I have confessed to being “distracted” when it comes to Business Development. My favorite tool for overcoming the distracted-ness is a contact management tool developed by 37signals called Highrise.* The thing I like about Highrise is that with the minimum of effort you can track the development of a relationship with a prospect. I blind copy or forward my emails into the prospect’s page, set tasks for making the next contact or the needed follow-up, and add notes from meetings and phone calls. I end up with a chronology of all my interactions. With just a few minutes a day, which works much better for me than once a week, I am able to keep all my efforts moving forward. The four main features I use in Highrise are Contacts, Tasks, Cases and Deals. Contacts: individuals or organizations that you want to manage a relationship with Tasks: TO-DOs related to contacts or other efforts, say, your website. You can get notified by email or SMS when due. Cases: this is a way to pull together multiple contacts to make it easier to manage the effort to win a potential project where several people are influencers. Perhaps members of a board or building committee... Deals: once a project is formed, you can use a Deal to track RFPs, interviews, value of the fee, wins and loses. Check this all out at their website. I recommend signing up for the free account first. See the link in the fine print about a free account. That way you don’t have a time limit, and if you decide to upgrade to get expanded features you can. Or maybe you will be happy with ’free’. I also use Highrise to track ’marketing opportunities’ for each project by treating the name of the project as a “Company” in Highrise and assigning tasks to remind me to blog about the next opportunity on the project. I like to contact prospects once a month and past clients every month or two. Even though a past client may not have another project any time soon, by keeping in touch I maintain a relationship that might result in referrals. This monthly contact for numerous prospects got to be a burden - what do you say? So I came up with a number of standard email subjects to draw from, and used a ’note’ assigned to the prospect to track which topics I had already used. Here’s my Email Subject Master List: (in no particular order)
The idea is to have a rough draft of each of these topics saved so you can quickly customize them and send it out. I use Highrise to save the sent emails and record a task for which to use next and when. You really can't do this kind of contact management very well without a tool like Highrise. After some initial organizing, you really can keep dozens of relationships developing in just minutes a day. I urge you to check it out. I find it the easiest way to stay in touch. * 37signals recently decided to focus on Basecamp exclusively, but their other products will continue and will be managed by others. Comments are closed.
|
x
Archives
September 2023
Categories
All
|
Architekwiki | Architect's Resource | Greater Cincinnati
© 2012-2022 Architekwiki
© 2012-2022 Architekwiki