| Contact Management Logistics |
| Wednesday, 13 December 2006 | |
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Mechanistic use of a contact management system can blow holes in travel budgets. The significance increases when you are substantially dependant on face-to-face interaction with customers, and when your contacts are spread far apart, perhaps across national boundaries. Life is much easier within an organization, because you can order people to attend joint meetings according to a schedule fixed well in advance. However, the shoe shifts to the other foot when you step out to the imperious world of regulators, because they can offer appointments rather far apart. Does your contact management system make you in to a frequent flier and tote up hotel reward points for your colleagues?
The most productive way to stay in step with contact management demands may be to arrange business events in which you can indulge in group selling, even if in subtle manner only. Newsletters work well, provided you load them with enough useful information to avoid a client discarding it without reading! The optimal way of keeping up with contact management demands obviously varies for each executive, but there is a general rule that the columns and rows should not dictate your agenda and travel budgets. Periodic review of contact management entries with regard to the number of people to be met, and the frequencies, should not be cast in stone. A good contact management system should allow you to optimize visits along time and cost parameters. Integration of contact management with book keeping is fantastic, because you have hard figures to justify time and money spent in meeting various categories of customers, but most business models do not allow very precise tracking of the outcomes of all calls. Contact Management Kaizen: A formal contact management system is not a must. You may scribble names on pieces of paper, call on prospects at random, or if you are a top professional, even have them lined up outside your doors! However, most organizations grow to levels where some degree of work organization becomes compulsory, so the day dawns when you have to buckle down with a contact management system. It can be quite a culture shock if you are accustomed to an informal way of working in which contact management is just a piece of new-fangled jargon. Perhaps you are on the other side, right out of a training course or even college, and dying to try out contact management, but even then you are bound to run in to some resistance from skeptics. Some of the best sales people hate anything which uncovers their secrets of success! A contact management system makes the day’s work naked for everyone to see, and no one new to controls, takes to intrusion willingly. A contact management system may fail because someone, enthusiastic for its introduction, oversells the benefits. Poor quality entries, product obsolescence, genuine market demand shrinkage, stock outs, and pricing issues… the list of excuses which you may proffer for no results with a contact management system, but will it cut ice with the boss? Remember that formal contact management will start with Kaizen-type minor improvements. Weeding out unproductive calls, finding new and profitable ones, improved productivity, and better customer knowledge will be the kind of small benefits your organization will realize from contact management, rather than any sudden change. However, that should not detract from the value of the system in terms of sustained business improvement for you. |