Contact Management Systems

Having a good contact management system is an important factor in building any business, especially a home based network marketing business.

I’ve had people decide to join my network marketing business 1 and 2 years after our initial contact. Staying in constant touch with these people over a long period of time allowed us to develop a relationship that was built on consistency and trust.

In all cases these people joined me in business at a time that was just right for them. Everyone has their own time line when it comes to getting involved in a business and it has little to do with what YOU would like to see happen. If you are not in constant touch with your prospective business partners, you probably will not be top of mind when they are ready to get started with a new business venture.

With hundreds of people on my contact list, keeping in touch regularly with people would be hard without an excellent contact management system.

Are You a Hunter or a Farmer?

In Joe Nunziata’s book, Spiritual Selling he divides sales people into two groups;

1. Farmers – those who cultivate relationships over a long period of time
2. Hunters - those who go for the quick sale and then move on to the next target

Farmers are the people that build huge lists of contacts and continue to nurture those relationships over a long period of time. If this way of working appeals to you, then having a very good contact management system will be crucial for your success.

I personally prefer to build relationships over time and so have tried a number of different contact management systems.

The first one that I used was Microsoft’s Outlook and I must say that I was very happy with it. I did find that it was a little hard to integrate all of the tasks, notes, appointments and emails with contact information but for a long time I made do with it and was happy.

On a few occasions I lost all my data due to computer malfunction (as well as me not backing up properly) and that was an absolute nightmare. This is not something that can be blamed on Outlook but I must say using a web-based contact management system gives me a lot of peace of mind on that front.

The next contact management system that I used was ACT by Sage. I switched to this because it was recommended by a few of my mentors and most of my team was using it. There is no doubt that ACT has some powerful features that Outlook doesn’t but I never totally got used to using it. I found it a little too complicated and never got past using the simple features.

One drawback with ACT and Outlook

I use a desktop computer for all of my work and both ACT and Outlook were PC based systems. This meant that if I was anywhere other than my office I couldn’t access my contacts, appointments and scheduled tasks. I know that ACT has a palm device that can by synced with a PC but I just never felt inspired to go there.

Then came Oprius…

I wasn’t really looking for a new contact management system but was asked to trial the Oprius Sales and Contact Management system to see if it would be a good affiliate program for the Renegade Marketer System. There was a 30 day free trial with Oprius which required no payment details. I tried it for the 30 days and have been using it ever since.

I used to love playing with new software and tools. I’d happily spend hours fiddling with them until I was comfortable with all of their quirks…not these days. Because I have better things to do with my time than fiddle with software, I want things to be obvious and intuitive. If I try a new piece of software and it’s not fairly obvious how to use it, I move on very quickly.

That was one of the things I liked about the Oprius Sales and Contact management system, everything about it was obvious. Within minutes I could find my way around the basic features and the slightly more complicated features could quickly be grasped by watching their short and simple tutorial videos.

One of the other things I loved about Oprius was the fact that it was web-based. After losing my data more than once this was very appealing to me.

After about 1 week into trialling Oprius I was converted and over the following couple of months I started to really see how useful it was in building relationships for my business.

I was chatting with the CEO of Oprius a while ago and he mentioned the conversion rates for Oprius, I was amazed but not surprised — web traffic to free trial converted at 7%, free trial to paying customers converted at 48% and the retention rate was 98% !!

These are quite an incredible statistics and give you an idea of the level of satisfaction that people have with the Oprius Contact Management system.

Over the coming months I’ll be doing a series where I break down all the features of Oprius and how I use them in my business.

You can take a 30 day trial of Oprius and see what you think. I’d love to hear your comments…

By the way, what contact management system are you currently using if any?