tl;dr
A personal CRM fundamentally works different compared to the classic B2B sales and marketing CRMs. It is much less about a transactional relationship rather than building meaning relationships with your network.
Depending on your age or generation you might be familiar with this thing below? If you don't know what it is, it doesn't matter. This device is called Rolodex and was used in the non digital age to store business cards in one place.
In the past it was a fast way to skip through some cards to find a phone number or address of one of your contacts. Obviously in today's world it is very limited as most of our contacts that me make are living online on social platforms, though email conversation, or via video meetings. In addition the size of our network increased dramatically as it is much easier to meet new people at scale online. Thus the Rolodex solution is outdated and we need a fully digital way to have a contact book where we can store all information of our network.
Before we start exploring what a personal CRM is we first need to understand what a customer relationship management or in shot CRM software is. This product category rises the first time in the 1990s to help with sales automation, customer service and marketing motion. The cloud revolution in the 2000s helped CRM software to get breakthrough and companies like Salesforce and HubSpot evolved. This two companies alone have a market cap valuation of over $350 billion and are the leading CRM solution in the enterprise segment.
Of course the market is very crowded as almost every company need some sort of CRM to manage and organize their sales and marketing efforts and keep track of potential customers, leads and those who got converted to become a client. Work collaborative with your co-workers and have the valuable information in one place. Thus there are many more solution and different CRM's for different nieces and use-cases. One subset of a CRM is the personal CRM space but it fundamentally differentiate from the traditional sales & marketing CRM's that we described earlier.
A personal CRM can be actually more compared as your advanced contact book or as I like to call it your contact book on steroids. Because it not really made for transactional relationship tracking with alle the different steps that a sales process or marketing approach include.
People use personal CRM's to keep track on their own network. On the connections that they make in their private or business life. Thus it need different features compared to the CRM's like the HubSpot's and Salesforce's of the world. Although the core idea to have one central place to store all your contacts with a rich set of information stays the same. Therefore a CRM unlike a contact book like the one on your phone plugs in to different platforms to accumulate the information.
For a classic CRM this might be integrations to your website to collect form entries or to your emails to track sales conversations. For a personal CRM this are ideally all platforms where you connect and are in touch with your network. This includes social platforms like LinkedIn and X (Twitter), or your multiple email accounts including private and business emails, or your messenger like your WhatsApp and iMessage.
And this is exactly where the limitation to a contact book app lies. The true power of a personal CRM is to automatically bring in your contacts from all these different platform to have them accessible in one central place.
There are a couple of reasons you should use a personal CRM. Here are my top 5 that will lead us to the next part the feature set that you should look out for when considering using a personal CRM.
A personal CRM allows you to store contact details, notes, and interaction histories in one place. No more searching though emails or messages to remember when you last spoke to someone. These days our network lives across so many platforms that it is mess to find information when needed.
With automated reminders, you can ensure that you stay in touch with friends, mentors, colleagues, business partners, investors, or who ever exist in your network. Forgetting about a follow up happens all the time in our busy daily life. So why not using the help and power of smart software to take care of it.
By creating more touch points with people you build better relations. People feel valued if you remember their birthday or other important days in their life such as starting a new role at a company. Finding the right opportunities to sync and start a convo are not always easy. With a personal CRM that reminds you and gives you suggestions it much easier to do.
For professionals, freelancers, and entrepreneurs, a personal CRM can help build meaningful business relationships, leading to new opportunities and collaborations. It really matters who you get to know and maybe can introduce you to other valuable people. Don't forget networking is not a one way street. The best networker bring value first before asking for any favours in return.
Personal CRM's that are build with an AI first approach can help you get tasks done much faster. Writing an intro between two people in your network that you want to connect can be time consuming. With the power of AI you don't have to do it manual anymore.
When it comes to the feature set besides the integration and connection to different platforms, there are some features that really make a difference. Look out for features like:
In general a flexible tool that can adopt your needs is great because you don't want to tread every contact in your network the same way.
No matter if you already have an existing network or are just getting started to build up new relations, a personal CRM can truly be a game changer. Even for those who already are that level of organised to keep tack of their contacts with a spread sheet and trained themself to always keep in mind to update and enter new information a fully automated CRM can be beneficial and time saving.
Once you understand that we humans are a social species and thus will always have interaction with other people it just make sense to leverage technology to ultimately build ore meaningful and deeper relationships with the people sounding you. This can be little things like the birthday of people who you really care about and don't want to miss out, or conversations with people you met at a conference and usually forget to follow up with them even tho you had such a great convo by that time. So the simple answer is really everybody should at least give a personal CRM a shot especially as most of them are free to start with. There is really no downside and if you figure out you don't get much value out of it you can simply go back to the state before. But so far I only met people who would never go back and trying to manage their network without the help of tools like table. Your network is your net worth!
As the benefits of networking and growing a meaningful connections are huge and can lead to so many amazing things happening in your life, we covered how to network with the right intent in this article.
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