Running a business is never easy. You’ll always have a lot on your to-do list—from increasing brand awareness and promoting your products to converting leads into customers and performing post-sale follow-ups.
With all the data you’ll have to deal with in between, a disorganized contact system can cost your business lost productivity and sales.
This article shares some tips on how to stay organized with your business contacts and stay on top of your existing leads to maximize business relationships.
1. Choose The Right CRM
Short for Customer Relationship Management, CRM is at the heart of a strong contact management strategy. It’s where you store all contact data and record all interactions with every lead and customer.
This makes a CRM system an important tool to get right in your business. Take the time to look for different CRMs and find one with the right fit for your business size, industry, sales, and marketing strategy.
For instance, while you can opt for advanced CRM systems suitable for large corporations, a good personal CRM should suffice in boosting your contact organization, managing workflows, and maintaining solid business relationships if you’re a startup or small business owner.
Take note, however, that as your business grows, your CRM software also needs to grow with it. This can mean adjusting your strategy, upgrading your plan, or even switching tools as you scale.
For example, if your business operations depend on reservations, you need top-notch appointment scheduling software and booking systems like the ones offered by SuperSaaS.
If you truly want to scale your business, tools like these can help you book more appointments, fill your schedule, and ultimately increase your revenue.
2. Have A Centralized Contact Database
Contact data plays a critical role in every department of your business. The problem is that different departments collect and store contact details in different ways.
For the sales team, they organize data in a CRM. Marketers collect contact data like contact numbers and email addresses and store them in email marketing platforms and lead generation apps.
Email marketing has never been easier. It can be maximized using tools like email-to-SMS software, which enable marketers to communicate with customers by simply sending emails from their computer, tablet or phone and having them received as text messages.
Since SMS messaging is currently the most popular method of communication, you can’t go wrong if you implement these solutions as part of your marketing strategy. Other departments such as support and HR have their own systems for storing and managing contacts as well.
These different systems and platforms often don’t work well together. To prevent these problems, you’ll need to have a centralized database that all departments have access to.
By creating a centralized database, you can find all the key insights you need in a single place. It can also make it easy for other teams to find data and break down information silos between teams and departments.
In general, your CRM will serve as your centralized contact database. Thus, it’s important to follow the first step and choose the right one.
3. Setup Automatic Syncing
To start centralizing your contact data, you need to identify the main apps and software in your stack that collects the data.
Then, establish the necessary app integration to allow seamless syncing of data with your CRM. While it’s a good idea to limit the number of software and apps you use in your business, you’ll still likely end up with dozens of tools.
Automated syncing keeps everything updated between your business devices and apps. It keeps the right data in sync between all your business tools. Also, by syncing your apps, you empower your employees from different teams with easy access to critical data. This way, your employees are in better positions to stay productive and focus on strategic tasks instead of spending time on repetitive and tedious manual processes.
4. Spring Clean Your Contact Data
The digital world is massive and only continues to double in size every 2 years. However, a lot of this data is actually useless.
With big data, the biggest problem is identifying which data is valuable and which isn’t. In terms of organizing your contacts, bad data will prevent you from delivering the right message through the right channels.
Bad data includes outdated, duplicate, and incorrect contact information. It can also be contact data that you’re not supposed to retain because of privacy regulations like GDPR.
This is why it’s important to keep your contact data properly organized and clean before making major changes to your contact management processes.
For businesses that have a large contact list, it’s virtually impossible to manually clean your contact data. So, try using a smart system or platform for unifying multiple data sources and getting rid of bad data.
5. Contact Segmentation
Contact segmentation is one of the best ways to organize your contact data. Unless your business has a very niche audience, you shouldn’t send out the same messages and promotions to everyone on your contact list.
Segmenting your contact list ensures personalization, allowing you to send relevant marketing and promotions relevant to a specific audience.
Even if your business caters to a widely similar demographic, you’ll still need to segment your contacts into different groups—for instance, leads, existing customers, and cold contact.
The best way to segment your contact list will depend on your business and the sort of people it caters to. Some businesses segment their lists based on where, when, or how they signed up.
Others group their audience based on demographic attributes. You can use a combination of these grouping tactics depending on what works best for you.
6. Ensure Security
Protecting your contact data is one of the most important aspects of contact organization and management.
Thus, you need to take every necessary step to prevent your contact data from being exposed to cybersecurity risks and hacked by cybercriminals.
To mitigate these risks and keep your access management routine efficient and secure, it’s important to keep in mind the best practices for user access review.
Some of these practices include developing a user access review policy, creating a formalized user access review procedure, implementing role-based access control and least privileged access, and granting temporary – not permanent – user access.
Also, you need to implement an opt-in that allows people to give their permission for you to send different kinds of messaging communications.
This allows you to build a high-quality and organized contact list with contacts who actually want to hear from you while ensuring that you’re on the right side of the law.
Lastly, organizing your contact data also boils down to that practical and technical level of data backups.
Regardless of what contact management strategies you have in place or what kind of solutions you have within your business, you need to conduct regular data backups.
Data backups allow you to have a secure archive of your important contact data and information.
Take Away
And there you have it! For your business to grow sustainably and successfully, you need to have a strong contact organization and management strategy in place.
Follow the above tips to organize your contact right now, ensuring business productivity and skyrocketing sales.
Ella Marcotte
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