How important is the management of your contacts?
How important is the management of your contacts?
Having up-to-date client and supplier lists are imperative to a successful business. Effectively managing your contacts will alleviate stress while building and maintaining relationships. You could be needing to send a single follow up email to a prospective client. Or you may want to send a recurring newsletter to your existing clients. Maybe you've decided to dive into marketing campaigns? This is where curated lists and consistent contact management can make all the difference to your business, and its success.
We’ve arrived at the last of our 5-part series. Over these last five months, we have explored how delegating your tasks can alleviate stress and give you back valuable time to focus on managing your business. Today we are looking at contact management.
Building relationships is important for your business. But, managing your contacts, whether they are clients or suppliers can take up a lot of time. Does this sound familiar to you? Every so often in large companies, a list will come out of contacts that need to be updated. You spend so much time staring at the spreadsheet wondering who these people are and how long ago did we work with them?
This is where delegation of managing your contacts can help. By having someone manage your contact list, whether it’s a CRM tool or a spreadsheet, you will remain on top of your relationship management game. So, what should you be doing to manage your contacts and why is it important to so?
Consistency is Key
The key to managing your contact list is to have consistent data entry. When you’re focused on so many other facets of your business, this is a task that often gets pushed to the bottom of your to-do list. That is, until you need that information and can’t seem to find it. And this is where consistency comes into play.
Every time you have a new prospective client, you should be entering them into your contacts. To keep a full history of your clients, make sure you are updating your contacts with sales data, and key interactions. When you have new suppliers to support your business, you should be adding them into your contact list so that you always know who you’re working with.
By having routine and consistent data entry, and delegating this task, you will always be up to date with your contacts. This allows you to communicate exactly what you need to and when you need to.
Manage Your Lists
Having all your contacts in one place is great but making sure you properly organize these contacts is paramount. Managing lists can take time and effort. That’s something that you don’t have a lot of when you’re busy building your business. For effective communications, segmentation of your contacts is a must.
You should make sure you maintain separate supplier and client lists. But you can also further segment your clients. Having prospective, new, and long-term client lists allows you to conduct targeted marketing campaigns. Why is this important? How you speak to an existing client versus a new or prospective client is vastly different. With segmentation of your clients, and the delegation of this task, your business will be ready to communicate strategically and effectively.
Yearly Review of Contacts
Every year, you should be reviewing your contacts. You need to make sure that your clients, suppliers, and anyone else you work with are properly updated. Contacts that you no longer have business with should be removed or marked as inactive. This review each year will ensure you’ve got the right details for your business strategy and all your continued communications.
Overall, delegating contact management can not only give you time back in your day, but can help you manage your contacts more efficiently and effectively. They can streamline the process of adding, updating, and organizing your contacts. This way, you will have the ability to focus on your relationships with your clients and the overall growth of your business.
And, if you find yourself struggling with who to delegate these tasks to you, or you are a one-person show, let’s have a chat! At ROSAPEL, we have been working with our clients to help build and maintain their contact management strategy for over 35 years. Our proven methodologies will simplify the management of your contacts so that you can focus on building your business. With our help, you can easily communicate with all your clients exactly when you need to. We have been making business owners look and operate as the true professional CEO’s they are. Need it done? We’re the one!
Bonus Tip for January
With all the business at the ending of the year, it is difficult to get prepared for New Year, so here’s a bonus tip for you! The first week back in January, before the craziness begins, set yourself up for a successful start to 2023. What does this mean?
· Create new email folders for the new year in your inbox
· Create new folders for the new year in your filing systems
· Transfer all old files and emails to your 2022 folders to close off the year
This way you’ll have a clean slate for 2023. You can hit the ground running when the new business starts rolling in.
