Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a standard sales focused way to understand who you are targeting, who you’ve approached, document outcomes to discussions and schedule follow up actions.
If you’re serious about taking control, you need to develop you own CRM, in order to keep a track on your activities and collate data from your target clients/ employers.
Remember, the aim of this whole process is to get your prospective client/ employer to engage in a discussion with you. To do this, they first need to notice you, then you need to be different to grab their attention and then you need to encourage them to take action – we have covered a lot of the activity around these steps previously.
However, let’s briefly talk about how you can build up a steady flow of materials/ references/ data etc. that you can proactively share with your ‘Jane Doe’ that they will value and which will help differentiate you from the crowd.
Activity:
People are always interested in themselves more that they are interested in you! A big generalisation I know, but in the main, it holds true. You can use this to your advantage though by demonstrating to your target person that you have invested time in getting to know them. You do this by referring to their work, to an article that they had had published, to some post they have put up on social media etc.
Let’s start to collate the information that you need;
Get out your list of target organisations and/or individual hiring managers (and their managers). Go to Google and set up a series of ‘Google Alerts’ for each and everyone on your target list. This will provide you with a regular flow of information (in the main topical) that you can refer to when making contact. You can set up daily or weekly Alerts.
There are number of other News Alerts websites, most offer a free subscription – do a Google search for News Alerts sites in your area or focused on your target sector and set up similar alerts.
Finally, set up alerts on Job Boards so that you know the type of roles the organisation is looking to fill – download their role descriptions – these often provide valuable insights into the culture and style of the organisation.
Equally, look out for more senior appointments as this often indicates future changes in direction etc. All of this is designed to be collated and filed in an accessible place – apps like Evernote is great for collating electronic data like this as it provides the ability to segment your data into folders.