Starts working on contact

Make better use of your notes in your contact manager.

by Stephen M. Canale   One of the most exciting features of many contact- management software programs is the ability to search not only fields (name, address, phone number, etc.), but also to search based on the notes you have entered regarding your contacts.

In order to effectively turn this feature into a productive activity, a few pointers are in order. First, don’t bother typing full sentences or worry about grammar. These notes are for your benefit. No one else needs to read them, so any time-consuming effort involved should be minimized. If I’ve just spoken with a prospect, my notes from a 10-minute conversation may look like this: "condo buyer, after wedding, Dec-Jan, PMI, 30 min I-94, he/she GM/Nurse."

This is enough to jog my memory, covers the basic details, and is short and easy enough to enter that I actually do it!

To effectively search through the contact notes, you need to use words that are easy to remember, and thus search through. And keep in mind that while grammar doesn’t count here, spelling does. If you mistakenly enter condu, a search for condo will come up empty.

In the example above, note the key words I’ve used— condo, buyer, wedding, PMI, GM, and Nurse—and you should realize the power that this simplicity offers in future searches. However, I will offer one example, just to drive the point home. If I have 1,000 contacts in my database and had just listed a property near the hospital, I would be able to search for every contact where the word nurse appeared.

What could be more effective than immediately mailing a just-listed postcard to the 28 nurses in my database? While the nurses in my contact manager may or may not be interested, odds are that someone they work with would be interested in such a property, and this simple search may very will result in a quick sale.

That is what I call effective contact management.

Stephen M. Canale, CRB, CRS, GRI, RAM, (Canale.com) is a speaker, educator, and trainer from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Illustration © Artville.

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