Organize your contacts in 5 easy steps: Step 3
By now you’ve collected new contacts. The data entry is done (or in progress). Now to organize them. All these contacts don’t help a bit if you can’t access them when you want to. Think about how you categorize people. When you try to think of someone what comes to mind most easily? For me, it’s often what they do. And that is how I categorize my contacts.
Here are some other helpful ways to categorize your contacts:
- Where you met them
- What industry they’re in
- A group they’re associated with
- What you want to do with them (customer or JV or what)
- Where they’re located (if you work with people in multiple loctions)
Make sure to assign each contact a category and keep it consistent. This way, you’ll have a system to track down your contacts even when you can’t remember their names.
This is also very useful for communicating wih people in bulk. You can customize a message for everyone in the category. The more bulk communication is personalized the better. Better open rates and better response.
This will be an ongoing process as you build your network your system will grow. Work on it (or get it worked on) steadily and you will have a truly valuable resource.
