What activities did I undertake to achieve my goals?

1. Write a professional mailing list to potential customers and get at least a 5% response rate:

My internship coach and I practiced with making a good sales letter. For my first letter, I needed to write it all by myself. We looked over it and it was a very long story, which is not how a sales letter should be. He gave me guidelines on how to make it better; use bullet points to show advantages for the customer and keep it short and simple.

This helped me a lot with my letters to come. Eventually I did not send any of my own written emails, because it was just to early for that, but I did learn a lot from it and now I have a better idea on how to write a sales letter.

 

2. Know how to deal with complaints and unsatisfied customers. What to say/do etc.

So far I personally did not get an email back with a complaint or unsatisfied customers, but heard some complaints that has been handled by my colleagues. I also did not handle complaints because of the business industry Caplinq is in. I do not know specifically how they handled it, because every complaint is different, but I learned that:

• Caplinq replies within 24 hours, email or phone call
• In that email/phone call is an apology and a promise to fix the problem
• Then find a solution for the problem

I do not think that I can handle any complaints on my own because the business is very difficult to understand, especially in such a short time. Most of the time I will forward the email to one of my colleagues, because they know more about the products and payments terms etc.

 

3. Make a customer database so that Caplinq has an overview of all the customers and information about the customers:

For Caplinq I updated the database of customers who already bought a certain material/product. Keeping a database of customers is very important. From all these databases I made one, so that the employees of Caplinq have a better overview of all the customers, suppliers, and their addresses and other contact information.

 

At first I needed to make a database by myself, my coach told me it was not what he was looking for at first and gave me a few tips to improve the document. I needed to ask myself the question; ''Which information is important and why?''

So my coach then was opening up to me and explained it further:

1. Name of the contact person, who is the customer, what is his/her job title, direct phone number, mobile, email etc.
2. Address: companies sometimes have multiple locations, which location (address) is important to Caplinq
3. Sales potential: this is a top priority customer that needs all the attention now or is it a small customer that buys sometimes and complains a lot?
4. Status update: when was the last contact with the customer and what was the most important information? (summary of a call or meeting)
5. Action items: which tasks are still open to get back to this customer?

With this, Caplinq has a good overview of who their customers are, when they were last contacted and their contact information.

 

4. Make a competition analysis of 1 specific product group, so that Caplinq knows exactly their market position at the end of my internship:

Together with another intern at Caplinq we made two competition analyses. The first analysis was for different kind of tapes. The second one was about tapioca starch. With both of the analyses, we worked in Google Sheets so that working together was easier, as we both worked on different computers. We wrote down all the information about the product;

1. Name of the company: to know who else sells that product
2. Product information: what exact product it is, as there are different kind of tapes with different measurements and different weights of the tapioca. If they are not exactly the same, you cannot compare them to each other.
3. Pricing of the products: you need to compare your own prices with he prices of your competitor. We put both the prices of Caplinq in the sheet as well as the prices of the competitor, if the measurements also were the same.
4. USP: we made a column with USP, to see if Caplinq's competitors have anything special to offer their customers. So that maybe Caplinq could offer the same or something even better.

With this Caplinq can change their prices, shipping costs, or add a USP.