Listen along when you’re on the go:
Have you ever noticed the star under a person’s profile picture on LinkedIn?
The star is a great way to save a contact, even if you are not Connected to them. Simply click the star and LinkedIn will save that person’s Profile as a contact. Once a contact is saved, the star turns into LinkedIn’s “Relationship Tab,” an area that allows you to input notes and data that only you can see. The Relationship Tab is the perfect area to use LinkedIn as your personal CRM (customer relationship management system). In this post, I’d like to share with you the 5 ways this is possible.
Let’s explore these 5 features one by one.
In this area, LinkedIn will automatically populate all messages that have been sent between you and the saved contact on LinkedIn. Furthermore, If you have your outside email synced with LinkedIn (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo), this area will auto-populate with all of the email correspondence that the two of you have had as well. This is great because it allows for a centralized location to see all of the conversations that you’ve had with the saved contact. This makes it easier to see where a conversation left off last when you go to reach out to a contact.
Under “Notes” you can fill in anything you’d like in relation to that saved contact. You are the only one who can see your notes and they provide a great area to capture anything you want to remember in regards to the saved contact. Three quick ways to use notes would be to:
The Reminder feature allows for you to set a reminder for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or recurring reminders regarding the saved contact. If you choose recurring, you can then choose to be reminded every week, every month, every 3 months, every 6 months, every year, or after a custom range of days. Just like notes, this information can only be seen by you. Reminders provide the ideal area to schedule follow-up calls, lead nurturing initiatives, and gentle nudges to stay in touch.
How many contacts do you have in your network that you can’t remember how you met them? Maybe it was a networking event, maybe a conference, but after a year or so of having them in your network, you can no longer remember. The “How you met” feature takes the guesswork out of remembering who the saved contact is. You can type in details of how you met (location, date, event, etc.) and if the saved contact was introduced to you, you can even select who introduced the two of you.
My favorite feature of them all is the ability to tag a saved contact. This is a great way to organize your network and to group like individuals together. After a conference or event, I always suggest tagging the individuals you meet, so that you can easily pull up those individuals by tag for follow-up messaging. Once the conference or event rolls around again the next year, using tags also makes it easy for you to pull up those contacts once more to inquire if they’ll be in attendance again and more importantly, if they would be open to meeting with you one-on-one at the event/conference.
There you have it, 5 amazing features all housed right inside of LinkedIn. Of course these features only scratch the surface of CRM capabilities and do not have the complete functionality of systems like Salesforce, and other similar systems. However, if you are a salesperson, small business owner or entrepreneur without a robust CRM system in place, I hope that you can see how these features can help you set up a pretty simple, yet effective CRM.