Showing posts with label do more faster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label do more faster. 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.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Book Report: Do More Faster

With the good weather and barren inbox (thanks Olympics!) I had time to plow through Do More Faster - a compendium of startup short stories by the founders of TechStars (Brad Feld and David Cohen).  Based on the Amazon sample I felt some trepidation as it seems like another useless brag-a-thon of successful start-ups.  However, based on rave reviews I plowed ahead.

The first half o the book was largely as expected - repetitive and cliche stories about listening to customers and making good products.  *yawn*  When I have real conversations with start-up junkies there is usually some secret sauce or unfair advantage they have/discovered/acquired to win in their market.  Its usually messy and held together with lots of hope and duct tape, but it's true.  I want to hear that - not 20 iterations of the obvious.

That being said, the last two chapters of the book on on legal issues and work-life balance made the slog worth while.  Stories told by many (but especially Brad Feld) unveiled some sinister issues almost any entrepreneur will face (equity battles and upset spouses) when going all in on a company.  These problems fall into the easy to prevent, but hard to solve category.  So, getting a good feel for the warning signs is absolutely critical (write a great vesting schedule and set up regular conversations with loved ones).  And the genuine, unique and heartfelt stories was a fresh infusion of life experience.  Wish they'd led with that!

Not one of my bibles, but worth a weekend read!
http://www.amazon.com/Do-More-Faster-TechStars-Accelerate/dp/0470929839