One of the keys to maintaining and growing a business is staying in touch with potential customers, past customers, and referral partners.
There are many methods to do this, including social media and email marketing. Often, though, a business needs to make that personal contact.
It’s important to follow up on a regular basis before you fall off of someone’s radar.
This means maintaining a list and a schedule to follow up. A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help you to do this.
Here are some tools that I recommend:
Insightly
This is a cloud-based tool that is fairly easy to use for contact management.
- In your contact record, you can keep notes, email correspondence, and files.
- Search within contact records, notes, files, emails, and projects
- Create a full opportunity pipeline or single tasks to follow up
- You can connect Insightly to your Google calendar or to your Exchange calendar.
- Insightly has a free plan which includes all of the above except for calendar sync. For that feature, you’ll need the Basic plan at $12/user per month.
Evernote
Evernote can be more than a note-taking app. Read my blog post here about using Evernote as a simple CRM: 7 Tips to Manage Client Info.
- You can make Evernote even more like a CRM by using a tool like Transpose to create note templates. Here’s an article about that: Evernote for CRM (Note: KustomNote is now Transpose).
- Evernote costs $69.99 for the Premium plan, which I recommend.
Contactually
This is the best tool for automating your follow-ups. You connect Contactually to your email so that your email contacts are automatically added. Your email correspondence is automatically part of your contact record.
- You can search for a contact by name, organization, or tag. Notes are not currently searchable.
- Contactually uses the concept of “buckets” for your contacts. Each type of bucket that you assign a contact to will generate an automatic follow-up reminder within a certain period of time.
- You can create tasks to follow up and connect those tasks to your Google calendar.
- Contactually costs $20/user per month for the Basic Plan
Need help with follow-up?
