There comes a point in any successful small business when contact management becomes a real point of friction. Running a small business is hard, especially for sole proprietorships and early-stage startups with very few staff. Entrepreneurs need to organize business contacts across suppliers and vendors, existing clients, and especially their pool of leads and prospects.
Complicating matters, your contacts are probably spread out across multiple products and formats, across phones, computers, and other devices. Managing them is a critical challenge, and there are many ways to approach it. Here are six tips to help you do it more effectively, so your business can thrive.
1. Consider Utilizing a Specialized Contact-Management Tool
Choosing a contact-management technique or product that works for you is the fundamental first step in bringing your contacts to heel.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of modern ways to organize your business contacts. One type is a contact management system (CMS), which you can use to aggregate all of your contacts across devices and platforms so they can be centrally managed. The other is a full-blown customer relationship management (CRM) product, which offers the same kind of contact-management functionality but with additional tools and functions that help you manage the relationships you have with each person in your digital Rolodex, rather than simply indexing their contact information.
Either a CMS or CRM will help you manage your contacts effectively, and both classes of products are available for businesses of any size. Salesforce is the biggest name in CRM, for example, having created the category as we know it in 1999. But you don’t need a Salesforce-sized budget to bring a CRM into your business. There is a thriving ecosystem of CRM products for SMBs’ needs, from specialist small-business vendors to “lite” offerings from bigger players, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho. Many companies offer strong enough onboarding and support that you can implement their CRM even if you don’t have in-house or contracted IT support.
2. Standardize How You Record Your Data
Whether you use a CRM product, a CMS, a spreadsheet, or even a Rolodex, you’ll find that it works most effectively when your data is formatted consistently. Establishing standardized formats for recording client, vendor, partner, or prospect data goes a long way toward avoiding confusion and inaccuracies. For example:
- If you’re using a hardcopy system for lead management, make sure to design standardized forms and have them printed, so you’re using the same format each time.
- In software, set up drop-down menus rather than using free-form fields when entering predictable and frequently used data (i.e., job titles, industry categories, etc.) to reduce variability.
- Establish a fixed format for date fields, so they are entered the same way each time.
For entries that are fundamentally free-form, like post-meeting notes, providing templates to follow can help keep things consistent from person to person and note to note. Many CMS and CRM products now have AI-powered routines that can extract actionable data from segments of text, like those post-call notes. AI tools thrive on consistency, so entering free-form notes via a template in a predictable format helps the algorithms extract actionable data with fewer errors and omissions.
3. Fill in Missing Capabilities With Aftermarket Add-Ons
CRM and CMS software are powerful tools, but you may not find a custom-tailored solution aimed specifically at your line of business. Rather than pursue thousands of individual niche markets themselves, those vendors make it easy for entrepreneurial developers to carve out their own businesses by addressing specialized needs through add-ons.
If your CMS or CRM offers integration with an ecosystem of add-ons, those additional capabilities can often elevate a marginal experience to an acceptable one, or from merely acceptable to exceptional. Analytics capabilities are especially useful: the data contained in your client files can have a high impact on your marketing and sales campaigns, as well as your forward planning, if your software is capable of unlocking it.
4. Maintain Good Data Hygiene
If you come from outside of the tech industry, the phrase “data hygiene” may not be familiar to you, but you almost certainly have some experience with its effects. Over time, any collection of data begins to accumulate errors and inaccuracies. Common examples include:
- Misspellings
- Omissions
- Duplicate records
- Outdated data
Data hygiene means taking steps to counter this data corruption. Your CRM may have the ability to detect duplicates, either as part of its basic functionality or through an add-on module, but other inaccuracies can be more difficult to correct. A misspelled name in a customer record, for example, can’t be detected by a spellchecker in the same way as an ordinary typo, because names are so variable.
Spokeo for Business can be an invaluable data hygiene tool. In seconds, you can verify that your contact numbers, emails, and physical addresses are still current, and replace them if they’re not. If you have some IT resources available (in-house or via a third-party vendor), you can integrate Spokeo directly with your CMS using its powerful application programming interface (API). If you don’t have those resources, use Spokeo’s new batch-search capability instead to update your contact information en masse without programming.
5. Use Automation to Lighten Your Management Load
It’s absolutely possible to be successful while using handwritten, hard-copy customer records. But keeping your records digitally makes it possible to do more with them, and do it faster, and — best of all — often do it without needing your own time, input, or intervention.
If you’re using a full-blown CMS or CRM, you’ll often be able to set up automated routines for specific tasks, such as directly importing and formatting new client data, or updated pricing and availability from your suppliers. If you receive an incoming email from a potential customer, for example, your CRM could automatically import the contact information, create a new record in your chosen format, and flag it for follow-up.
6. Lean In on Contact Data Enrichment
Often, the contact data you’ll start off with is incomplete or only partially accurate. A top-tier human-centric search product like Spokeo for Business can help you back-fill the data that you’re missing and help you identify and correct any errors.
As covered above, good data hygiene simply means that the information in your records is accurate and up to date. Data enrichment, however, means that it’s complete and well-rounded. Your data will organically become richer as you continue to do business with an existing specific client or supplier, for example, as you have more interactions with them and get to know both the company’s culture and your vendor contacts or clients as people.
That’s not the case with new leads or prospects, where you’re starting from scratch. Spokeo for Business can help with that. When you acquire potential leads through referrals, at networking events, or through your marketing campaigns, searching them with Spokeo can help you build a fully-rounded picture of them as individuals, right from the start. The additional data you can access through quick searches, where available, includes (but isn’t limited to):
- Where they live, and where they’ve lived in the past.
- Their age and estimated net worth.
- A full suite of additional phone numbers and email addresses.
- Their public social media profiles, even those that are under pseudonymous usernames.
Understanding who you’re dealing with as people is an important step toward building a better connection. This kind of data enrichment — especially their social media — not only helps you do that, it provides more and better raw material for the analytics tools in your CMS or CRM. That, in turn, helps in all of your marketing and decision-making.
The Right Tool For the Job
Your company will evolve through many stages as it grows and matures, but the need to sell effectively will never go away. That means you and your sales teams (as you grow) will always need to manage contacts effectively, and will always need your data to be accurate, accessible, and comprehensive.
A CMS or CRM product can help you greatly, and you should be able to find one of those tools that’s appropriate for the size and budget of your company. Spokeo for Business can provide an equally powerful tool to manage the data enrichment and hygiene side of that equation, empowering you to maximize the value from your software investment. Our usage-based subscription plans can scale with you, whether you’re a handful of people working from a garage or on the verge of outgrowing the SMB label.
To learn more about how Spokeo for Business can help you manage your leads and contacts, to see a demonstration of its capabilities, or to evaluate it hands-on in a no-cost trial, reach out to our team today.
Sources
Salesforce: The History of Salesforce
European Business Review: Why Data Hygiene is the Backbone of Successful Lead Generation