Managing your personal brand is essential to your success. You want to stand out among the crowd, be noticed, be invaluable. You don’t want to be someone who is easily replaced and easily forgotten. You want to be someone who people will listen to, look up to, and most importantly be remembered.
To be a strong and successful personal brand, one of the most important things you need to have is a network of contacts. And it’s essential that you manage your relationship with those contacts well, to ensure that you have a smooth and hassle-free working relationship.
As your brand or small business continues to grow, you may have difficulty with relationship management. People get muddled up in your mind and you may become confused as to which tasks need to be done by which people. You may forget names, as well as the faces associated with those names. So how do you manage?
Keeping the important – important
Depending on the person you’re talking to or interacting with, it can range from being funny to being offensive if you mix up their name or their work title. So it’s really important that you keep track of who’s who so you don’t end up angering anyone.
For this purpose, you need a relationship management tool that’s intuitive, easy to use, and something that can really help you manage your contact list so you don’t get confused. One of the latest and most promising tools available today is KarmaCRM.
KarmaCRM makes managing and maintaining a huge contact database incredibly simple. The site offers advanced filtering and tagging features so you can easily search and find the contact you’re looking for in your list. You also have the convenience of importing contacts from third party integrations such as Freshbooks and HighRise. Add the information you need for each contact, so you always know who you’re talking and connecting with.
Another excellent feature that KarmaCRM offers is email integration with your contacts. Each email account will be given a unique KarmaCRM dropbox, and all you need to do is CC, BCC or email this address whenever you correspond with a client, colleague or customer, and Karma will automatically attach the email with the contact’s file. This makes it easy for you to remember previous conversations with a specific contact. KarmaCRM will even create a new file if there’s no record of that person.
Involved in sales?
KarmaCRM also offers a great feature for personal bands that are involved in sales. Within the site, you can organize your contacts according to the sales status you associate them with. Whether you’re in the contact, proposal or follow-up stage, KarmaCRM helps you easily identify what part of the sales process you’re currently in. You can even get updates on deadlines associated with different contacts. With this tool, you’ll never miss a proposal or deal deadline again.
Yes, there are other tools out there yet they can be cumbersome or even overwhelming when you’re talking about just managing your personal circle of influence’s information. If you have a sales team, this can help you and if you don’t if can help you and not overwhelm you with too many gadgets to get in your way or bog you down with a large daunting learning curve just to figure out how to access your information.
And let’s not forget the easy-to-read reports that Karma provides. Any good CRM tool should offer reporting that’s easy to create and easy to export. KarmaCRM offers you a custom report builder that’s intuitive and easy to use.
The tools you use are an extension of you
KarmaCRM also integrates with different third party applications such as Freshbooks, Highrise, MailChimp, and Google Calendar. And it is continually working to integrate with other third party applications so that people can have a better experience using Karma.
Perhaps one of the BEST things about KarmaCRM is the fact that it’s entirely cloud based, so you don’t have to download any special software or application to be able to access the tool. Anytime, anywhere, you can easily check your contacts, see any deadlines looming, and monitor progress and reports.
As a personal brand, it’s important for you to build trust with your clients and customers, so make sure you use a customer relationship management tool that helps you manage and monitor your contacts.
Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm. She helps create connection, credibility, community and cha-ching through mobile marketing and social commerce around your brand. She is co-founder of #brandchat – a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding.
