Managing Your Business Contacts as a Small Business
It should be obvious that one of the best ways to manage your business is to stay as organized as possible. Whether it’s keeping your documents sorted, your financial records up-to-date or even your contacts organized, it’s vital that you keep all of your information sorted so that you can easily filter through your data and find what you need when you need it the most.
However, every business has its own processes for sorting and organizing data. This means that you’ll need a solution that is suitable for your personal needs instead of trying to fit industry-standard solutions to work with your processes. So in this article, we’re going to take something simple like managing business contacts and show you how to organize it with different levels of technology and convenience.
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Why manage your business contacts?
Busy entrepreneurs and business managers tend to forget things. This is because most of their time is spent managing different aspects of their business and worrying about important interactions with investors, refining their products for the market and generally managing all of the larger tasks and decision making. However, occasionally, there will come a time when data is also important, such as contacting individual vendors for production information or speaking to investors over the phone instead of meeting them in person. In situations like this, it’s vital to have their contact information so that you can easily get in touch when needed.
With a business contacts management solution, you can easily input data from business cards, save all of your contacts in specific folders or categories and have a much easier time reaching out to different businesses, clients and other miscellaneous contacts to make operating your business a lot easier.
Small retail businesses that are just starting out
If you’re a relatively small retail business then you’ll likely be best off with just a small notebook or a business card folder. This is the simplest way to keep track of your business contacts and since most of the information will come from business cards, you can keep them sorted in a notebook or something similar.
However, if you do make use of the internet and common technologies, then you may want to look at a digital solution. There are several different contact management software solutions that will provide a source of information for all of your contacts in a simple and easy-to-use interface. These tools are generally much easier to use than traditional media such as paper, notebooks and so on. This means that the information can easily be synced between devices and users and it gives you an easy way to input data. This is the preferred method for all small businesses because it provides a cloud-based solution that doesn’t take much investment.
Growing businesses that regularly keep in touch with hundreds of contacts
If you need something that can scale up to a hundred or more users then it’s unlikely that a small contact management solution will be enough. It’s more likely that you’ll need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to help you manage relationships with individual customers and clients. This is far more sophisticated than a simple contact management solution since it integrates with your existing software solutions to provide you with an all-in-one platform that handles all of your customer relationship management needs.
The point of a CRM isn’t just to manage business contacts, but also to increase sales and profitability by helping you stay in touch with all of your customers and business contacts. It’s far more advanced than a system that only handles your business contacts and also uses data collection and analysis tools to help you discover sales opportunities that can improve your sales. As such, it often involves a lot more technical knowledge and you’ll need to have dedicated employees to manage a powerful CRM system. Thankfully, it’s a scalable system that can easily fit your exact needs should you eventually grow your business into a medium-sized company in the future.
As you can see, it’s vital to set up a solution that fit the needs and scale of your business. A static solution will only cause trouble in the future and it’s incredibly important that you have some kind of business contact organization solution ready. While a static solution such as a notebook can work for smaller businesses, a scalable cloud solution is, without a doubt, a far more elegant solution that can grow and scale alongside your business.
