Contact Management Concepts

Contact Management is the management of all tasks and information related to developing and maintaining business relationships. A Contact Manager effectively integrates the three most frequently used tools - a customer database, a calendar and a task list. It automates a variety of tasks business people face every day, including: • Finding and contacting new prospects and building business relationships by it's use • Following up with prospects and clients by telephone, fax, mail, and email • Sending product information, proposals, and quotes • Scheduling reminders, appointments, meetings and events • Scheduling multiple related activities based on business processes • Maintaining accurate records of all contact interactions • Generating reports for reviewing activities and client/account • Sharing up-to-date contact information in a team

Automating the process with Contact Management software

A contact manager helps you free up valuable time that you typically spend on routine administrative tasks. You can spend this time more profitably responding quickly to customer needs and following up with clients and business partners in a consistent and organized manner. As a result, you increase your effectiveness in building business relationships and growing your business.
The need for a contact manager is typically associated with salespeople. However, any businessperson who is externally focused and needs to grow his or her business can benefit significantly from a contact manager. Small business owners and managers can keep track of customers, vendors, and business partners such as suppliers. Consultants can manage client interactions as well as interactions with other consultants who provide complementary services

• Real estate agents can more effectively farm their territories by managing relationships
• Building contractors can coordinate subcontractors, suppliers, customers, and inspectors
• PR and advertising professionals can manage contact with all types of contacts
• Recruiters can track job candidates and clients to match people and companies faster
• Seminar and training professionals can manage interactions with instructors, promoters, attendees, facility managers, and equipment suppliers
• Manufacturers 'representatives can track transactions and interactions with manufacturers and customers
• Banking and financial professionals can maintain contacts with clients and financial providers.
These people have a great deal in common with salespeople. They are all running a business within their territory. Their major tasks are to find and target new prospects and to ensure the satisfaction of current customers. As a result, they all perform similar activities that can be automated and streamlined by a contact manager.

Improving Your Processes, Improving the Customer Life Cycle
Once you’ve gone through this analysis, you’ll have plenty of information, but you’re still at a high level in terms of understanding the problems. Start breaking down your gaps to identify the detailed process steps that contribute to your disconnects. Obviously, the greater the gap, the more opportunity there is to make improvements.

Drive out the root causes. Make sure you first look at how things are done today rather than rushing to address your gaps. A thorough but managed analysis of your current process will set the stage for why improvements are necessary and help prepare for the cultural aspects of process change.

Get and keep the right people involved. You’ll want to avoid the ivory tower syndrome by leveraging the knowledge of those in the trenches. Make sure you include an outside perspective by involving the customer or other outside parties.

Be specific and action oriented. As your improvements are identified, make sure that you have identified a delivery date and have assigned an owner who is empowered to make these actions happen.

It’s important to prioritize your improvement efforts in the right way. Remember that the key objective for your CRM efforts is to build a stronger bond with your customers. You want to be sure that your efforts increase the “throughput” of your organization as a whole, in order to deliver maximum value to the customer. Balance is important here.

Take the analogy of a water pipe, if you’re not maintaining consistent capacity from sales through delivery, you’re going to spring a leak or get backed up. For example, if you enhance the customer acquisition process so that you can sign up more customers, you better be well equipped to deliver the goods or services that are expected. Furthermore, if you’re not continuing to analyze your customer data and act on what it tells you, then you are missing out on the opportunity to increase that “capacity”, improving those relationships and enhancing the bottom line.