Leak-free System for your Contact

We all know how important it is to keep up your relationships in business but how confident are you in your tools?



The importance of a leak-free system for recording the contact details of your colleagues, customers, potential business partners or anyone you know cannot be over emphasised.

The standard response to such a question is they keep it in Outlook, Gmail or some other mail system. Others worship at the alter of Blackberry or have the company CRM forced upon them while others keep it "old school" with a paper address book or organiser. The point they are missing is that these are stores for some of your contact information not a system and certainly not a complete leak-free system.

Ask your self the following questions about your current system, what if:

• You lose your phone/PDA/organiser, could I recover everything in a day
• your employer let you go taking PC, phone, PDA back with no notice
• I need to call an acquaintance that I have never emailed before
• I lost my electronic data, do I have a recent paper copy
  

The details of my own system are for another post but you need to look at how you are recording your contact information and ask the big question, do I have one place (master record) for all my contact details and have I a procedure to ensure it is kept fresh.

Great post from InsideCRM - Blogs of 2008

There is a great post from Chris Bucholtz over on InsideCRM summing up his pick of CRM blogs in 2008. You may not agree with all his choices but the list contain some great reading.

John Jantsch Duct Tape Marketing is a personal favourite, great mix of CRM, marketing and enterprise

Give it a look, it will introduce you to some thought leaders in crm (in its broadest sense)

Words from Larry Hochman

"Collaboration is the hallmark of Value Creation"

Larry Hochman.

Photography by Conor McCabe from whitespace.ie,

I recently attended Larry Hochman's excellent presentation hosted in Dublin by Marketing Age.  The theme was customer relationship management in an information age.  To get an idea of the quality and content here's a video

The presentation left me with as many questions as it did answers.  

• What does it mean to be more compeditive in a changing world?
  
• Is agility more important than planning?
  
• Is collaboration where the real value creation is?
  
• What is the "promise gap" of my business?
• What are we doing to increase loyalty
• Are our own customers our biggest competitors? 

In searching for the answers to these and many other questions he did offered some clues (it would have been a bit depressing otherwise):

• In order to adapt and change you must  be free of denial, nostalgia and arrogance
  
• You must meet the customers real demands
  
• There are no longer passive customer but co-creators
  
• You need to create "platforms" to give them a voice.
• Ethics will determine your fate

We were left with a challenge "What will you do as an individual to make a difference?"

Larry is a great speaker and your feel the sincerity in his words.  I took away quite a few ideas and even put one or two into practice.  If you get the chance hear him speak.  To use one of the quotes from the day:

"The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas- but to make them forget the old one" - John Maynard Keynes

The Cure for Unpleasant Tasks

There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don't like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don't spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.
Michael Dell


We all have those tasks we've been putting off because they are just not much fun. The call to ask for a project extension, the renewal that will require difficult negotiation or the client who has a complaint to be addressed. The natural tendency is to put it off these unpleasant tasks.

There is one simple solution get it over with quickly.

In work relations there is a natural tendency to avoid confrontation, the unpleasant or difficult. We don't want to hurt someone's feelings or our own.

As someone who has to do this daily I can attest to the effectiveness of this strategy of "get it over with quickly". Some observations that may encourage you on this:

• A problem is rarely as serious as you think it is
• A stitch in time saves considerably more than nine
• Superior relationships are forged in adversity
• The client always wants to help
• You always feel better when you've made a start
• Momentum counts
  

Something to try out
Tomorrow morning take your email in box, stop the refresh, and starting from the top start and in sequence: replying, deleting or writing down actions for each email. Do this as fast as you can, 30-60 seconds per mail (momentum counts).

I guarantee that in one hour you will have cut through emails that have been hanging around for days, possibly weeks and feel great.

If you are interested in hearing more about these kind of work strategies check out a favourite podcast of mine by Stever Robbins, Get It Done Guy.

Wisdom in others questions

"Judge others by their questions rather than by their answers." - Voltaire



I found an interesting resource online relating to Relationship Management in an unexpected place, LinkedIn: Answers. Although there are many topics to choose but for now go to Sales and then search for Customer Relationship Management. Once there you will see lots of interesting questions and some great answers.

To get the maximum benefit I suggest you subscribe to the RSS for this category. Once you get a bit of confidence you might want to add your own 2-cents!

What I'm Reading - From Acorns..how to build your brilliant business from scratch

If you want to pick up a trick on great business relations ask an entrepreneur.






Just finished reading From Acorns...how to build your brilliant business from scratch by Caspian Woods. I posted a brief review on Amazon but what readers of this blog might find more interest is the motivation behind my choice.

I admire entrepreneurs for a variety of reasons but mostly it's for their unconventional think. Let's be honest, they wouldn't last very long in the business world if they did the same thing as the guys already ahead of them. This gives rise to all sorts of ideas in their writing, ideas that you and I can very often apply to our situations.

As well as having to be great sales people they also have to be excellent at networking. This book has a few great ideas on both topics and the author, through excellent design, makes them easy to find. The book is worth a read but the genre (Starting a Business) is always worth exploring what ever your interest.

Top 20 CRM Blogs

InsideCRM had an interesting post today on the the Top 20 CRM Blogs

By CRM we mean the solutions as opposed to the role. It's worth checking out given that anyone serious about managing the business relationships needs tools to help.

Chris Bucholtz blog is very good anyway and I'd recommend it if you want to keep abreast of the technology and tools out there supporting CRM. (also check out his blogroll for other sources)