Power Networking — What the Right Tool Can Do
Using the right tool for networking, marketing and sales has totally changed the way I do business. It’s gotten me thousands of dollars of work I wouldn’t have otherwise had, and it saves me hours of time each week.
Let me share with you a story that represents the composite experience of how I now sell a product or service.
I was sitting at my desk working on a budget, a little bit behind deadline, when I received the call. Normally I wouldn’t have taken it, but after the phone rang once, a pop-up window on my computer informed me it was Susan X, a very hot prospect. The computer immediately displayed a screen that showed the summary of my last call with Susan, along with “personal interest” information about her.
When I took the call, I was ready. "Hi, Bill, this is Susan X," she said. "Oh," I said, "It's wonderful to hear from you. I thought you'd still be taking Joey to Sweetbriar. How did that go?" She was surprised and pleased that I remembered, and we chatted about her daughter for a few minutes. (I recorded a few more "personal interest" facts while we did, and I briefly reviewed my notes on the past two calls we had exchanged.)
After a while, Susan got down to business. She had a question about the terms that I had specified for the work I had proposed. From the list of files associated with Susan, I clicked on the proposal and it popped up in my word processor. I was able to clarify the area she had a question about without skipping a beat.
Susan asked whether I was free to start a week from that Monday, and the integrated calendar showed only a tentative appointment that I could easily postpone for a day.
As soon as Susan said that she wanted to proceed, I clicked another button, which faxed off a sample contract — complete with her company’s name and the terms we had discussed. It reached her while we were still talking, and she expressed interest in a discounted additional service that the contract mentioned. The extra sale added 50% to my profit!
As soon as Susan hung up, I selected the "new sale" process. This process sent Susan a fax confirming the sale and scheduled a follow-up thank you note three days hence. It also scheduled the five other actions that we needed to accomplish before next Monday — two for me and three for my staff. It automatically assigned the actions to my staff members and gave them a pop-up notification about them.
For years, I've used a personal information manager (PIM). I've used Lotus Organizer, Sidekick, Schedule+, Ecco and Outlook. They have been great for the basics: keeping my address book, calendar and to do list. I've been able to search for that mysterious phone call I couldn't remember and easily mark recurring events and tasks in my computer. I've been able to send and receive email from them so I didn't have to have two address books. They've even allowed me to automatically put a person's name and address on letters and faxes I create with my word processor.
But with all that, I felt that something was missing — that the tool I was using didn't fully support critical areas of my business in networking, marketing and client support.
Then I purchased a more powerful type of software package — a contact manager. The one I purchased was GoldMine; its major competitor is ACT!, which has similar functionality. The rest of this article talks about GoldMine, but other contact managers support most of the features — I don't get any money from GoldMine for talking about it!
The difference was amazing. As I have grown used to the tool, I now recommend it to any professional or office that is heavily involved in coordinating actions related to a large number of contacts or does networking or sales.
Purchase the right contact manager with optional add-on products, and customize it correctly, and you can do any number of people-related things more easily. As GoldMine says in its advertising literature, your contact manager can turn contacts into gold. Some of the features that you may find valuable are listed below.
Auto-Dialing. I make 20-50 calls a day, and this is a real timesaver. I bring up the list in GoldMine of calls to make, and I double-click on the person I want to call, bringing up his record. When I press Alt-1, GoldMine dials the call and displays the dialogue box containing the call details that I can fill in to make a historical record of the call. GoldMine automatically records the time and duration of the call, and I merely click on a check box if I need to make a follow-up call. Recording busy signals and voice mails and rescheduling the calls for tomorrow is a snap.
Automatic Correspondence. GoldMine lists the dozen or so letters that I customarily send out to prospects and clients. To send one of these letters, I merely select it from the list. GoldMine takes me to Word, pauses so I can edit the letter if needed, and then prints it with the envelope. If I select "fax" instead of "print," GoldMine faxes the letter (sans envelope) on its appropriate fax letterhead instead. Similar functionality is available in email templates. If I need to write a letter from scratch, I merely select the empty letter template. The person's name and address still appear at the top and it automatically creates the second page header along with the envelope.
Networking. Networking, in large part, consists of maintaining a relationship with people, and I have found that GoldMine helps me do this in many ways. First, I can classify contacts according to their industry or interests, and send emails, send "fax tips" or print mailing labels for newsletters focus on one particular group of contacts. Second, I can create a window with any number of customized fields so that I can ask about children by name, as well as remember people's career accomplishments, personal vacation plans, professional affiliations, etc., when they call. Custom fields can also capture people's anniversaries, their birthdays and their children's birthdays, and GoldMine reminds me two weeks in advance to send cards. Further, GoldMine allows me to record relationships between contacts so that I "see" the people in their professional and personal context. There's even an add-on to GoldMine that allows you to automatically search the Web using a dozen different search engines for information about the people and/or their companys.
Follow-Up. There's nothing I hate more than losing business because I neglected to follow-up on a lead. And, I'm glad to say, this rarely happens to me anymore because of two of GoldMine's features. First, whenever an action is completed, there's a follow-up box that I automatically check. This habit has saved me a lot of aggravation. In addition, "Automated Processes" permit you to schedule an entire sequence of upcoming actions by picking the process from a list. This can be especially useful in any type of sales cycle in which you may wish to call and/or send materials to a prospect in a systematic way.
Automatic Information Gathering. If you really want to get sophisticated, GoldMine will support you. If you have a website with an information form on it, you can set up things so that the form sends the information to GoldMine. GoldMine then checks its database; creates a new record for the prospect if needed; prints, faxes or sends emails to the client without your touching anything; and automatically schedules calls or other follow-up activities at your discretion. Similarly, with an add-on product, GoldMine can capture information about callers who call when you're not there, add the fact they called to their record, create a new record for callers who aren't already in GoldMine and even schedule a follow-up call if you like.
Workgroup Features. If you have a staff that works together to sell or provide services to clients, GoldMine is completely workgroup-enabled. Every action is assigned to a GoldMine user (you, by default), and can easily be assigned to another user at will. All users can share a central GoldMine database, so everyone with proper authorization can easily see every action that's taken with a client. You can automatically assign new clients to users by geographic territory, product offering, etc. And if some of your group members work on the road, they can completely synchronize their copy of GoldMine with the main one as soon as they reconnect to the network - or even by email if they prefer. If you use a telemarketing staff, GoldMine provides telemarketing if-then scripts, automatically assigns the right number of calls per marketer and provides sophisticated reports on the number of calls made, calls completed and sales closed.
There are many other features — a ZIP code lookup, an integrated "info center" and the ability to synchronize with devices such as the Palm Pilot — but by now you're probably getting the idea. A good contact manager can become the centerpiece of the way you do business every day.
Yes, and you should recognize them before you make the decision to upgrade to a contact manager.
First, although PIMs are free (with a desktop suite) or relatively inexpensive to purchase alone, contact managers can cost up to $300 a person, and they have sophisticated protection to keep you from sharing them illegally.
Second, the programmability of the contact manager comes at the expense of the need to program it. This either costs you time (and the learning curve is fairly steep) or money to hire a VAR to customize the system for your use. Fortunately, many people can use most of the features "out of the box" and do the customization piece by piece.
Third, contact managers are not as intuitively easy to use as PIMs - especially PIMs, such as Organizer, that look like a day organizer. Contact managers have a different underlying concept: Everything (phone calls, appointments, tasks) must link to an existing contact, and the contact is the center point of all activity. Like anything else, however, after a couple weeks you get used to it and eventually wonder how you did it any other way.