Developing an effective contact management is crucial for any small business, potentially making the difference between a lead becoming a customer and a customer who walks to a competitor. That’s why following best practices when moving your contacts to a new CRM is absolutely crucial.

But the worst thing you could do to your small business success is think of contact management as a one-time ordeal that is done once you’ve fully implemented your CRM. While customer relationship management software is undoubtedly helpful in managing your contacts for you, your strategy must continue in order to allow you to manage contacts as well as possible. Here are 3 ways you can optimize your processes after moving to ACT! contact management software.

1) Keep a Dynamic Contact List

One of the major benefits you will enjoy from Act! is the fact that your contacts are not managed on a static list. Depending on their interactions with your brand, their profile will grow, giving you a fuller picture on just who they are – and how you can convince them to become customers or repeat customers.

But of course, even the best CRM has its limits: it can not record interactions dynamically that happen offline. You may interact with your customers on the phone or face-to-face, and both are important interactions that help inform you about just who your contacts truly are. When these offline interactions happen, you should create manual entries in your contact files to ensure that a salesperson looking at the profile gets the full picture.

2) Clean Out As Needed 

Naturally, not all of your leads will become customers, and not all of your customers will give you business throughout their lifetime. So instead of wasting efforts trying to reach or interact with contacts who have “jumped off,” you should establish regular contact cleanings in which you sort out those contacts that aren’t worth reaching again.

Act! does some of the work for you. For example, some recipients of your email messages may simply choose to unsubscribe, and your software can ensure that they’re automatically excluded from future email communications. But are your unsusbscribes still getting phone calls or direct mail from you? If so, you may want to take them out of your contact lists altogether, or keep a master “do not contact” list.

3) Establish a Contact Quality Score

As we mention above, not all leads are created equal. Some will be more likely to become customers than others, and you can predict their likelihood to buy based on the number of interactions with your company.

It makes perfect sense: a lead who regularly clicks on or even responds to emails will be more likely to become a customer than one who may have filled out a form on your website once, but has never interacted with you since. That’s why Act! ‘s E-Marketing system can pick up and assign varying scores to leads based on these interactions, allowing your sales team to stop wasting time and only approach those leads who are most likely to convert to customers.

Such a lead scoring system can be time-consuming to set up, and requires continuous adjustment for maximum effectiveness. But done correctly, it is also an incredible contact management tool that helps you efficiently direct your sales efforts and maximize your ROI.

Contact Management can take some work, but the results will speak for themselves. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a tool that helps you maximize your efforts! That’s what Act! can do for you, so you can focus on the most important part: increasing your business by attracting, converting and delighting your leads. For more information on how the software can help with your contact management, contact us!