Manage Your Contacts with These Best Practices

Store and Organize Customer Data

A traditional business card can only be held in the hands of a single person at a given time. A CRM lets you take that business card data and store it in a place where your whole team can access it. When managing data access and getting to know your customer, keep these tips in mind.

• Make sure that everyone has easy access to the data: If everyone on your team has a Salesforce license, everyone can view the contact’s details right in the app. If only one of you has a Salesforce license, it’s a best practice to export and email the data to the right people. Either way, the data is readily accessible and deliverable.
• Keep your data clean: The biggest troublemaker in any contact management system is dirty data. This includes duplicate entries, inaccurate information, and incomplete records that make your reporting inaccurate. Make it a priority to keep that info squeaky clean to save yourself time later on.
• When in doubt, add the contact: Not sure about adding someone as a contact? Just do it. Whether it’s a person you eventually market to or someone you buy from, adding any contact (and all of their information) to your database can help grow your network.
• Use automation whenever you can: Salesforce brings your emails, phone calls, and related notes into your contact record for you. Avoiding the manual misery of entering data into the contact record makes it much easier for you to keep things up-to-date.

Examine Your Relationship with Each Customer

Access each customer's activity feed to see the entire timeline of your relationship with them. You can see how deals moved through the pipeline, the email campaigns sent, and the customer support provided. If you have many contacts, it's practically impossible to remember every interaction. A CRM can help you keep track of the work your team does with each contact.

• Add to the paper trail: Some activities, such as emails, phone calls, and status updates, are automatically added to a contact’s Activity feed. Others are not. If you take action behind the scenes to move a contact forward, add an internal note to the feed so others working with the contact know.
• Attach related docs: If you have docs that exist outside of Essentials, you can attach them to the contact so the full picture is available.
• Review the data: Read through the activity feed before engaging a customer so you don’t duplicate efforts with a teammate. This can also help you provide a tailored experience based on what they’ve done so far.

See the Big Picture of How Your Customers Correlate to Business Success

Run reports to get a high-level view of the customer base: Create a report to show your team a snapshot of the customer base. This could be something like, Days Since Last Activity per Contact, or # Opportunities per Contact. Use list views to segment customers: If your team prefers to look at the individual tasks making up the data, a list view is the best option. You can segment customers by fields on their profile or important dates and times.