Conquering Contact Overload
- Posted January 6th, 2011
- Filed under: sales, Using BatchBook
Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of contacts you need to wade through every day? Not sure which contact to call on next, or which task should take precedence? You may be suffering from contact overload.
It is very easy to get to the point where you are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of contacts in your CRM. The good news is, with a few tweaks, it is also pretty easy to bring your contacts under control. When you do it right, you can build meaningful relationships with your most important contacts.
Minimize contacts
The first rule of thumb for controlling contact overload is to avoid having too many contacts in your system. Be realistic about what your business can accomplish. Thousands of cold leads from a list you bought may just get in the way of meaningful interactions with qualified prospects and active customers.
There is nothing wrong with a list of cold prospects that could turn into customers one day. Its just that you need to be strategic and organized in how you handle a large amount of contacts. It is far better to segment that list out from your active group of contacts that you are having ongoing interaction with.
Batchbook is best used to build and maintain relationships with customers and other important contacts (including qualified prospects). Focusing your primary efforts here will help you avoid the feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of people that you think you need to reach. Instead, move qualified leads and customers to the front of the line, and use Batchbook to better manage you relationships with them.
Maximize details
This piece of advice is sure to make already overburdened salespeople grimace. However, keeping better details on fewer contacts will help you stay on top of the relationships that are most important to your business.
Using SuperTags in Batchbook, you can track any kind of information about your contacts that you desire. This is great, because what is important to your business is different than what is important to a business down the street.
Of course, you shouldn’t get carried away here. Focus like a laser on the information that helps you book sales. Think carefully through what makes an ideal customer, and track the details that will help you identify your future ideal customers.
The details you track can go from simple (region, type of customer, size of potential sale) to complex (color preference, number of children, astrological sign). If you keep track of the right details, you will be able to quickly segment your contacts into useful lists, track success of marketing and sales efforts, and find ways to build better relationships with whole groups of current and future customers.
Create working lists
Once you start doing a good job of tracking key details about your contacts using SuperTags, you can begin building useful lists that you can work from to book more business and track your success.
In Batchbook, you can build a custom list based on a wide variety of information, including SuperTag data. This means you can quickly build a list of last year’s customers, or a list of prospects who prefer the color green, or even a list of prospects that you almost booked, but for some reason the deal fell apart.
With a good list, you can develop a more focused approach to sales and marketing. Instead of working through your entire contact database to drum up business, you can take a few weeks and focus on your list of customers that you need to set up a repeat sale with.
Keep lists current
One of the neat features of a Batchbook list is that it will provide live information. This means that if it is built on a SuperTag search for contacts that have expressed interest in your product, but who have not yet bought, it will only show those contacts. So if you book a sale with one of those contacts, you can simply change the SuperTag information, and the contact will automatically be removed from the list. In this way, you can use lists to work through your sales and marketing efforts and to monitor and track your goals. It is a great feeling to watch a list of prospects get smaller while a list of new customers gets larger.
So, no excuses. Batchbook provides the tools neccessary to overcome contact overload. You do not need to struggle to stay on top of your contact related tasks, hope that you don’t forget to send important emails, and randomly pick one prospect out of many to call on today.
Use the tools in Batchbook to get and stay organized. Then, one by one, knock off your business growth goals.
Image by graeme_newcomb via Flickr
** Add customisable tabs, eg Leads has its own tab.**
Nice article. I imagine there are quite a few users, myself included suffering from this. Batchbook does indeed include all the tools required to tackle this issue however I would like to make a suggestion on how I believe this could be improved. I migrated over to Batchbook from Pipeline deals and am glad I did. There was one thing however that I really liked… the fact that leads are treated separately to contacts and given their own tab.
You are correct in that you can simply use supertags and lists but the visual representation of seeing leads as their own entity by way of its own tab would be the perfect addition to an already great system.
In addition I would say there are 3 main categories ideally each with own tab: Clients (customers that have purchased or expressed interest); Leads (potential customers with little or no previous contact); Contacts (everyone else).
Continuing the Batchbook tradition I imagine the best approach would be to have customisable tabs. Essentially a list could be given tab status and the tabs could be placed in any order as required.
Please let me know what you think.