Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Keeping up with business contacts with repeating tasks
Some tasks are so periodic that a list can help you complete them whenever you have the time. This week’s tip comes from guybehindtheguy, who uses a list to help stay in touch with business contacts regularly. Each task repeats and the list is sorted by due date, so with a few simple steps the first people to contact are right at the top!
A certain percentage of my job is business development, but it’s not an everyday thing. This makes it hard to remember who I’ve reached out to recently and who I need to ping again.
I’ve created a “Sales Tickler” list in RTM that works really well for this. It is simply a Smart List that filters on tag:sales, sorted by due date. Then the process to add a contact is pretty easy:
1. Create a task with just the first and last name of the contact.
2. Tag that task with sales.
3. Setup to repeat after X weeks or months (depending on how aggressive I want to pursue a given contact).
Every time I have an opportunity to do some sales calls, I pull up my Sales Tickler and grab a few contacts off the top of the list. After contacting them, I complete the task and it pops to the bottom of the list automatically. This simple process has already led to increased opportunities, just by forcing me to touch my contacts regularly.
Bonus Pro feature: I have the Outlook integration setup. So, to add a new contact, I create a task from the last e-mail I received from him/her, and change the name of the task to the contact’s first and last name. I can assign it the sales tag by adding the sales Category right inside of Outlook.
Thanks for sharing this tip, guybehindtheguy! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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