Contact management is one of the keys to successful networking. If you’ve been in the networking game for a long time now, you’ll more than likely say the same. It’s all about staying on top of your contacts and knowing when to engage with them, besides, of course, acquiring fresh ones from time to time through contacts sharing.
Doing these forms a solid foundation for smooth Business Relationship Management. That being said, it may be less difficult for you to do these steps if you have a reliable platform to use. One amazing option available now is a Smart Networking Platform that ensures smooth, hassle-free management that will only make your networking life a whole lot easier.
What Are the Usual Stumbling Blocks in Efficient Contact Sharing and Contact Management?
Control. That’s probably one of the main hurdles to better contact management.
- Without it, you’re likely to just look on helplessly as your contact book fills up with names of persons you no longer have any business connections with.
- Without it, it gets harder to remember important details and, more importantly, know the most ideal times to set meetings with clients as part of your follow-up strategy.
- Without it, you’ll have no choice but to just be carried away by the current of COVID restrictions, desperately looking for rare opportunities to share your contact information.
- Without it, you won’t be able to fully keep track of and harness the data that your contacts share on chat platforms.
Lack of control pretty much encompasses the management issues prevalent in professional networking. With that in mind, the proposed answer by Contact Exchange Solutions to this lingering question is relatively simple: give as much of it to networkers.
How Can an Enterprise Contact Management Platform Help?
With its on-point name, it’s fairly obvious that you can use an Enterprise Contact Management Platform to tackle the issues involving sharing and managing contacts. In fact, it’s actually purpose-built to achieve those two essential networking goals. Let’s start with how it can assist networkers when sharing contacts.
Seamless Contactless Networking
And we mean this in the best way possible. After all, one of the most efficient tools found in this platform is the Digital Business Cards you can use with them.
- You’ll be able to create multiple profiles with these digital cards. These profiles can be shared with specific individuals based on the industry or niche they’re in, allowing you to build them in a more organized manner.
- As for the sharing part, in platforms like StayTouch, you can do this without having to be in direct contact with the person with whom you want to share contacts. You only need to place your respective phones next to each other and the transfer of information will be done automatically after a single click. Again, the entire process is contact-free.
- Another way is through a messaging tool where you can keep track of key details shared while chatting with each one of your contacts.
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Less complicated way to update contacts.
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Remembering information about each contact becomes less complicated with the help of organized notes.
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Set and manage meetings minus the usual hassles.
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Support for various CRM integrations.
Considering the restrictions in place due to the pandemic, these features will make sure you won’t break them while never losing the opportunity and capability to build your enterprise’s network. It’s a simple solution that doesn’t take any extra effort and time, resources that almost any serious networker can’t get enough of.
A Boon for More Productive Contacts Management
Of course, contacts sharing is just half of the equation. Without nurturing your contacts through follow-ups, your efforts to build your network will be nothing short of futile. What value does a Business Relationship Management Platform bring in this regard? The short answer is plenty.
Contact management encompasses numerous aspects of networking, after all. These are but some of the features of these tools that are, more or less, intimately tied to them and designed with them in mind. These are the ones that pave the way to better productivity.
Let’s face it, one of the main reasons why we end up with an obsolete contact book is because we dread having to do the entire process manually every time. Either that or we’re just starved for time. Either way, it’s vital that
In these platforms, you get to this mostly automatically. You can update your business card just by scanning it and then proceed to store it on platforms like your email or phone, after all. Once done, it will even automatically send notifications to your other contacts informing them about the changes.
This is another challenge that a lot of networkers have to contend with. Unless you’re naturally gifted with dynamic memory, you’ll more than likely struggle to retain every specific detail about your client. And what does that often translate? Lost sales in most cases.
This won’t be the case if you’re able to take down audio notes on the go, right? That’s one of the ways a contact management platform aids in your networking. You can then mark and store these recordings in-app, which you can then access at a later date, particularly when the time for a follow-up is ripe. All these recorded notes can be organized easily and seamlessly.
With more invaluable data at your disposal and better organization as a whole, setting meetings at the most suitable times will not be as much of a struggle anymore. Most of these meetings can be arranged just by contacting the client through the app, as in the case of StayTouch. You can then keep a record of these meetings and pertinent details about them, which can be accessed at any time.
Most platforms even proceed to send you notifications should a specific meeting be due. Again, it’s all about proactive time- and effort-saving, which, in the end, has an immensely helpful, incremental effect that brings value to networkers over time.
These platforms are also often designed to accommodate the CRM software that your enterprise happens to be using. Of course, this is especially beneficial as it skips any kind of interruption its integration may create in your business process. More importantly, these tools complement each other and work in great synergy to ensure efficiency and productivity.
Conclusion
So what is an Efficient Contact Management Tool? It should not only provide workarounds to the biggest obstacles blocking your way to success. Rather, it should also make the whole process uncomplicated and less time-consuming.
It should, in short, be a bonafide innovation. It’s safe to say that the examples and features cited and highlighted here meet that criterion.
