How long does your Rolodex last ?
All salesmen have a Rolodex in one form or another:
- the real physical Rolodex
- an electronic contact data base
- a spreadsheet
This Rolodex is the asset of a salesman: it is the rescue lifeline of the salesman where he can fall back on when he starts missing sales. It allows him calling up people for generating leads or getting hints.
Obsolete Rolodex
The main problem is that the Rolodex becomes obsolete after just a few months.
People will move from job to job or from job to unemployed.
People will only inform salesmen of the status or job change if they see a benefit in it. Just, like they update their status on LinkedIn as this can help them finding a new job or better opportunity.
The best is to have links with all of your contacts using LinkedIn and then your Rolodex is likely to be up-to-date as people communicate their changes.
The challenge of the up-to-date Rolodex
As there is no incentive or personal benefit to keep the salesman and his Rolodex up-to-date, he needs to check all of his contacts with online data bases like LinkedIn, Spoke, Jigsaw, Zoominfo and other directories to make the changes that are communicated and published.
Additionally he needs to contact those contacts that haven’t communicated a status change on a regular base just to be sure if they are still in place.
As contact data base of all salesmen grows, the effort and required investment of keeping track and re-contacting becomes a challenge to achieve.
In most cases the Rolodex deteriorates in accuracy and thus value fairly quickly as the investment in contacts is only valued the moment you need a contact. Hence most people don’t invest time and effort in updating.
Building a new Rolodex is more important
What’s important is not the past or the current number of contacts in your Rolodex, but the number of up-to-date contacts.
The best salesmen are not the ones with an impressive Rolodex, but those who can build up a new Rolodex in a short amount of time.
What’s the status of your Rolodex ?
