Sales contacts are your bible

We all get engulfed in the daily sales day and sometimes miss simple fundamentals in establishing LONG TERM goals.  An example would be not keeping a good tally on contacts.  Contacts are the holy grail when it comes to a salesperson.  Especially one that has chosen a particular market segment and will be staying there for a considerable amount of time.  For me this is Technology Sales.  The people you meet, email, text, connect with all have a common goal and that is to perform there job duties using the solutions you provide.  Notice how I did not use "sell" but rather used solutions that you "provide".  ;)  Your customer, prospective and acquaintance contacts are your little network of business.  In my business it is a very very small world.  Everyone knows everybody somehow some way.  I am sure it is similar in other lines of business.  Make sure you keep track of contacts, put them in a database, save this information and even the people you just end up chatting with over email or phone.  You never know where those people end up or end up doing down the road.  You will regret it if you are not organized.  I would like to touch on a few points and disect this a little.

Lets take a look at where people work and how long.  It is usually pretty hard to find employees staying at companies for long periods of time.  You do have the ones that stay but mostly people will move throughout companies in their industry.  When your good customer contacts move from company to company this is an excellent resource for you to grab new customers.  The prior companies they were working for have adopted your technology and hopefully you have entrenched yourself as a valuable asset and they continue to use your solutions.  When that contact goes to another end user, you now build that relationship with the same contact but now at a different company.  Stay in touch with your contacts wherever they go.  LinkedIn is perfect for this!!!!!!

Another item to keep in mind is these contacts you collect all have friends and most likely belong to groups to share ideas and strategies.  If you are keeping in touch and staying "of value" they are more likely to refer you to their group of trusted people.  But if you become a fair weathered friend so to speak you will be left in the dust.  Again, use LinkedIn to stay in touch.  And if that doesnt work for you and not sure why it wouldnt, just email occasionally or text to stay in touch.

The last piece of advice I have and I kind of touched on this earlier is you just never know where or in what capacity people will end up later on down the road.  For example:  If you deal with people either face to face or over the phone remember to keep maintaining that you are "of value".  Maybe these people arent your direct customer and are the distribution team members or engineers helping plan a deployment or the managers indirectly involved but overseeing projects from the high level.  All of these people could become a major asset to you later on down the road.  Especially if they either can become your customer or could positively influence sales for you.    

Always keep in mind to show yourself as having "value".  Go out of your way to stay in touch with people.  Help people whenever possible.  Be professional and kind "most" of the time.  :)  It will come back to you.  Maybe not right away but believe me there will come a time when an old contact comes back and surprises you with something great!!

Shawn
SR@ShawnCReilly.com