Business enterprises are always working hard to manage contacts for suppliers, clients, employees, and subcontractors. Often, a lot of them do this on their smartphones as well as emails. Even worse, there are some business owners who use the old fashioned way to manage their contacts – which is an address book and business cards.
These methods of contact management can pose a challenge for any business that wants to grow. In the highly digital world, a lot of devices and office spaces are fitted with standard tools for managing contacts. While these default systems may not provide small businesses with everything they need to facilitate proper contact management, they set them on the right path. If you are a small business owner, here are some benefits you are likely to reap when you sync your contacts well with a solution like SyncGal:
- Bring all contacts to a single place
How many times do you find yourself searching for email addresses or phone numbers for important customers or suppliers? Most business owners find themselves in such situations often. Managing contacts well can go a long way in helping solve this problem easily. The main purpose of setting up good contact management is to ensure that you can contact your employees, suppliers, and customers with ease.
When you use a contact management system, you enable your business to store a high amount of contact data and track or retrieve them with ease whenever you need to. With such a system, you can go a notch high and structure your contact database into categories such as clients, industry experts, suppliers, competitors among others. Doing this enables you to keep contacts in a safe and easy to access manner.
- Present contact information clearly
When you are organizing your contacts, you want to include details such as name, address, and phone number in your database. But these are just a few of the details that your business needs to have about its contacts. Beyond this, business enterprises need to get other relevant details including products or services that customers purchase and details about projects or transactions that have been made with the customers.
Other details that you could include are titles of team members who are responsible for engaging customers, special customer preferences or needs, or feedback from customers. When you are dealing with contacts from companies that serve as partners or suppliers to the business, you may want to include data like the cost of their services, the services they provide, and important points to note like transactions. Capturing all these details in a contact management system makes it easy to edit as well as augment the details when there is a need to do so.
- Filter and Group Business Contacts
When you have captured all the information you need about your business contacts, you should be able to access the data with ease and use it intelligently. A good contact management system facilitates this by enabling you to classify your information based on categories that are important to you. It should also enable you to search for contact details with ease through the use of different filters.
Using the grouping feature, you can put all customers who buy specific products together. This makes it easier to customize your up-selling or cross-selling efforts because you can target your promotional materials. Even so, the benefits that filtered or group searches are not limited to managing customer contacts.
In a broader sense, these features make it easier for businesses to manage supplier and subcontractor contacts. For instance, if you are running a printing project, using a contact management system enables you to place the contacts of printing companies that you work with in the same group and also check their individual performances and service costs. With this information, you can quickly decide which company to give the next printing assignment.
- Focus on important business process
Selling is an important aspect of any business. To sell effectively, each business wants to get a quick view of the sales opportunities it has so that it can maximize them and increase its revenue. When a business has a good contact management system, this becomes a breeze. The business can focus all its efforts on the sales process without having to worry about finding customer details.
This makes it easy for it to grow the business because the time that would have been used sorting contacts is spent on more strategic activities. Further, a good contact management system enables businesses to follow sales leads up and convert them into customers. The business can easily check customer purchase history and determine how best to grow its sales through up-selling or cross-selling existing customers. All this is reflected in the sales process, which makes it easier to manage and even track.