Previous posts, here and here, talked about making initial contact and identifying something shared – a person, place, passion, experience, etc. That “shared something” serves to connect you for your initial conversation, and helps them remember you later on.
Once you’ve made that initial contact, followup is your next challenge. It is the step that is most frequently not completed, due to lack of tools, process, and time. But no followup = no return, so take a few minutes to protect the investment of time you’ve already made in networking. Select a system, set up a process and stick to it.
System considerations first – you’re using some system now to save the information about your contacts even if it’s only keeping it in your head (not recommended, by the way). Outlook is by far the most frequently used, followed by Gmail, Yahoo and then a plethora of other email, webmail and database – desktop or hosted – alternatives.
It’s no surprise that the first three alternatives mentioned are email and webmail because contact management has been largely subsumed into those systems and their address books. All three offer users the ability to store limited information on contacts and integrate with a calendar. Outlook supports more data, but it’s time-consuming to enter and hard to organize.
Factors to consider in selecting a system include accessibility, flexibility, complexity, ease of use, how much and what kind of data you need, the size of your network and what you want to accomplish with the system.
As a longtime consumer of contact management software, I migrated from Teamup to Goldmine to ACT, and finally to Outlook. I found all of them lacking in flexibility, accessibility and – most of all – too complicated and time consuming to use. That’s when and why WeMeUs came to be. WeMeUs is designed to organize and track people, not companies and relationships rather than business processes. It also has a unique focus on automating and streamlining at multiple points to save users’ time. Because it is web-based, I can access my data can be accessed anywhere, and I no longer have to worry about Outlook crashing and losing my contact information.
Building your own solution is extreme, I’ll admit! What software or system are you using, why and how has it helped you?