Hello and welcome to a new week! I hope you are feeling refreshed and ready for this week’s newsletter. Today’s email is all about relationships, questioning just how intentional we should be with maintaining our friendships.

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One thought: Should you have a Personal CRM? 💌

A customer relationship management tool (CRM) is usually described in a business setting. Company’s use CRMs to track and manage their interactions with past customers, current customers, and also prospects.

Salesforce is probably the most recognised CRM, which is used by large organisations to effectively track business contacts. If, for example, a new sales team member was hired, they would have no idea about who the business has worked with already without this information being stored somewhere.

A CRM will typically include information like contact details, who internally liaised with the client, and general information about what services were offered and also potential up-sells. A CRM can also just be an Excel sheet, which is probably more realistic for smaller businesses, whilst benefiting from this system of recording information.

So why on earth am I mentioning this to you?

“What gets measured, gets managed” - Peter Drucker

The Personal CRM

Relationships are one of the most important aspects of our lives.

We’ve all met people who we really got on with, but have since lost contact with from either simply losing touch, a change in circumstances, or just a lack of effort to keep the fire burning.

To share my own experiences, I graduated from university 2 years ago now and I don’t really talk to the people who I would see every single day at university. Yes, it’s quality over quantity with friends, and sometimes relationships do come to a natural break, but there are definitely people I miss. Admittedly, I have been incredibly lazy to reach out to them.

A personal CRM is essentially being more intentional with your relationships, and this can be as detailed, or as basic, as you would like it to be. This could be as simple as reading this newsletter and thinking of 5 -10 people who you would like to get back in contact with.

A more advanced ‘Personal CRM’ would be to build a ‘database’ for the relationships you form, as you make them. You could use a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or a tool like Notion to include information like:

• The person’s birthday
• How you met and where
• Similar hobbies and interests you have
• How you feel about that person
• Where they live

You could even get extra fancy and set up a regular reminder to check your CRM, so that you regularly keep in contact with the people you care about the most.

Let’s imagine a scenario:

You lose touch with your old friend Katie and it’s been years since you last spoke. You add Katie into your Personal CRM, you find her birthday on Facebook and remind yourself of your similar interests, for example, she loved to read fiction books.

You set a calendar reminder to contact her the week before her next birthday and after sending her a message, you agree to meet up. You rock up with a small gift, the latest book in her favourite series, and BOOM. The relationship is back on!

I titled this week’s newsletter Exploring the Personal CRM because I am still figuring this out myself… to what extent should relationships be intentional? There’s almost a hesitancy over this, which then begs the question:

Why are we leaving maintaining relationships up to chance?

I hope you reach out to one person this week to re-kindle a friendship!

Talk soon,

Joe

Content tip of the week 🚀

Turn screenshots into content! If you’re engaging with other people’s content and chatting to people over direct message, ask yourself the question: “Could this be content?” It’s always important to ask somebody for content first, particularly if this is a private conversation you are sharing publically, but this is a creative way to add images into your content mix.

Resource of the week ✍️

A friend of mine Sophie Cross has launched a free ‘Content Creation Confidence’ online course which looks amazing. Here’s an intro for the course and the link if you’d like to enroll: https://www.thoughtfully.co.uk/content-creation-confidence-course

This Week’s YouTube Video - Subscribe here! 🎥

I’m desperate to get back on the YouTube bandwagon ASAP. I have some fun interviews coming up soon and also I’m editing my FREE LinkedIn Content Crash Course which I am so excited to show you guys.