How I Manage My Personal Network with Contastic

Every day people in your network have opportunities that are perfect for you.   To get access to those opportunities you need to be top of mind with your contact at the same time as the opportunity is.   Contastic provides an easy way to stay top of mind with your contacts in three ways:

Keeping Track

On a daily basis I use Contastic before and after every call.   It combines my mail, contact information, and notes all in one place.  The profile card gives me an at-a-glance view of the contact’s essential information.

And the top of the data pane shows our recent email conversations, interests, and my notes.  Notes are critical in quickly understanding what our last conversation was about.  As we chat I’ll add a couple lines to the notes for each conversation to make it easy to pick up where we left off. 

Building Relationships

On a weekly basis I try and spend some time nurturing new relationships .  If I’ve just met someone at an event or through an introduction I tag them with a ‘developing’ tag.  This creates a tab in Contastic that enables me to review my list of ‘developing’ contacts at any time. This ensures I can revisit them often to continue nurturing the fragile new relationship. 

Contacts can be tagged with multiple tags (a friend may also be a prospect).  And these tags are an easy way to manage your pipeline.  I’ll make sure to label prospects, leads, and customer accordingly.  This way I know who to reach out to with sales materials, project suggestions, and referral requests respectively.

Staying In Touch

On a monthly basis I’ll set aside an hour (yes – that’s all it takes with Contastic) to go through all of my contacts who I haven’t contacted in over 90 days (Contastic automatically creates a tab for them) to reconnect.  

I try and be brutally honest when reviewing these connections to determine if they should be categorized (focus more on this person!) or hidden (this person is not really relevant anymore).   If a person is important and I haven’t reached out I’ll find a reason to reconnect.  Usually the emails will give some clue as to a topic I can follow up with my contact about.

If that doesn’t seem fruitful Contastic recommends a series of articles based on your contact’s education, company, interests, and things you have in common. 

Often times these articles are great ways to keep up to date on things your contacts care about as well as providing an engaging way to rekindle the conversation.   Once written they can be quickly inserted into a template to be sent in seconds:

That’s how I get Contastic!  It is my daily CRM, my weekly lead nurturing tool, and my monthly means of staying in touch with my entire network.  I’d love to hear more about how use get Contastic in the comments below.

3 Lessons We Can All Learn From Being the New Kid in School

When Kevin and I came together to build PeopleNotes we were driven by a need that had been brewing since our childhoods.  We both moved around a lot - 16 schools between the two of us - and we were always the new kids in school.  This taught us to work hard for, and subsequently treasure our personal relationships.

As our professional careers developed we’ve seen how others can struggle to learn those same skills as they move in to a new city or career.  This inspired us to build what we learned as new kids into an app that would help everyone make friends and build better relationships:

#1 End missed connections

How many times have you had an amazing conversation at a professional event or conference and then forgotten to get some contact information to stay in touch?  I can’t imagine how much better my life would be if I always managed to follow up.  The biggest reason we included the people search features for PeopleNotes was to make sure that you could look up anyone you talked to on the spot without fumbling with business cards or a clumsy CRM system.   Our goal was to make a mobile tool that made entering a new contact as easy as searching Google.

#2 Make people feel cared for

Even with the best intentions we all forget important details about our contacts all the time.   That's a surefire way to torpedo a relationship. Conversely, there is nothing that makes another feel as cared for as remembering the little details - like a recent vacation or favorite food.  We built the QuickNotes feature of PeopleNotes to help anyone jot down the important details of every conversation to make sure they don’t forget anything about their important relationships ever again.

Review information and news before a meeting.  Take notes during and after.

#3 Empower people to choose their relationships

So many relationships rely on serendipity – who you work with, live near, or share friends with - to maintain their social network.  However, relying on fate to choose your relationships often can leave out some amazing connections.   We created the ReConnect function in PeopleNotes to allow you to pick and choose who you want to be reminded to stay in touch with.  This forces you to deliberately make the choice of who your most important contacts are, and helps you remember to keep in touch.

