1. Never let a viable prospect go You spent time and money through networking, good customer service, advertising and website development to get prospective customers to your figurative door. Don’t waste your money or time spent. Establish a communication stream to keep in contact until they are ready to do business or refer. 2. Excel is Magic It doesn’t matter what database software you use to store your information because it’s simple to bring it into Excel to then manipulate, clean, de-duplicate and add to it in seconds flat. 3. Plan for the future today If targeting improves success – do you have enough information to do so? Have you ever stopped to contemplate what new products, services, customer service initiatives you’d like to do over the next few years? A new branch or store? What about additional staff? Will you ever need to know or monitor their productivity or their contribution to business? If so how will you measure it? What fields would you need? Phone numbers.  Are you consistently collecting mobile phone numbers so you can do sms messaging in the future? 4. Categories not columns The last thing you want to do is work with an endless line up of columns. Don’t set up separate columns for clients, prospects, old clients, suppliers. Instead have one column called client type and have different Categories (or variables) you enter into the one column, being client, old client, prospect, supplier. 5. Treat your business referrers well Do you have a distinct communication, thank you and reward plan for those business colleagues that refer business your way? Why not? A suggestion to help them could be a tip newsletter about how to improve their business success. Why not create a recurring reminder to prompt you every few months to telephone for a chat. The more thought you put into developing and using your database, the more you’ll be rewarded.