🔒How to leverage relationships to achieve your business goals

“Success is in Your Sphere — Leverage the Power of Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals” By Ziv Band (McGraw-Hill Education, $26).

Companies spend lots of money on customer relationship management (CRM) systems designed to create and build customer connection. They know that CRMs not only increase customer loyalty but also create a continuous feedback loop, which produces valuable product and service information.

Yet, the same people spending the money on CRMs usually don’t apply its principles to managing their personal networks. As a result, they don’t utilize the power of relationships to maximize their productivity.

Like a CRM, developing a personal relationship management (PRM) system takes a long view. Why? Social networks change. They evolve as you and those who helped you change jobs, change employers, relocate, die, etc. People who helped you get to point A may not be available, or may not have what you need to get to your point B.

How do you keep your PRM fresh? Follow Band’s CAPITAL strategy for relationship marketing:

C — “Consistent execution”: We live by our calendars. Block out time to devote to contacting people (email, phone, face-to-face, social media comments) in your PRM and those you’d like to add to it. Building this new habit into your daily routine “could be as easy as memorizing: “Every ____ after I _______, I’ll spend ___ minutes working on my network.”

A — “Aggregating”: Buy a contact-management system. Within its templates, include information about the contact interests, what connects you to them, birthdays/anniversaries, hobbies, etc. Also use it to batch information to share with “contact email groups”; various Google extensions, Evernote and Dropbox make it easy to share web-based information. Appendix C provides messaging templates. Creating files for their email responses that you can connect to your database and notes on conversations helps you decide what’s next and when.

P — “Prioritize”: Constantly evaluate where you are on your path toward your goal and what’s needed to continue your progress. Review your database to identify those in the best position to help you now. Focus on contacting them more frequently. Note that now will change over time. Appendix B provides information on contact-frequency times.

I — “Investigate”: This is a corollary of “aggregating.” The more information you have, the greater the opportunity to amplify and solidify the relationship. Every time you make contact probe for “what’s new.” Add it to your contact notes and begin looking for information that the contact would find of interest.

You’ll probably find that such information exists with other contacts in your database. This presents an occasion to contact these others for “I want to learn more about … ” input. It also leads to a new/revised batch messaging and cross-contact pollination. I’ve found LinkedIn groups a good source of information, too; it’s information can lead you to new contacts.

L — “Leverage”: Make it easy to act on what you need to do to build, maintain and adjust elements of your PRM. Band stresses that your database should always be accessible (much like the old days when you carried the Franklin Planner wherever you went). Ready access cues a prompt update after an interaction. Having a database that provides when-to reminders helps work the contacts into your calendar.

Subscribing to RSS news feeds helps keep track of topical information from different websites in a single news aggregator.

Making your PRM system work: Band advises scheduling your 100 most-important contacts for quarterly interaction. This shows them that they’re on your radar and helps ensure you stay on theirs. People do business with people they know — especially those who maintain an ongoing interest in them.