Showing posts with label Contastic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contastic. Show all posts

Sunday, March 9, 2014

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.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

How to Send New Years Notes



With the New Year on our doorstep I'm thinking back to many of my important contacts that I've fallen out of touch with simply because there was never a pressing reason to reach out.

So, I'm making the time now to reconnect with these people to hear what they’re up to and share my own updates  And, just in case you haven’t gotten around to sending out Christmas Cards (or emails), here’s the process I use to send holiday update emails for the New Year.

The Template 

As with any communication the goal is to maximize your signal to noise ratio.  Make it short and relevant.  I generally like to include a greeting, one cue about a common thread we talked about last time, and an update:
Hi [name]

It's been a while since we caught up! How has [their job/project/hobby] been? I just wanted to shoot you a quick note to wish you a Happy New Year! 
Cheers!
Cy
 While this can be done with mail merge and excel, I've started to use Contastic exclusively to automate this process:

1.     See who you’ve fallen out of touch with

Contastic scans your gmail to figure out who you haven't exchanged emails with recently.  Next to each of your contacts we'll show you how any days it's been since your last contact.  A good rule of thumb is to stay in touch every 30-90 days.

2. Prepare your NYE template

In the Contastic template builder you can write an email in your own voice while inserting dynamic content that will customize the email using your contact's LinkedIn information.  The goal here is to make a personal email with the least amount of redundant effort.

3. Send!

Once you hit 'email' we'll pre-fill a template with custom content tailored to your contact and send the whole package to gmail or your mail client of choice (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).  You can edit and send it from there!  We bcc our mailbot (he's harmless we promise) on the messages so we can learn which content you liked best for you!

  

This is the perfect opportunity to revisit folks you’ve fallen far out of touch with (on Contastic this would be your 90+ bucket).   I’ve also had some friends combine Contastic with Boomerang to schedule their messages to go out on New Years Day.  I hope this helps you stay in touch in the new year!