Building and continually growing a solid database of contacts is important for your and your small business clients' success. 

All businesses regardless of their size share a common and critical pursuit – to continually attract new clients. There's one resource whose value you should never underestimate for generating and maintaining a steady influx of new clients: your database of contacts.

You can spend as much money as you can on marketing, and as much time as you can spare on meeting with your strongest prospects, but in the long run nothing matters more than building(and continually growing) a solid database of contacts you can proactively reach out to on a regular basis. To keep yourself in people's minds is to keep yourself in business.

But to get the most impact from your database, you need to use it smartly. Start by dividing it into at least three basic categories:

• clients
  
  
  
• prospects
  
  
  
• referral sources

Needless to say, your clients are the easiest to maintain communication with, since you're already working with them. But you can also keep them "in the loop" on general matters you'll be contacting the other two groups about. That starts you down an important path: converting satisfied clients into happy referral sources. But for now, let's focus on reaching out to the other two groups – your prospects and existing referral sources.

First, let's look at building and maintaining the database. There are some excellent contact management programs out there, such as Outlook and ACT. These provide tremendous flexibility and convenience, and make possible the sorting approaches we're about to get into. If necessary, give serious thought to having one dedicated person – a top administrative person, perhaps – to manage your database. Having one person serve as a database "expert" can be extremely helpful, and this is an area that deserves that level of attention.

It's essential to capture all the vital contact information on each entity in your database. This means business name, address, phone number, fax number and e-mail address. Make your best effort to have a contact person's name at each contact, and keep that as up-to-date as possible. Also, the moment you become aware that your contact person has changed, be sure to get a new person's name and fix that in your database right away. Also keep any pertinent notes on each contact, such as how you came to learn of them, important communications you may have already had with them, and so on.

Next comes the issue of sorting. Rather than just lump each contact into one of the three categories we've mentioned, assign each new entry to multiple categories, based on your own situation. If you market to different industries, say retail and real estate, use those categories too. Down the road you may well want to direct a marketing piece or campaign at prospects in a particular industry. Similarly, if your referral sources are, perhaps, lawyers and bankers, enter them as categories too. In the marketing approach I favor – which I call expertise marketing – you'll be creating pieces that speak directly to the specific concerns of those professions.

You may also want to sort your contacts by a broader variety of searchable sub-groups such as geographic location and company size, if those distinctions matter to you in your overall business development strategy. . Smart marketers do not just s do one sweeping distribution to every single contact they have. Instead, for strategic and common sense reasons they target one sub-group, or a cross-section of a couple sub-groups. You'll find you have different messages at different times, for different types of prospects and referral sources.

Now that you've got your database together, how do you get your messages out to those contacts? Provided you've gotten the different contact information mentioned above, you've got a variety of choices at your fingertips. Customized e-mail distribution lists are very popular these days, but don't discount the continued importance of the good old fax (and the convenience of computer-managed mass faxing). So-called "snail mail" can be equally important when you want to land something eye-catching and straight-to-the-point in their hands – and that will always remain the only proper way to get out those ever-important holiday cards.

Finally, always keep in mind that one of the most important aspects of maintaining a great database is….well, maintaining the thing! Be sure to not only add to it regularly but go back and make sure the contacts already in it are accurate and up-to-date. What you've got there is a powerful tool for reeling in those ever-important future clients. That seemingly inconsequential e-mail, fax or mailing talking about your upcoming seminar next week could be landing in the hands of next year's new Number One client.