This Non-CRM helped me make $246,000 from my personal network

As an entrepreneur, public speaker, and all around loud mouth, I meet a lot of folks, some of whom are important and some who are not. Many of these individuals are important to me personally, but not everyone is created equal when it comes to my business. Using a standard CRM, I can only treat people as if they are sales leads, which does not always help me maximize my relationship with them. Most of the business we do is based on relationships, not pure outbound sales.

To me, a traditional CRM software was made to store people’s information, like a historical ledger of communication and upcoming tasks, rather than fostering a healthy relationship.

My goal with any of my contacts is to keep the relationship strong with minimal upkeep. Keeping relationships strong means remembering or noticing important events like birthdays, job changes, promotions, or newly funded projects. This can be difficult, but thankfully I found a service that can help. I am happy to introduce you to Contactually.

Enter Contactually

For the sake of complete transparency, they used to be a client of mine. My love for their tool is what drove me to get them as a customer.

Contactually is a relationship management tool that has helped me earn $246,000 for my business. Many people would argue that this is also the purpose of any CRM. Those people would be correct, but for me, traditional CRM wasn’t getting me results nor was it easy or fun. The people who hired me weren’t part of our sales funnel or sales process; they were people I had met before and followed up with about their new jobs, birthdays or just remembered to say hi from time to time.

One example of many is Wistia, yes you Ezra. Because of Contactually I knew to follow up with Ezra, one of the marketing people I liked (his bucket) and say hello one day, we did a webinar together at KISSmetrics. Now they are one of our favorite customers and all because Contactually politely reminded me to say hi to Ezra. Seven of our largest clients have from me leveraging my personal network with Contactually.

Ok, so how does all of this work?

When you sign up for Contactually, you can connect it to your Gmail, Outlook or IMAP email account, and—more importantly—to your social accounts like Facebook, Twitter and at the time of writing this post, Linkedin (2/2015). These features are important for me because I have just as many connections on my social networks as I do in my contact book on Gmail. Staying in touch with these social connections is crucial.

Once you have added your contacts, you are then able to add all of these people into buckets. A bucket is a segment of people or contacts that have a follow-up reminder attached to them. In my case, I have buckets for influencers, investors, potential hires, consulting prospects, and so on. Each of these buckets has their own follow-up reminder.

Now bucketing people is not easy, I will say  bucketing my 12,000 contacts was nuts. Will give Contactually credit for trying to make this easier with their bucket game.

Now that I have bucketed a bunch of folks I receive an email (you can choose the day and the frequency) with a list of follow-ups I should conduct. The email contains follow-up information from all of the different buckets. This means I have a mixture of folks to contact; some I have forgotten about entirely (sorry Kapono).

Of course, this same list appears in my Contactually dashboard, where I can simply click “follow up” and then send them a message directly through the platform.

Now (and this is friggin awesome to me), since I don’t have everyone’s email address, I can also choose to follow up with them directly on the network where we are connected (LinkedIn messages, Facebook timeline posts, or even tweets). I can also see all of our previous conversations, notes I have about that person, and any other information that has changed on their social profiles.

(update: this has changed since writing this past in 2/2015)

Here is the kicker, just following up with people on a set interval is cool, but Contactually takes it a step farther. If any of my LinkedIn connection changes their job title, I will also get a follow-up reminder to congratulate them on their new job. This one feature has made me a bunch of money.

Since we are a consultancy and provide external analytics, marketing and growth services, it is hugely beneficial to be able to follow up with folks right at a moment when they are most in need of your help.

Makes sense right?

When you get a new job or promotion, you need to make the best first impression, and you are willing to spend money to do so. This has landed me two clients, and I would never have been in the right place at the right time without Contactually.

Even with all of the features I have mentioned, I am only scratching the surface. Contactually offers the ability to create email templates with merge variables. You know, those {FNAME} things that will automatically insert people’s names into the email for you. They take it a step farther by letting you have merge variables for {Company}, {Revenue} and {More}. This really comes in handy when you use another awesome feature they have called Scale Mail.

I am a super awesome spammer and will admit that to anyone. I don’t send junk; I just need to reach out to a lot of people at once and cut down on the amount of time it takes.

For example, I was once hiring a product marketer and had about 200 people on my target list. With scale mail and merge variables, I was able to craft a semi-custom email to each person. Where most systems go wrong is when you hit “send” and all 200 emails just go out without any review. This is where Contactually blew me away. Once I had created the bucket of potential hires and created the email template, I could choose to send them all out at once or manually approve each email.

This approval process meant I could read every email first and approve it before it was sent. This is important because not all merge variables work, and it can quickly turn into a nightmare. I can also add more personal context if I am close to the person.

In addition to scale mail, Contactually has an automation suite that allows me to automatically email people based on set criteria. What is even cooler is that I can do what is known as a soft follow-up.

When you follow up with someone via email, it’s easy to become a nag, so I use other channels to be less annoying. I do this by following them on Twitter 5 days after the first email follow-up and maybe connect with them on LinkedIn 5 days later. This keeps me top of mind without being a pest.

Then around 20 days after the first email, I send them a polite follow-up asking if they received my first message. With these soft follow-ups, people are aware of who I am, how we met, and the purpose of our connection.

If you are into sales pipelines, they offer features which are very similar to a kanban board (items moving through stages left to right). This is helpful when trying to track people through your internal pipeline.

Our team at McGaw.io signed up for a team account, but overall it kind of lacked the core sales team features at the time. We had some hurdles with automation and seeing statistics around what was being opened or clicked. For our sales team we switched to AgileCRM, which has it’s own awesomeness. However, I still use Contactually on a personal level :)

If you are looking for a tool to help you stay up to date with your contacts and truly get ROI out of your relationships, Contactually is the solution.

Do you have something to add about Contactually or another CRM you would recommend? Just put a note in the comments.