Batchbook Blog

Organized Lists Help You Stay In Touch

Bradford Shimp

Staying in touch with all of your contacts is hard enough. Making sure you are reaching them with relevant messages can seem like an insurmountable task. If you are like many small business owners, you may be more worried about good opportunities falling through the cracks than about which message to send to which contact.

But, by keeping your contacts organized into lists, you can solve both problems.

The first goal to getting organized is to make sure opportunities stop slipping away.

Organized lists will not only show you which contacts you need to get in touch with, but they will also help you to organize your contacts into segments. Each of these segments may need a different touch from you, so by being organized, you can stay on point when talking to your contacts.

A Catch All List

The first goal to getting organized is to make sure opportunities stop slipping away. By housing your contacts in a small business CRM, you can keep them front and center.

Hopefully you are already using Batchbook to manage only active and important relationships. By not clogging your CRM with every lead you’ve ever come across, you are already a step ahead of the competition when it comes to focus and organization.

Yet, even with a more focused group of contacts, some people can slip past your attention. To minimize this, we suggest setting up a list to catch anyone who you haven’t communicated with recently.

The set up for this list is simple. Click on the advanced search icon  and select the following criteria:

(Contact) Not communicated with | not after | 30 days ago

If you are actively building relationships with your Batchbook contacts, this simple list will catch anyone who you stop communicating with. You can then reach out to them. Note that you can use any time period for this list, but we suggest using natural language like 30 days ago, 2 months ago, etc. so that your list will automatically stay current.

A Smaller “Catch This Type of Contact” List

While a general catch all list will serve as a stop-gap for contacts slipping through the cracks, you can narrow down the list further to make it even more useful.

For instance, you may have a different plan for your hot leads than you have for your past customers. Maybe it’s okay to talk to past customers every 3 months, but you want to make sure your team is following up on hot leads every week.

To customize your catch all list to only focus on certain contacts, you can just add criteria. Here is what the search would look like for the hot leads example above, if you are using tags to track those leads.

(Contacts) Communicated with | not after | 5 days ago AND Tag | is | hot lead

A List Built for Action

The first two types of lists are examples of reactive lists. They are there to help you not miss things.

With lists, not only can you avoid missed opportunities, you can reach out to your contacts with highly relevant messages to create new opportunities.

What about when you want to actively reach out to your contacts, perhaps with a special offer or a new marketing message? Lists work great for that too!

By collecting information about your contacts and storing that info in custom fields, you can easily build segments of all of your contacts. When you can make segments, you can be much more relevant in your outreach to customers.

For example, say you wanted to send a special offer to customers who had bought a certain product from you. As long as you record that kind of data in Batchbook, you can make a list in a snap.

(Custom fields) Purchase > Product | contains | running shoes AND Purchase > Sale Date | in | 1 Oct. 2012 and 31 Oct. 2012

In this search I added criteria to show only contacts who had bought the product in a certain time range. You can narrow your own list down based on any combination of default or custom fields that you have set up.

With lists, not only can you avoid missed opportunities, you can reach out to your contacts with highly relevant messages to create new opportunities.

Lists will help you organize your contacts in really useful ways. Experiment with them for your small business. And if you are already using lists, let us know how you are using them!

 

 

  • Max

    Hello Bradford,

    My first time reading about your product and I am indeed interested. In your opinion when does a company have necessities for something like Batchbook? My business is just starting out but we do have 4-5 big clients that we are trying to maintain and for them to always come back for our services. My biggest problem is to understand how to keep in touch and not be annoying.

    P.S. I am in the Photography business for restaurants and hospitality business.

    -Max

    • bradshimp

      Hi Max,

      A business should start using Batchbook when it starts to have trouble keeping track of the customer relationship and important details start to fall through the cracks.

      There are other considerations, like whether you have multiple people working with clients, and if you communicate through multiple channels, such as email, social, etc.

      Many small businesses start out keeping everything in their email inbox, and then moving on to try to get organized with spreadsheets. But as you grow, not just the number of clients but the number of interactions with them, a CRM can be very helpful. One argument for starting out from the beginning with a CRM like Batchbook is that you will have a full history of your clients and will be able to stay organized as you continue to add new clients.

      As far as staying in touch without being annoying, part of that is to always remember to be helpful to your clients, so they won’t mind you staying in touch. The other part is to monitor how often you do contact them, and just as importantly, if you haven’t contacted them in awhile. Batchbook can help you with this with advanced search – by looking up the contacts who have not been communicated with in the last month, etc.