The Business Card Black Hole (part 1)
Contact Relationship Management
As a business owner, your number one priority is your clients. They are one of the biggest contributors to your success or failure. How you manage your relationship with them, will say a lot about how you run your business and who you are as a person. Do you sell to them, and then never talk to them again? Do you call them everyday just to say hello and see if you can help them. As with everything, there needs to be a balance when you contact your clients.
There are other important relationships we have as business owners. We have relationships with our suppliers, our vendors, our competitors. What about our relationships with our referral partners. How you handle these relationships is just as important as your relationships with your clients.
So you are out there networking and trying to grow your business. You’re attending networking events, talking to potential clients, and building those referral partnerships. You are excited about the progress you are making building your business. So you go home and get to your office and set down all of the business cards, referrals and sales receipts you collected through out the day.
NOW WHAT?
What do you do with these “people” you have collected? Does the contact information just end up in the ‘Business Card Black Hole’, that drawer that all business cards go in when you get home? How do you cultivate your relationship with them? How do you turn potential clients into closed sales? Just as you do with other aspects of your business, you need to create a repeatable procedural system that works for you to handle your contacts. There are several different systems available for you to adjust to fit your needs. There are also several software tools you can utilize to maximize your efficiency in your contact management system.
The two main aspects of contact management are: How to classify the contacts and get them into your system and what to do with the info once it is in (temperature touch points). The type of category will help you to make sure that you are approaching the relationship in the right manner.
The temperature touch points will tell you how actively you need to pursue this contact and what exact steps to take. The touch points are the types of contact that you will make with each “person”. Some will require face to face contact, some will just receive your newsletters and announcements, and some will require very little contact. When setting up your contact management system, another important thing to consider is the tools that you are going to use. Are you going to use a rolodex, note cards, and/or software programs? Some of the software programs available are Outlook, Act, Access or you could have a custom system created to fit your exact needs. There are even online contact management tools such as Oprius, LinkedIn, and Constant Contact. Which tools you utilize will make a big difference in your contact management system. Schedule time to sit down and review some of the options available to you before making a decision.
Your contact management system is a very organic living system. It will change and adjust as your needs in your business change. In the future we will talk a little more about some basic category and temperature groups to help you to start building your system.
For more information on this topic, please check out our ebook, due out July 2009: Make Your Networks Matter - Turn The People You Meet Into Profitable Client$