Over the past month or so, I’ve been working spending time keeping in touch with friends I’ve not contacted for a loooong time, and yesterday, I finally managed to sort out the last of the contacts which I have on file.
Originally, I had them on Excel sheets – and I had several of them, so it was messy, some of them had fields which others didn’t and it was a terrible mess. What I have done so far, is to really look at each friend individually, and then jot notes on what I know about this friend of mine – whether we’ve met in secondary school, polytechnic, university or in a toastmasters club.
On my way home these days, I also take effort to randomly scroll the list on my mobile phone and then message a few people a simple “Hey, how are you doing? Just messaging to catch up.“… and the response has been awesome. This “pinging”, as Keith Ferrazi would put it, has helped me to get in touch with so many old friends, and find out what they are doing, and it wasn’t a surprise when it came to me that many of them whom I’ve studied together with in polytechnic or university could potentially be business partners for any upcoming projects, or can be potential mutual benefit customers, or suppliers in the future!
But I’m not done yet! These 553 contacts which I have now are just those whom I know more personally – there are still two stacks of namecards on my home table – and these are the contacts established during all the seminars I’ve been to… and probably half of them are still not in my Outlook!
For the starter – I think we all feel the same way – it is a real mess of namecards and it is awfully time consuming to have to key in all the names, but I feel we all should start somewhere, rather than have the namecards pile up on us. Even if you have 5000 names, go ahead and key in 10 a day… it may take you over a year to get all this organized, but if you just keep at it and be sincere to keep in touch, just imagine how powerful it will be to have an immediate 5000 friends to look for, for better deals, for market outreach or just to bounce an idea.
Start converting your namecards into relationships today!
Good for you Kian Ann. I use a system called HighRise (www.highrisehq.com) to keep all my notes on people. They also just added a birthday reminder feature which is awesome.
The other reason I like it is I can add reminders (such as call Person X at 10am on Sept 21) and it will send me an SMS that day at 10am. I set up these reminders right after I finish making a call.
PS: I’m not a reseller/partner of them… yet… but I’m trying to get ’em to let me be one. I recommend it often enough 😀
PS2: How are you now days?
~ mel
Thanks for the link to the Ferrazzi book. Gotta go get a copy asap.