We spent the last five months building PeopleNotes to become the app that helps everyone put these three lessons into practice and build better relationships.  

Time Management Process

Life is complicated. As we accumulate responsibilities and relationships throughout the development of our professional and personal life the challenge of keeping track of it all mounts.  We all need a system, and here is mine:

Input generally comes in person and over email. If it’s in person I just make a quick note and send myself an email to get it into the stack.

Once I’m on my laptop I’ll go down all of my email items and decide to delete, delegate, or allocate.

Delete – I just don’t have the time or interest to do this.

Delegate – This is someone else’s problem. Rely all to the email to loop in the assignee and then delete.

Allocate – any task I commit to doing has to go on my calendar.

While, this may make my schedule look like a bit of a mess (see above), it prevents over commitment. Also, if the task has any notes (i.e. ideas I have or notes from a customer call) I’ll input them directly into the calendar item. If I have a meeting I’ll input the email correspondence leading up to the meeting right into the calendar item for easy recall on my iPhone when I’m on the move (great for sales).

If a work item is taking longer than expected, is recurring, or needs to be shifted – I simply shift the calendar item. And, in any given day I’ll usually have an hour or two of unplanned interruption, so I plan my schedule with a hour lunch and an hour before sleep that I can use as buffer.

Using calendars in this way enables you to force an allocation process in your life and provides a chronological record of notes (easier to recall/review). Stay organized my friends!

Super Simple CRM

From my last couple posts I got quite a few questions about how to keep track of your interactions as you sell.  There is certainly a full range of CRM (Customer Resource Management) software, but I find if your team is small (1-3 people) a simple spreadsheet in Excel works just fine. 

The goal is to create a document that is simple enough you can make a habit of keeping it up to date.  Heavyweight systems tend to be more laborious to use and reduce the frequency of data input (which is key). 

In it’s simplest form I keep a sheet with following columns:

• organization name
• email
• first name of contact
• last name of contact
• website
• status
• notes

An example of what this looks like from Flock is as follows:

To create your first sales list you can usually just rely on the web (Google searching) or some select industry directories (in our case Yelp was quite useful).  This will help you fill out the majority of the fields to create a record for each potential customer.

As you send out your first emails, make a note of that in the ‘status’ section.  I usually keep this field short and tied to major stages of development (emailed, heard back, agreed, contract signed).  All the other information I input into the notes section.

When inputting information it’s a balance of ease of reading vs ease of writing.  I fall heavily on the side of ease of writing because I want to ensure that I get all the information in – even if it is in a messy context.  If the information turns out to be important later on (ie this becomes a key customer) I can format the information then.

As I engage in sales meetings I’ll usually just jot notes on a legal pad as I’m talking with the customers and then transfer it to the excel sheet as soon as I get home.  If I don’t happen to have a paper/pen handy sending yourself emails via iPhone work just as well.  For each meeting I take notes in two phases:

1. During – While engaging with the customer it is important to write key issues/follow up items you’ve agreed on down.  I’ll usually come in with a few agenda items jotted down as headers and fill in notes under those headers as we talk.
2. After – Once the meeting is over, I’ll immediately write down everything I can remember about the customer interaction.  This is critical to maintaining a consistent interaction each customer when you are meeting with hundreds. 

The nice thing about an excel sheet is it is very easy to review.  Every week I’ll just run down the list to make sure I’ve had a chance to check in with every customer with a current issue.  All the dormant relationships (sales that closed or failed) will be contacted every few months).  The biggest mistake I see new sales people make is failing to maintain consistent contact with their customers. 

Also, if you’re in a startup environment where you are just starting to understand your sales pipeline this list will serve as a record of your sales experimentation.  You’ll instantly be able to look down you list of closed sales and see from the notes what characteristics of your interaction of the customer made the deal work.

The whole mantra here is KISS (keep it simple stupid!).  When you start selling create an excel sheet.  Update that sheet after every meeting.  If you can do that you’ll be well on your way to delighting your customers!