Do you keep your business contacts guarded like a secret weapon? You worked so hard to build those relationships and you want to take credit for them, right?
In my experience, collaborating with my team on business contacts makes for a much more productive work environment and helps us to strengthen our business relationships.
Here’s how collaborating on business contacts has helped our business…
Make your contacts feel special
Allowing your whole team to collaborate on your business contacts makes it easier to keep notes on conversations any team member has had with a customer or client. These notes can be the key to making your customers feel special.
For example, if John calls and mentions, in passing, that he’s taking a trip to Paris, the team member he speaks to can make a note of that against his contact details. When John calls again in 3 months, you’ll be able to ask about his trip, even if it wasn’t you he initially told about it. This kind of personal communication shows your customers that you care about and value them.
Do you have customers or clients who call the office on regular basis? Sharing contacts across your whole company means you no longer have to take down Jane’s phone number every time she rings. Make her feel valued by letting her know that you have her number saved instead of making her repeat it every time she calls.
President of Kauffman FastTrac, Alana Muller, believes personal connections like these are key to your company’s success…
“People like doing business with companies they connect with personally, with companies they trust. Sure, price is a factor, and your company must demonstrate its value and be competitive, but, believe me, that is the easy part.”
Stop annoying your colleagues
How often do you find yourself asking around the office for a client’s phone number or email address? Before we created Contactzilla, members of our team were asking for contact details several times every day, slowing them down as well as the people they were interrupting. In fact, this problem was the main inspiration behind Contactzilla.
Because of this problem, we decided to create an app that would allow teams to share address books so that everyone could stay up to date with the latest contact details for clients, suppliers, freelancers and other team members.
However you choose to manage your contacts, keeping them all in one central repository that can be accessed and edited by everyone who needs them will save you time and constant interruptions from your co-workers.
Stay up to date
Allowing everyone to add, edit and update contact details in your shared address books makes it easier to keep contact details up to date.
I have around 3-4 ways of getting in touch with most of my contacts including phone numbers, email addresses and social accounts.
Ideally, nobody’s contact details would ever change but unfortunately that’s not the case. Ask around your team and you’ll likely find that several people have different phone numbers for the same client, colleague or supplier. Enabling your team to collaborate on your address books means that if John tells Graham his new phone number, Graham can update it in the address book and everyone across the whole company has John’s up to date contact details. Easy!
Stay in touch with your team
We have a Contactzilla team shared address book so everyone in the team has the contact details of everyone else. We find this is great for nurturing relationships within the team which we think is important for a truly productive and collaborative work environment. We find that when our team make friends outside of work, they collaborate better inside work.
Gretchen Rubin, author of Happier at Home, believes that forming friendships with colleagues has a number of happiness benefits…
“For most people, having strong friendships makes work more fun. Science supports this: having close relationships is essential to happiness, strengthens the immune system, and reduces anxiety.”
If you’d like to manage your contacts as a team, try Contactzilla for free today!
