Organize your Contacts for the New Year
What do you want for January?
This time of year-whether we like it or not—new business always seems to slow down, while holiday preparations speed up. Our prospective clients tell us to “call them after the holidays,” and we tell our vendors and potential vendors to “call us after the holidays.”
This got me thinking: What is everyone planning to do after the holidays?
January is the perfect time to renew our business efforts and implement new strategies. I always envision that I will hit some Magic Button on January 2nd (I like to take down my Christmas decorations on the 1st) and new clients will come running to me.
Note to self: Ask for a Magic Button for Christmas.
But what would the Magic Button, if there was one, actually do?
If your goal is to “Hit it hard in January” one of the best things you can do is get your contacts in order. For today the magic button will go through and make sure all your contacts are entered into both your phone contacts and your email system and everyone is up to date with an email address, phone number, and mailing address. Even without a magic button, we can get this done before the holiday cards need to go out.
Where is Your Contact List’s Primary Location?
If you have contacts in a variety of locations it can be hard to find the most up-to-date information. Choosing a primary contact location is your first step for getting your contacts under control. Obviously, there are pros and cons for the different contact management systems and some of you will already have a powerful CRM or other professional systems you use, but here we are talking about your everyday people. People you need to call, email and visit. It is time to make sure you have up to date information when you need it.
About your phone contacts:
We use our phones all the time, phone contacts are easily accessible and you can update them on the spot. That’s great, but there is a real risk that you may damage or lose your phone and lose your contacts—disaster. This risk can be completely eliminated by syncing your phone contacts with your primary email contacts. Check the settings on your smartphone to make sure you are set up this way.
About your email contacts:
Properly set up, your email contacts and your phone contacts can be automatically synchronized. I highly recommend that you make this your first priority. We send emails and make phone calls to stay in touch with our people and this is the easiest way to make sure information is up to date.
Be aware that phone contacts and email contacts are prone to duplication for a variety of reasons. This can be an unending battle but don’t let it stress you out too much. The important thing is that you have the information.
It is easier to deal with duplicates from your email contact list on your computer than your phone. Look for the option to merge contacts, but be careful, often merging contacts will delete information from one contact and replace it with the other and you don’t have much say in which bit of data is kept. It is often easier to scan them both and delete the less complete record.
In your email system, you can also set categories or tags for your contacts. Each year I create a new tag called “Verified YYYY” and tag my contacts with it as I deal with them. This lets me know the last time I verified the information.
Once everyone is organized
Export them to a spreadsheet. When you have your contacts in a spreadsheet (.csv or .xlsx) you can upload them to a customer relationship manager, use them in a mail merge for address labels or envelopes, or just have a handy list for reference.
Check out the BLOG POST: Export Your People to Safety for more information on that.
