Meaningful relationships – with colleagues, customers, influencers, investors, potential leads, clients and other people you might need to work with in the future – are at the core of every successful business. That’s a lot of relationships to build and maintain…
Make sure your team is in sync
Building strong relationships with colleagues outside of work is great for boosting collaboration and knowledge sharing inside work.
What’s more, research suggests that people that have friends at work are happier and more engaged than those who don’t.
Leadership writer and speaker Christine M. Riordan, stresses the importance of workplace friendships in this article for the Harvard Business Review…
“People in organizations need to work together. So, managers and employees need to foster collaboration, trust, personal relationships, fun, and support. In an increasingly global and virtual environment, challenges for employees and managers will be to cultivate these personal relationships. Fostering friendships takes proactive effort.”
We have a shared address book for the Contactzilla team. Because we’ve all synced the address book to our phones, every time someone joins the company, or changes their phone number, their details are automatically updated in our phones.
This makes it a lot easier for us to arrange to meet up outside of work. For example, 2 weeks after Mike joined the team, I got a message from him about an event we were both attending. We never exchanged numbers and even though I hadn’t saved Mike’s details manually, his name still came up in my phone.
Start by creating a ‘team’ address book and sharing it with all of your colleagues. If you give everyone ‘read/write’ access, each team member can add and edit their own contact details at any time. Make sure your team sync the address book with their phone (we support iOS and Android) to stay up to date at all times.
Keep notes on clients
Salespeople have been doing it for years, but there’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t keep notes on the people they work with.
Mike Scanlin, CEO of Born to Sell, recommends recording ‘keywords’ for everyone that you meet…
“When you get back to the office, enter those notes into your address book or contact system. Later, you will want to be able to enter keywords like ‘sailing’ or ‘wireless’ or ‘French’ and find all the people you know who match that keyword. Doing keyword mining on your own contacts will pay dividends for years.”
Use Contactzilla to quickly and easily add notes to contacts, without the need for a complicated CRM system.
Manage relationships as a team
Have you ever found that you don’t have a contact number or email address for a client, co-worker, freelancer, or supplier and had to ask around the office to get one?
This problem was the inspiration behind Contactzilla. Sure, managing your own contacts is simple enough (as long as you’re organised!), but once you need to start managing relationships as a team, contact management gets a bit trickier.
Using shared address books means any member of your team can update contacts or add notes. Say your finance department call a client to chase an invoice, and the client wants to let you know about a change of phone number at the same time. The finance team can update contact details in the ‘clients’ address book, and rest assured that everyone else who needs it will have access to the latest, up to date phone number for that client.
Keeping your contacts up to date and well organised can be a massive help when you have lots of business relationships to maintain. If you’re looking for a simple solution to complicated contact management, try Contactzilla free today!
