Contactually is a very interesting application that addresses a critical activity that too few of us are very adept at … establishing a consistent program, and executing same, for keeping in touch with our prospects, clients, and contacts on a regular, and appropriate, schedule. Not to say that there are not other programs available that might perform similar functions but, I have only seen two. Coincidentally, both were acquired by Salesforce over the past year. Even then, neither performed this task even remotely as efficiently as Contactually would seem to do.
The Challenge: I have been in B2B sales since 1977 and this much I know about sales and sales people …
- Smart sales people recognize that you need an effective system for keeping track of what you have done and with who, the next action that you need to take, and when that action should take place.
- Different clients require different optimum schedules for regular contact. For example, let’s use the old “A”, “B”, “C” formula. “A” contacts are my best customers and prospects and I want to be in touch with them, let’s say, monthly. “”B” contacts may be every other month and “C” contacts may be every quarter.
- Even for those of us who are using a CRM, this can be a daunting task. Certainly, we can go to the contact record, enter in whatever activity we have just completed, and schedule our next activity but this involves ….
- record keeping and sales people are notoriously poor record keepers and for a variety of reasons.
Enter Contactually: Contactually is much like a personal assistant. It connects to your email account(s) and will import your contact records from Gmail, Google Apps, and IMAP. Exchange and CRM integrations are available on paid platforms (more on these later). Once your contacts have been imported you are encouraged to separate these into groups which Contactually calls “Buckets”. You can do this one at a time when you enter or edit a contact or you can play the “Bucket Game” where Contactually brings up your contacts one by one and you can drop them into the appropriate bucket.
Contactually comes with some pre-defined buckets and you can also create your own. Buckets are a critical element of this application as you can set, for each bucket, the appropriate frequency of connection for all contacts in that bucket and this frequency can be set by the number of days between connections. Every three weeks = 21 days etc. From there, Contactually will be reminding you via daily emails as well as on it’s dashboard, that you have actions to be completed. Nice. Here is a look at the dashboard …
And here is a look at one of two daily emails …
Let’s talk about the emails. You will receive two daily and the one shown above is an example of your morning “reminders”. Your reminders are based on which bucket you have assigned this contact to (connection frequency) and also an algorithm which is used by Contactually to identify how “important” each contact is and also how high a “priority” it is for you to be in contact with them. Honestly, and I have told the developers this directly … I find their grading system to be confusing, it seems to grade certain folks way higher than I do, and it seems that the only way to override that is to place a contact in a specific bucket. Great, I only have approximately 3,500 to go 🙁 Now, how you can get around this, I am not too sure. Back to the emails. Would you like to follow-up with that person? Hit the button and a new email window opens … pre-addressed. Sweet! Not shown on this sample are any reminders of actions (tasks) that I have not yet completed. Also not showing is this …
Contactually knows that I have had contact with these folks and it is asking me to tell it a little more about that contact so that it can update that information to the specific records. You can do this either by going directly to Contactually or … by email! Hit “Reply to this email” and a new email is opened, each of their names is pre-loaded into the body, and you can free type your answers. Free type? Right now, Contactually will actually look at your answers, find keywords, and parse those into specific sections of the contact record. For example, each contact record has a field for “How me met” so, if you were to type “We met at the Boise Chamber of Commerce meeting”, Contactually would parse that and place that note in the appropriate field. This is a great feature but, it does have one drawback. Depending on how easy to parse your message is, that will dictate how quickly it updates to the contact record. In some cases, I saw many many hours to complete this function and in discussions with the folks over at Contactually, they may be changing this up a bit to make those answers more clearly defined, by you, in the email. Your evening reminder email is very similar to the morning edition with a little more emphasis on “tell us what happened” and update your open actions. While these emails are great, integration with my Google Calendar and tasks would be a huge plus!
Here is a look at a contact record …
Contactually can be run as either a stand-alone application or it can be integrated, at this time, with either Salesforce or Highrise. More integrations are planned and I would want and need one for Nimble. If you do not use a CRM, by all means consider using it by itself. If, like me, you are using CRM, I think that integration is a must-have to make it worthwhile. Contactually is currently in private, invitation only, beta. For those of you wishing to give it a try, go to Contactually and use the invite code salesresultsllc and get instant access. Don’t say I didn’t get you a Christmas present! Once out of beta, it will be available in a free ( limited) version or a number of different paid configurations starting at $15.00/user/month.
Craig M. Jamieson
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