Step 1: Pick a Contact Manager
One of the biggest hurdles people have in building and maintaining relationships is not having all your contacts in a simple contact manager that you can use to retrieve information on-demand. That’s exactly why we’re going to tackle this problem right up front.
Your contact manager needs to be able to do these basic things:
- Create a new contact in less than 3 clicks.
- Create a new note relating to a contact in less than 3 clicks.
- Find a contact quickly.
- Create a task relating to a contact and mark it done when it’s completed.
- Organize your contacts quickly by tagging people or putting them into lists.
Optionally, if you’re planning on using it for sales, you might also want it to be able to:
- Create a deal and record progress.
- Output a report on your sales pipeline.
- Find a way to link marketing activities to sales revenue.
PipelineDeals, HighRise, SalesForce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a few other CRM systems will work just fine. Outlook also works but its not the best software to use as your contact manager. I personally prefer PipelineDeals because it’s simpler, cheaper and easier to use.
Step 2: Export existing contact data
Once you’ve picked a CRM system, you need to export data from where ever they may be and import them into your CRM system. Here are a few places you might find contact info:
- Accounting — If you use QuickBooks or another accounting software, your customer data probably has a wealth of information about people you know.
- Email — If you use Google Mail, look under the contacts section. It has a suggested contacts list that contains a list of people you have had email conversations with. If you use Outlook, there are a number of tools to extract email addresses from your email communication. Just search on google.com for “extract outlook contacts from email.”
- Cell phone records — Skydeck.com let’s you pull info from your cell phone company & helps you identify who you’re talking and sending SMS’s with. I’ve found it to be a great tool for identifying people I want to and need to keep in touch with.
- Social Networks — LinkedIn / Facebook / Twitter / MySpace all have great information about people you are connected with. Facebook is particular awesome because people often have their emails, cell phones and birthdays listed in there.
One trick is to get your data into Excel so you can clean up & manipulate the data. I like to remove people that were assholes to work with (very few, but they exist) and to separate people into lists. With some CRM systems, you’ll be able to import people and have them automatically go into lists if you’ve got them separated.
Step 3: Import the contacts into your contact manager
The final step is to import your contacts into your chosen contact manager. Below are links to the instructions on how you can import contacts for a few of the popular CRMs:
This lesson is critical. Please do not skip it. It will make all the next steps a lot easier.
Next Lesson: Who Do I Want A Strong Relationship With in 2009/2010?
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