How do you guys manage your personal and professional network?
Hi,
since graduating from my MBA program, I have been using my free time to figure out a solution to manage my network. Essentially, something that helps me remember the people I have met, personal details like their pets' names or how many kids they have, and in what context we worked together.
Historically, I have been using good old Excel spreadsheets, but it's become messy and I want to be better prepared as I start my banking job. There are a number of tools out there, with some of them having been released fairly recently and each of them with individual pros and cons for example:
- HubSpot
- Dex
- Clay
- Cloze
- Airtable
- MonicaHq
- 4Degrees
A lot of these tools are either full-blown CRMs and/or have a heavy sales focus. While that's not necessarily a road block, I have yet to find a tool/workflow that works smoothly for a single user in a professional services/banking/PE setting.
How are you handling your personal and professional networks?
Any recommendations/insights are highly appreciated.
Thanks!
Facebook and linkedin
I don’t think that would work for me, because
(a) I don’t add my clients on Facebook (and not everyone is on LinkedIn, particularly senior folks)
(b) AFAIK LinkedIn removed to ability to add notes (e.g. pets’ names)
(c) There’s a complete lack of the “management” part of “relationship management,” meaning that I can’t track when I last was in touch and in what context.
I am curious how you use the two in a productive way, but I am looking for a way to actively manage my network.
Re LinkedIn, one feature that Google+ had when that was briefly a thing was being about to group your contacts without them knowing they themselves were in those groups and being able to add the same people to multiple groups. In that case, you could then group people by industry/company/interests/whatever you would have wanted. Not sure if LinkedIn ever had that as a feature, but that should 100% be the first new feature they add imo.
You might try searching for “personal CRM” or “PRM” to find what you’re looking for. I haven’t used the app Garden, but you can build simple profiles of your contacts with the kind of details you mention and then set reminders to keep in touch. Looks pretty easy to use and I think is also free.
Yup, that’s how I came across the software in my post above. Curious if anyone here uses one and how.
I'm not sure that a CRM is going to be any less messy than just using a spreadsheet, if anything it seems like using a CRM for this would be overcomplicating things. still not seeing the issue with just using a single spreadsheet for this, and I have used HubSpot and Salesforce before. what's the disadvantage to using a single spreadsheet with name, phone number, email, date of first contact, date of most recent contact, notes?
My brain is terrible and I often need a reminder on what I talked about with people. For example, I once forgot that I took a very small and intimate MBA class together with someone and asked them if they had taken the class. Awkward. Once they were like “wtf I was right there with you,” I remembered everything including our conversations and discussions inside and outside of class. I just need context and I haven’t found a clean way of capturing that in a spreadsheet without creating a database-type structure with several sheets and/or dozens and dozens of columns. I will never find relevant information quickly when I need it.
Spreadsheets are fine for static information, like someone’s pet’s name and current workplace. It gets messy when you want to add data like when you last spoke and topics you talked about and other contextual information that may change over time. Also hard to add or pull information on my phone.
I use Mogul. It's pretty good, I think it's like $100 for a year.
How long have you been using it for? What are some pros/cons that you've noticed?
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