Structured systems keep things running smoothly even with a seemingly small task. For instance, handling contacts. A startup thrives with the accumulation of contacts. The problem arises when it is handled carelessly. You may needlessly lose lots of hours in a year if no contact management system is in place.
What is contact management?
Contact management refers to storing, organizing, and securing contact information about your leads, customers, vendors, and even employees plus other stakeholders. In other words, it is about how to handle the contact information of anyone in your business environment.
Businesses and even individuals need contact management to take care of the ever-growing number of contacts. There are several types of contact management tools available in the market for such.
What are the benefits of contact management?
Contact management tools come in different forms and pricing. These are all depending on your organization’s needs and budget. Enjoy these advantages upon acquiring your contact management system:
1. Organized contact data.
Create ‘labels’ to sort your contact database. A typical phone or email directory displays names alphabetically. Having a contact management app lets you compartmentalize them according to your preferred designation.
In this manner, you can easily send customized emails for each group. For example, promotional materials for prospects and reward programs for loyal customers. No need to waste time checking which contact belongs to what group.
2. Access everywhere.
It’s quite a rumble if you have the contact saved in your mobile phone memory when you want to email them from your desktop. Copy/pasting it once may seem not a bother but doing this repeatedly takes a toll on your productivity.
Contact management app gives your organization a centralized directory. Allow anyone to with proper authorization to access it. Furthermore, it eliminates the repetitive task of copy/pasting from spreadsheets to the recipient field of your messaging platform.
3. Consolidate data.
Sometimes, the answerable fields available in the contact directory like company and job title are not the only data gathered about the person. Notes like ‘a soccer fan’ and ‘collect vintage cars’ may help in customizing the sales pitch toward the lead.
These seemingly small details can get lost in emails or phone conversations. However, a good contact management app lets you have a space wherein you can write those types of comments regarding the contact helps you build a better insight about him.
4. Savings from CRM.
Businesses pay from $10 to $300 per month for a CRM seat. Established companies can spend higher than that. As a startup, spending that much may not be necessary especially when the number of contacts is still manageable without availing CRM.
An excellent app can do contact management at 10% of the CRM seat. With such, you no longer need to pay the not-so-upfront charges from CRM like onboarding, training, and implementation costs, among others.
Conversely, you can still utilize contact management apps for savings even if you already have a CRM. Some of your team members who just use the CRM for the contact database need not be trained and be given a CRM seat. They only need to connect via a contact management app that integrates with the CRM to have the access to the needed client database.
5. Collaboration.
A synchronized contact database paves way for everyone on the team to collaborate more efficiently. All the information regarding the contact is at a central location. Thus, this saves everyone the time of opening different applications regarding the client.
6. Back up.
If the company vehicle has insurance, then your intangible assets must have a trustworthy backup system as well. The client database that you are just building up is one of the valuable assets your startup owns.
Additionally, putting your contact database on the cloud rather than an ordinary spreadsheet file supports easier recovery in case of accidental deletion. Moreover, the contact management app allows the data admin to readily spot the changes made to the database.
7. Security.
Select a contact management software that adheres to renowned security standards such as GDPR, CCPA, Google Technology Premier, and so forth. Those programs ensure that data is processed with the utmost confidentiality guidelines.
Takeaway.
Your startup needs tools to help you make it grow. Contact management is one of those aids that nurtures your relationship with clients, vendors, and even within your team. Whether you use a shared spreadsheet, a full CRM, or reliable stand-alone software, implementing a good contact management system will help your business achieve its goals.
