Some careers are built on winning customers. Louise Riddle built hers on remembering them.

Louise’s career in sales and customer relationships began more than forty years ago, long before CRM systems, automated follow-ups and digital sales funnels became part of everyday business.

In the early days there was a docket book, a telephone and a growing realisation that the best business didn’t necessarily come from constantly finding someone new. It came from looking after the people you had already found.

Her early career included party-plan selling, where she learnt the importance of turning one successful interaction into the next opportunity. Later, while working with indoor cricket arenas across Auckland, Louise began using the telephone to build ongoing relationships with teams rather than simply waiting for them to book again.

That experience eventually took her into business consulting, where Alan McKenzie recognised something different in the way she approached customers and gave her opportunities to learn, sit in on client meetings and work across different businesses and industries.

Over the decades that followed, Louise worked across sales, database management, CRM, telecommunications, construction, automotive and business consulting. She built and managed outsourced Telephone Account Management operations, trained salespeople and worked directly with businesses to strengthen their customer relationships.

And everywhere she went, she kept seeing the same problem.

Businesses were very good at recording what customers had bought.

They weren’t always as good at remembering the relationship.

A salesperson left. A follow-up was forgotten. A quotation wasn’t revisited. A customer who said, “Call me in six months,” quietly disappeared.

Louise developed Telephone Account Management as a practical methodology for preventing that from happening — staying in touch, understanding the customer’s timing, recording what is learnt and ensuring there is always a next step.

Eventually she realised the methodology was part of something bigger.

She called it Business Memory.

Today, Louise continues to work directly with businesses and their databases, putting the principles she writes about into practice.

Business Memory brings together more than forty years of lessons learnt one customer conversation at a time.