Category: Communications Management

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?

Communications have become so fragmented.

Some people communicate with me by email, some text me, some send a Facebook message, some call me on the phone. Lately, I even have a couple of teams on Slack and am communicating with them using that platform.

Responding to them is easy – I just respond using the same method. What’s not productive is when I need to initiate a conversation and I have to stop to think, “Now which platform does this person use to communicate with me?”

It used to be easy. You would pick up your address book and look up the contact information, or call directory service to connect you. Then Email made it even easier. Now you just start typing the name and the email address will get filled in for you. Communicating by phone is getting harder because mobile numbers are unlisted and many are dropping their land lines. Communicating by email is getting harder too because so many people are overwhelmed that yours may get overlooked.

Many are turning to texting and messaging (read my blog post here: Communicate with the World). Now, for some of my contacts, I have her or his home phone number, mobile phone number, email address, LinkedIn profile, Twitter handle, and Facebook profile. I may also be following her or him on Instagram and/or Pinterest.

This all leads to the issue of contact information management.

There are services that connect some of it together. One example of such a service is CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools. They help to centralize contact information and to track interactions.

One tool that’s interesting is Contactually. The tool can run on your mobile device and keep track of your email correspondence, phone calls, and texts.

You can use Evernote as a simple CRM (see my blog post here: 7 Tips to Manage Client Info) by scanning business cards using Evernote on your mobile device and connecting to LinkedIn.

Without a tool to help manage your contacts, you might be wasting too much looking up the contact information that you need. Did that person send me an email, call me, or text me?

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