Sorting 1.125 contacts and prioritizing who to reach out to.
After I knew I have to meet with people to move a step forward, I wondered: whom do I meet? Whom do I want to want to be around?
The process itself was straightforward. I have a pretty well-organized “address book.” I always used the standard Apple address book and had it synched via iCloud.
I have never done much more with it. But I needed to find a more systematic approach.
So first I brought all of my contacts into “Google Contacts”. I set up different tags, e.g. “Private”, “Hotels”, “Restaurants”, “Swipe”, “SinnerSchrader”, “Accenture”, “Unwordy”, “Old stuff”, “Potential Clients” and “VIP”.
In total, I had 1.100 contacts. I went through all of them and organized them across all the labels. Anyone not fitting in my private and my past three companies got into the bucket “Old stuff.” “Unwordy” contains all contacts important for my podcast. “Potential Clients” become the bucket where I added everyone who could be of interest if I ever have something to sell again.
“VIP” was the last tag. When going through the list, I added those I wanted to meet into the “VIP” bucket. The main criteria: are those people who are fun, inspiring, and pleasant to be around. 27 people made it into this list.
Besides that, I realized this won’t be enough. There is a broader circle I need to meet and stay in contact with.
At the same time, I wondered: how do I keep track of all those meetings? On what we talked about? How do I make sure to follow up the most exciting and promising conversations?
So I looked around and started to play around with Pipedrive. It is a CRM tool, probably most used for sales teams. But it has a great Google integration. It tracks all emails, I can create notes to every phone call or meeting with a specific person. And most important: I can make follow-ups. Those remind me automatically — no matter if I have to follow up something a week or a year later. And then I can forget about it.
That lead to the last bucket in Google Contacts: “Pipedrive,” with 127 contacts in.
Oh, and I probably deleted 200 contacts, where I am sure I will not need them anymore — right now, I have 961 validated contacts in it.
How I reached out to those people, how the first meetings went — I will go into more detail next week.
Best
Jürgen
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