How to Organize Your Contacts to Maximize Your Business Relationships

Contactzilla is simple, secure contact management that blends into your existing workflow seamlessly. Share address books with your colleagues, collaborate on keeping contacts up to date, sync with your phone and never be without the right phone number or email address again. Find out more.

Keeping track of your business contacts and relationships can be a nightmare.

I have 3 devices, 3 email accounts, more social profiles than I care to admit and a combination of personal and business contacts. Having a broad network is amazing but if you’re not organizing and keeping track of your contacts, you risk losing some really important business relationships.

Here’s 6 ways to organize your contacts so you can really get the most of out them…

1. Centralize

Chances are you have contacts all over the place. You might have an email address and phone number for one person, a Twitter handle for another, a LinkedIn connection with another… the list goes on.

The first step to organizing your contacts is to get all of this information together in one place. Whether you use Contactzilla, a spreadsheet or an old fashioned paper address book, make sure you centralize your contacts so you can find everyone in one place.

With Contactzilla, it’s easy to import contact details from a variety of sources. If you choose to create your own spreadsheet or paper address book, this will be a lot longer and more painful, but trust me, you’ll be grateful next time you need to contact John Smith and can’t remember how you’d usually connect with him…

2. Categorize

Your contacts are all different so it makes sense to categorize them accordingly. Do you really need your next potential investor stored next to your friend Mike who’s cupcake business you occasionally use for staff birthday treats?

Dan Schawbel, author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success, believes that in order to organize your contacts, you need to have specific categories in mind…

“Consider things like the strength of your relationship, how important the relationship is to you, the last time you connected with them, three things about them, what company they work for, their location, and their contact information (e-mail, phone, address, LinkedIn).”

You might want to keep this information in a dedicated spreadsheet, add labels to your contacts or simply keep notes for each person…

3. Keep notes

How many emails have you sent today? How many phone calls have you made or received? What did you spend 10 minutes discussing with your colleague earlier?

You probably have a lot of conversations every day, but do you actually remember them?

There’s plenty of ways to keep notes on your everyday communications. In Contactzilla, you can keep notes against your contacts that are stored in chronological order. You could keep a paper diary of conversations that you have each day or use Evernote’s mobile app to take notes on the go.

Lesley Spencer Pyle, founder and president of the HBWM.com network, believes you should keep personal notes on your contacts..

“Your customer may provide cues that might be your gateway to providing a personal touch. If they indicate that their child is heading off to their first year of college, or they are taking a long awaited vacation, jot these things down on a calendar so you can ask how things went when you do a follow-up call.”

However, you choose to do it, keeping notes on your conversations is key to getting the most out of your contacts.

4. Merge your social networks

Social networks are a great way to stay in touch with your business contacts, offering them support when they need it and asking for advice when you’re in need.

However, you can lose hours every day tracking your favourite people on social networks to see if you can help each other. That’s if you’re not using the right tools…

Try using a social network manager like Hootsuite to keep track of your social networks. Hootsuite even allows you to collaborate with your team on social profiles and access all of your social analytics in one place. You’ll save hours without having to worry about missing out on great opportunities.

5. Be secure

When people give me their contact details, I keep them secure. Why? Because there’s nothing worse than giving out your phone number and email address and receiving a load of sales calls and spam from people you don’t know.

Don’t give out other peoples’ contact details to someone unless you know for a fact that it will be beneficial to both parties.

However you choose to manage your contacts, make sure they’re safe. That could mean using a secure, encrypted service like Contactzilla or locking your address book away in your filing cabinet at the end of the day. Either way, have respect for your contacts’ privacy. If you don’t, you will lose them.

6. Share your contacts

This might sound a little contradictory to “be secure” but sharing your contacts with your colleagues can really simplify your workflow and can even make your contacts feel special.

We created Contactzilla because we were getting frustrated having to ask around the office for contact details for clients, freelancers, suppliers and even other members of staff. By sharing our contacts across the company, it became a lot easier for the right people to get in touch with each other, without interrupting someone every 10 minutes.

Make sure that everyone in your company has access to up to date contact details, especially for regular clients and customers.

Do you have a regular client who phones up every other day? Make them feel special by letting them know you have their number saved instead of making them repeat it every time they have to leave a message.

Contactzilla is simple, secure contact management that blends into your existing workflow seamlessly. Share address books with your colleagues, collaborate on keeping contacts up to date, sync with your phone and never be without the right phone number or email address again. Find out more.

Photo by Raymond Rasmusson on Unsplash