Your contact database is one of the most valuable resources in your business and managing your contacts should be part of your daily routine.
In the past, I have struggled using Ace of Sales to manage my groups. I found myself over analyzing my group development and going back and forth between Ace of Sales and Gmail. Ultimately, I decided to narrow my groups and manage them entirely in Gmail, then import once per week into Ace of Sales.
Connect, Add, Populate
Gmail has an excellent user interface, and valuable add-on tools like Rapportive (for connecting) and Google+ integration into your contacts records. These tools are perfect for connecting with contacts and populating contact data automatically. Additionally, Gmail can be setup to automatically add any contact that you email to your contacts list and group them under “Other Contacts” if they don’t already exist in your contact database.
- Connect – get Rapportive. This tool will automatically display how you are connected socially for every email sender or recipient in Gmail.
- Add - Take 10 minutes or so each day to review your “Other Contacts” group new additions, add them to the your relevant group(s) and Google+ circle(s).
- Populate – It is so damn easy. Once you assign your contacts to a Google+ Circle, they will be notified that you placed them in a circle. If they decide to reciprocate, their Google+ data will populate into their contact record.
Keep it Clean
Be careful not to add too many groups or the next thing you know, you’ll have 30 or so groups and they become unmanageable. Here are my groups:
- Newsletter – Foxxr
- Newsletter – G2A
- Customer – Active
- Customer – Inactive
- Prospect
- Vendor
- Source – Referrals
- Source – Website
- Source – Local Networking
- Source – Advertising
- Source – Other
- Friends
- Family
Most of my contacts are assign to more than one group and I find the sources to be valuable for tracking my marketing efforts.
Set a Import Schedule
Set a weekly schedule to export the groups you intend to engage with Ace of Sales. Caution!! Double check to ensure you are importing a group and not the entire database. Gmail prompts you to export the entire database by default. My groups to export are: Newsletter, Customer Active, Prospect, Friends, Family. These are the groups I engage.
I’d love to hear from you about your group strategies. Please comment and share you best practices.
