base.

Also when in a house and the landlords were coming back so we had to leave the agent did nothing to find us another property or even send us a list of what they had free. So a current tenant they had knowledge of and should know our details was let go without even trying to keep them as a customer. That to me seems madness because the faster they let a property the more money they make and the more likely a landlord is to stay with them.

And why don’t they have a list of removal firms already for people going in or going out, or perhaps a list of cleaners and gardeners, a value added service which could earn them extra revenue. Simple to do if you have the right data captured and sent the right communications from your system.

Some of them don’t even have a log of the tenant calls or the landlord calls. C’mon people it’s easy. Guess which market we are looking to tap into next.

I hope all had a good break and if you were working that was all good as well.

A while ago a friend told me they had been at their daughters dance show at her school at the weekend and were told they could not take pictures because of the Data Protection Act.

Hopefully now most people know that this is not use, if you are taking pictures of your child in a show for your personal use then this is fine, however if the School takes pictures and whats to use them they need to check more carefull.

There have been a few cases in recent years where the Data Protection has been used as the reason for an action when in fact it was not the case. So one thing that is important is that you check if you need to register with the information commisors office and then you make sure you read all the relevent articles to your company.

Also make sure that someone keeps up to date as well, once a month it is worth seeing if therer are any new articles to read. OK so not the most exciting top but it does make sure you are compliant and ahead of the game.

Ok so maybe you already know this as you can't miss it where ever you turn!!

But hopefully while everyone also is going on about the doom and gloom we can look forward to the peaceful time of year with some happiness. Spending time with our friends and loved ones and looking forward to the Doctor Who Christmas Special. (OK so a little Sad)

So here at Hero solutions we do wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year and hope you will look out for me on the speaking circuit.

psst you can book me on this website you know!!

.This is the first VAT change in many years and the first since many Internet Business were created. The first for many people out there.

Already we are seeing customer who are having to work hard to accomadate this change even when they have their business well prepared to cope with changes. But as many of us from Hero have been IT traininers as well as consultants we know there will be Many MS Excel spreasheets out there where folk instead of having a single place to enter the VAT will have simply added into a formula. How many and what impact that could have we don't know.

Worse still is that some databases may have been developed witht he VAT hard coded in, instead of being in a place where it is easy to change. This means the program will need to be altered and redeployed, hopefully at the cost of the developer.

I certainly urge everyone to check their systems and see the possible impact as the clock is already ticking and there is not much time to get the systems right.

This goes to show how important it is to both choose the right developer and also to make sure you staff are trained up as well as possible on the software they use. This is whether it is Microsoft office of Bespoke software. As trainers we saw many bad happens in people using MS office software simply because they did not know another way. Make sure you staff use their software correctly so they are as efficient as possible with it and don't fall into any traps which could have repercussions in the future.

Any we are all off to check our code, there was always one day we might have been feeling lazy!!!

Certain shops were so busy yesterday that you would not think people were cutting back. The first one day sale for many years in Marks and Spencers caused massive queues.

But shoppers have got wise in the last few years, they know that the Sales will come and many peopl nowwait for them. For once the retail industry has been forced to follow, not lead ,and in these times the shopper has even more power.

They put on the Sales to drive people into their shops and buy. But Why do they need to do this? Well obviously because people are not buying.

But why are they not buying? Because they are waiting for the Sales!!!

In the last few years people have got used to the fact that shops now will have sales before Christmas and many people will wait for them so even if the shops don't want to they are, in a sense, forced to.

If you offer sales or discounts then make sure you track the usage of them, track the trends. This information can tell you how well it is driving sales, what works best, but as important are checking if these promotions are causing your customers to hold off buying until there is a Sales on.

So my question to you is does your Database application record all the sales and promotional information? Do you know what promotions and offers work and what don't?

And if not why not????

If you are in retail are you also tracking your competitors Offers? Because there might be a trend to when your sales go down and your competition has a sale

In marketing we often talk about it being a numbers game. The more people you market then the more responses you will get. Well I was amazed at the article on the BBC Website

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7719281.stm

1 in 12 million Spam emails gets a result!! And yet they still reckon spammers can make a fortune, but they do now think it is not as easy as they thought it was.

There are two things I wanted to comment on. The first was protecting your networks and computer from being used as part of a SPAM Network. You should make sure you IT provider or department has made sure you are safe from this. I once worked at a company that was being used as a relay and not only did it bring the server down it could have meant the domain was black listed which would have meant no proper emails getting through.

The second thing is it does show that if you get the better information then you get better responses. So make sure you have a good database of contacts and is cleansed to make sure you are not trying to chase clients or prospects who are not logger there,!!!

Half way through the last lap of the Brazilian Grand prix I thought it was all over. Lewis Hamilton was sixth and there looked no way he would make the pass to get him the points needed to be World Champion. But Mclaren knew different because of the information they had. Their computers were telling them that Lewis was going to catch Timo Glock.

Modern Formula One teams rely on their information today. They take data from the weather man, the engine, the drivers, the tyres and the track temperatures and crunch that information to allow them to make the best decisions possible for their drivers.

They knew it was going to rain in the last few laps. They knew the temperatures would fall away in the tyres and they would lose all grip, and all the other data said bring Lewis in and get him on the right tyres while Glock’s team just took a gamble despite the information they had. It might have paid off another day but this time it went Lewis’ favour.

More and more sports are gathering as much information as they can and seeing ways they can make that information give them the edge. I was in reading in the summer of how at the start of training Lance Armstrong would have all sorts of tests to see what state of fitness and health his body was in. From those tests they would design his training program to get Lance from where he was to where he needed to be for the Tour de France.  As good as he was there is still so much science and raw information crunching behind it.

So can gathering information and analysing it give us the edge? Well for most businesses it can. In our own business every day we are learning the more we can gather and manage data on sales, marketing and projects then the better we can sell and more important the better we can deliver.

McLaren an Lewis Hamilton will work even harder next year to gain another world title. They will gather even more information and use it to squeeze every drop of performance out of the car. If we do the same then we can get the most out of our business, job or department.

Well I never 50Billion avilable for the banks. Is it only me or are these figures sounding more absurd every day. I'm having to extend my Excel columns to notes these numbers down!!

The scary thing for me is that these financial houses got them selves caught up by packages of debt they bought that they did really know what was in them. the real truth of some of these packages was hidden. Bad information again!! Or more importantly they seemed to have failed to read the small print that financial organisations normally so love to have us read.

Ok I don't know a jot about the wheelings and dealings of the city but it strikes me that they managed to get on their books some nasty stuff and even more worrying they are still not sure how much of it. That lack of information about what they own in startling and to me like a company not knowing what its customers are ordering.

But it makes me stop and think. Do I know everything I need to know about my business? Are there potential banana skins ahead because I have not recorded some vital data?

I think we could all do with looking at what data we have and what it means to us, or more importantly look at the gaps in our knowledge about our business or customers and look to fill them