In planning this next stage of the career, one of the questions I tabled to all the top business developers I could meet was ‘what do you use to manage your business contacts and networks’?
The responses varied from whiteboards, to weekly planners, to moleskins, to prodigious use of www.linkedin.com, all with their strengths and limits for keeping track of a rapidly expanding network of contacts and relationships.
But the problem I’m grappling with is that your average notebook requires consistency and ‘reviews’, yet ultimately will be mothballed when spaces are used up. For pages turned, you have ‘out of sight, out of mind’ issues, and with sales databases (such as www.salesforce.com) you have powerful relational database schemes, but again the tendency for information to become entered, catalogued, and ultimately forgotten unless searched upon.
Linkedin is incredibly powerful and helps you visualize network connections, search in and out of network, and view the ‘degrees of separation’ between you and key contacts, yet involves it’s own gamut of online eqituette, and ultimately leaves your network wide open to those in your network. Not always what you want or need…
So, as part-experiment, part-need, I’ve started using mind-mapping software (mindjet’s mind manager for mac since the XP version is more costly and my mac is better for this) to build and visualize the network of people, relationships, and contacts currently in the works. It was tough coughing up the funds and departing from the open source equivalent Freemind, but the transition has been worthwhile already. Some interesting results that you won’t find elsewhere:
- Ability to visualize networks and intra-
network relationships - Add tasks with date reminders to contacts
- Single view of all network contacts, due dates, action items
- Dynamically scale, add, delete, link, unlink relationships
- Highlight high-priority contacts and activities
- Keep track of contacts that require follow up weeks/months down the path
- Export data to other standard formats (office, flat files, etc.)
So far so good, and eventually this may cost-justify a 27″ imac to manage the overall network in a large screen view!
I’ll put in a plug for old school. I prefer the simple paper weekly planner. To me, the idea of ‘forgetting’ is a non-issue: at any given time, most of your contacts are not in the front of your consciousness anyway – the moment you look them up, whether they be on linked in, a computer app, or paper, the memory returns. I find paper easier to use, often faster (flip a page rather than open an application), and every bit as reliable. Plus, if/when you fill up the planner, taking that one time a year to sit down and copy stuff into the new one is really a mind invigorator – forcing you to remind yourself of and consider every contact you have, when you otherwise wouldn’t have.