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Trying to keep up with the various people you interact with every day can be a real pain. Worse, figuring out how to expand your customer and contact list is often full of mystery. You’re a busy business owner and don’t have a lot of time to mess around, so a few tricks could benefit you in many ways.
We’re here to help! Check out the following tips to make dealing with your contact list much simpler.
Gaining Leads
No doubt you know LinkedIn is a great place to find like-minded professionals and other contacts you could possibly use. People from every industry are on the site so you have the ability to find anyone you want in any field you need.
Sometimes, though, that just isn’t the case. Depending on the size of your network, your search results on LinkedIn may be extremely limited. This is because LinkedIn will only allow you to see the profiles of people already in your extended network.
How to work around this? Join LinkedIn groups! When you are in a group with another like-minded professional, that person will then turn up in your search results even if you are not connected in any other way. You’ve found your person!
Also keep in mind that your activity on LinkedIn leaves a trail. When you visit someone’s profile, they can see that you were there. This means if they’re interested in what you have to offer they just might message YOU.
Collecting Data
One of the first things you need to do is actually collect all your contacts’ information. This is easier said than done, though, as sometimes Twitter handles, emails, and even LinkedIn information can be unexpectedly hidden. For example, they could have everything else in their real name but use Twitter with their shop’s name.
The best place to start is to use a few simple Google searches. If you know their name, try googling “their name” plus the name of their business. This usually leads to some solid hits or at least a few bites of info. If it leads to their Facebook page, for instance, you can follow the trail and get their website and Twitter page from it.
That may not do the trick, though. They may have accidentally hidden something away by only using their first name. Try to use different combinations to weed out the info you need. “First name” plus “business name” and “their email address” could yield results, as could “last name,” “business name” and “town the business is in.”
Putting It All Together
So what do you do with all this info after you’ve collected it? When you’re building a relationship with a customer, client, or other contact it would be nice to have everything in front of you. Over time you get to know them bit by bit, and when you’re trying to keep up with dozens of contacts like this it can be a little confusing.
Try using Rapportive to aid you in keeping track of all this info. It works by loading all your collected info into Gmail. When interacting with the contact everything is right there in front of you, including social media sites, picture, and any notes you’ve taken to help build the relationship.
Do you spend precious minutes poking around the web trying to find a contact’s social media site or a quote every time you email? Rapportive will cut that time down severely. Now you can spend those wasted minutes doing more important matters like growing your business.
Have you ever spent hours trying to track down an errant contact?