Create a contact

As a professional services business, strong client and contact relationships are the cornerstone of your success. These connections thrive on effective communication and a deep understanding of your clients' needs and goals.

advaise.app simplifies contact management by providing a central place to store essential information about your contacts. From contact details to job titles and custom notes, everything is at your fingertips.

Navigate to the Contacts module in the Sales category in the menu:

Click on the +add button in the menu at the top of the screen:

Enter basic contact details:

Contact name
Phone
Email
LinkedIn URL
Profile photo
Notes

Hints and Tips

For smooth sailing, remember these tips when creating the contact:

Phone: Include the country code with a plus symbol, e.g., +1, +44.
Email: Use a valid email address format, like firstname.lastname@company.com
LinkedIn page: Include the full LinkedIn URL, starting with https://www. For example, https://www.linkedin.com/in/firstname-lastname/ . The easiest way to get this is to go to the LinkedIn profile of the contact and copy the URL from the browser.

Import contacts

If you already have an extensive contact list, bulk import basic contact details using the Import/Export function in the Administration tab of the Organisations module.

Download the template, complete the details, then upload.

Import details include:

System Id (leave this blank for new contacts)
Name (contact name)
Phone (use international phone format, eg: +12124567890)
Email
LinkedIn Page (URL from their LinkedIn profile, eg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/contact.name)
Role
Notes

Management

Once you have created the contact, open the contact and navigate to the management tab to complete additional details for the contact.

Relationship Management actions

Client development is one of the most important practices of any professional services organisation. Using advaise.app to create and follow through on relationship management actions with contacts will take your business to the next level. Your team will always know what the next best action is to take to develop a client contact and keep them moving through your pipeline from prospect to satisfied customer.

It's important to develop the mind set and discipline to keep creating and completing relationship management actions. Client development is not a once and done activity, you should be constantly keep prospects, current customers and past customers engaged.

Creating actions against a contact has two benefits:

It creates, assigns and tracks actions that need to be completed.
It creates a record for future reference. This way, any staff member in future can see details of previous actions and communication with this contact, ensuring consistency of messaging and avoiding repeating the same information.

Actions are assigned a category. These categories can be used for filtering actions.

Assigning an owner will notify them and add the action to their dashboard.

Setting a due date and entering comments will help the team to understand what they need to do and when.

The status defaults to "In Progress". When the action has been completed, update the status to "Completed" or "On Hold", both of which will remove the action from dashboards. Use the comments box to capture the outcome of the action.

Buyer profile

Understanding your buyers is essential to closing deals and building long-term relationships. The buyer profile records details of the buyer's role in a client organisation and the motivators behind their buyer behaviour. By creating a buyer profile for each contact, you can understand their needs and expectations, tailor your messaging and approach, and build rapport with them.

Creating a buyer profile involves gathering information about the contact's role in the client organisation, their buying process, and their decision-making criteria. This information can include:

Seniority - How senior are they in the organisation? This determines how much influence they have on decision making.
Function - Identifying the function of the stakeholder will help you understand where they fit in the organisation and their perspective.
Role - What is their role in the organisation?
Budget - What is the estimated annual budget they control that is available to spend in our category?
Primary driver - What is their main motivation and priority?
Secondary driver - What is the second most important motivation and priority?
Attitude - Evaluate the stakeholder's attitude towards your organisation on a sliding scale from negative to positive. This evaluation will help you understand their level of enthusiasm and willingness to support your organisation.

By understanding these factors, you can position your product or service as a solution to the buyer's specific needs and challenges, making it more likely that they will choose you over competitors.

When you add a buyer profile to a contact in advaise.app, the information is available when the contact is selected for stakeholder management in clients, proposals, and engagements. This means that you can easily access the buyer profile information when you are working on a project or engaging with the client.

Additionally, the buyer profile can be shared with other team members who are working on the same project, ensuring that everyone has a clear understanding of the client's needs and expectations.

With this convenient access, you save time and enhance communication accuracy. Need to send an email or make a call? No more searching; it's all right there, including any past interactions with the contact.

Proposals

In the proposals section, you have easy visibility of proposals where this contact is named as the contact for the proposal.

Engagements

In the engagements section, you have easy visibility of engagements where this contact is named as the contact for the engagement.

Opening applications

If the contact is a candidate who has applied to an opening in advaise.app, the details of the role they applied for is displayed here. To find further details, go to the Openings module in the People category of the menu.

Next steps

Link contacts to clients

After creating the contact, go to the client and link the contact in the strategic relationships section in the development tab.

Client interviews

Prepare for and conduct client meetings using the interviews section. This brings together information on the contact, client, and market context including needs analysis, case studies, and insights. This helps you formulate a plan for a successful client meeting.