RelSci is a powerful platform and is leveraged by companies in various industries for relationship management. However, whether you are a nonprofit, a private equity firm, or an entrepreneur, the most important step to ensuring RelSci success is syncing relationships. Contact Sync is our process for inputting your contacts into your RelSci profile, so that our algorithms can display your relationships to people of interest. If you load in the wrong type of relationships or your scope is too wide, it can hamper the efficiency of RelSci. To avoid this pitfall and ensure succesfull relationship management, consider these 3 steps:
1. Decide Relationship Types & Scope
Before compiling and loading in any files, take a moment to decide what types of relationships you want to load in. Who are you comfortable leveraging for introductions? Who is your organization comfortable leveraging? Also keep in mind scope; you do not want to be leveraging an old colleague you haven’t spoken to in 10 years. A few types of relationships clients commonly use are:
- A user’s personal rolodex
- Senior personnel’s contacts
- Investors
- Clients
- Alumni
- Board Members
- Donors
2. Identify Relationship Sources
The next step is identifying where these relationships are stored. Are they in an internal CRM system? Or are they stored in a spreadsheet? Maybe you want to load in your LinkedIn connections, your Outlook contacts, and your mobile phone address book. Each organization’s situation will vary as well as each user’s, so it is prudent to standardize what should be loaded in. Then users can sync additional relationship sources as they wish.
3. Sync Strategizing
The final and vital step is Sync Strategizing. How are you and other users going to sync these relationship sources to RelSci? This can be challenging, even more so if you are a larger organization. It can be demanding to ensure wide compliance, particularly if you are relying on users to upload their own contacts. There are a few ways to combat this:
- Have your IT team pull the users’ contacts en masse. They can then send them to us via SFTP or sync them with the Administrator functionality.
- Use RelSci’s closed API, which can be used to tag relationships more easily.
- Invite executive assistants to training sessions so they learn how to do it on senior personnel’s behalf.
- Hold a contest to see who can load in the most relationships or relationship sources. This can be implemented for users and/or the executive assistants.
RelSci is the definitive relationship mapping tool, and following these 3 steps will increase its effectiveness and user adoption for your firm. If you have questions or want to discuss a custom strategy, feel free to reach out to your Client Success Manager or our team at clientsupport@relsci.com.