Everybody needs a good way to keep track of relationships.  For some of us, a quick trip to Barnes & Nobles yields a slim leather address book that does what we need.

If you happen to know more than a few dozen people you may just throw everybody into LinkedIn and use that platform to manage who you know (and who knows them).

Over the last ten years, the idea of CRM has been pretty mainstream — with Salesforce setting the standard for how CRM can really be an enterprise platform for running everything that we do.   Sadly, it’s bulky and no longer charming.  A lot of times, it just feels unusable for building rapport with customers and really getting things done.

And a bunch of new CRM platforms have jumped up to fill in the gap:

• Landslide [link] — great at charting the sales process from lead to close but needs a better mobile solution
• Highrise [link] — simple to use address book with deal tracking but could stand some more 3rd party integration support
• Bantam Live [link] – adds team collaboration and Google integration to contact management but
• Sales Nexus [link] – has email marketing built into an online platform but could could use some “prettying up”
• SugarCRM [link] — the best open source alternative just grew up (with social media flair) but tries to be “like Salesforce”
• Zoho CRM [link] – connects with three dozen other Zoho business products but is pretty unusable if you care about productivity

For me, BatchBook is the best new generation in high-performance “client relations”.

It’s what I use in my day-to-day “Conquer the World” strategy.

Here are a few views to get you curious.

Home Screen View

Arrange it any way you want.  You can add contacts, search on Twitter or Google, check out your leads, review your press connections, and see the latest new newsletter sign-ups on your website.

Contact View

When you finally get down to see the details of a contact in Batchbook, you can see their updated information and any recent tweets.  It’s pretty powerful.

Detailed Contact View

Find your contact on Twitter, Linkedin, and Flickr.  If you don’t have any information for them yet just hit the Search Social Network button and Batchbook will do all the work for you.

Get Started.

It’s free to set it up for yourself.  So if you are interested, go grab your own account and try it out.

Every forget something that you really wanted to remember?

Who was that guy I bumped into yesterday?  Did I send that email already?  What was the weather like yesterday?

Frustrating right?

You move so fast that at times you just get frantic trying to retrace your steps.  Trying to rethink vital information that

And it’s always at the worst possible time….

An edgy technology called Poyozo hopes to solve that problem for you once and for all.

Poyozo (got to love that edgy name, by the way) gives you your life (and your online data) back, one activity at a time. 

You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location.

To get started, you need to download the Firefox plug-in that automates the Poyozo magic.

Once you restart your browser, you add data to your Poyozo feeder.  You (literally) turn on access to certain services which Poyozo collects in the background.

Everytime the Poyozo service runs you get updated results.

That’s where the fun begins.

Poyozo begins to retrace your steps and help you recreate what happened.  Select the Poyozo icon at the bottom of your screen in Firefox and you get a calendar with a topic cloud for all your activity for those days.

You can drill down into a specific day for data.  A reminder of everything on your personal and social calendars, your music, emails, even the tweets you send and receive…And then you can drill down further and further into your activity.  Until it gets crazy detailed.

There are plenty of data streams to analyze, combine, search, and look through.

When you need to remember more, think of an edgy technology called Poyozo…

And never forget anything ever again.

“Who really cares?”

We’ve all asked ourselves that that question at one time or another.  Right?

You are busy in your cause and sometimes it feels like it’s hard to connect with the community.  You hear them.  You just can’t see them.

This is even more true with with Twitter [my link] and Facebook [my link] and the rise in virtual relationships.

Knowing more about your audience, let’s you provide any more value.

• You can help the audience find other like minds within the group.
• You can add targeted participants that are currently missing from your audience.
• You can keep your message simple and targeted knowing that everyone there wants to be a part of the discussion.

Enter Quantcast — an edgy technology.

The tag line sums it all up: “It’s your audience.  We just find it.”

That’s exactly what it does.  And getting started is a breeze.

You can create an account — or not.  (How about that for edgy?) For profiling your audience at an intimate level you will need to create your account and then place a special Quantcast tag on your site so that it can gather data for you.

And gather data it does.  Take a look at the data you get for Weather.com:

That’s actually not everything.  Just the stuff I could squeeze into a screen shot.

There is so much data here that Quantcast put together a tutorial to help you know what you are looking at.  (Which was so helpful I spent 30 minutes reading and learning the ins-and-outs of  everything.  Super helpful…)

Let’s take a look at each section.

Website Traffic.

This is pretty similar to what you could expect from Google Analytics.  The raw number of people coming to the site and from where.  You can look at it per day, per week, or per month.  And then you can specify the amount of history you want to view.  And you can compare it to other sites that you know are competitors.

That’s pretty handy.

US Demographics.

This is where Quantcast starts to get interesting.  You can get some really interesting info.

Imagine knowing the gender, age, race, education, number of kids, and income of your audience.  That’s exactly what you get.  And then to take it one step further, Quantcast puts those on an index comparing your numbers to the average website on the internet.

So for Weather.com, the website attracts mainly white, rich people who have multiple college degrees and are slightly older, without any kids. (The description alone is pretty edgy…)

Do you know that much about your audience?

Targeted Audience Profiling.

Quantcast also allows you you to see how “sticky” your audience is.

In this case, Weather.com has mostly casual traffic.  Only 2% of the audience visit the website 30 times a month or more.

The business activity is even more helpful.  You can see what businesses are visiting your site.  Imagine knowing that a prospect was actually looking through your site.  How valuable would that be?  It’s all there.  And easy for you to see.

Custom Searching.

If you aren’t happy with how Quantcast presents your data, you can do it your own way.  There are dozens of filters you can chose from.

You can use gender, age, race, education, number of kids, and income of your audience in an combination to see exactly is a part of your community.  And how active they are.

Audience Likes.

Want to present the right offer to your community?  Want to partner with another community that might like what you have?

Guess what? Quantcast will tell you that too.  It tells you exactly where your audience likes to hang out online.

But enough about me telling you about this technology.

It’s all just a mouse-click away.  So, go check it out for yourself.

Get to the edge of the conversation faster with Quantcast.

A big part of high performance is building relationships that matter.  It’s more than who you know or who knows you.

It’s about your ability to take key acquaintances and turn them into trusted relationships. And that starts with you taking the time to know what makes people tick.

Which can be a busy process. It can take lots of time and energy, and if you’re not careful you can come out looking like a “stalker”.

It just so happens that there is an edgy technology to help you.

Flowtown has an elegant alternative.

And it’s almost too easy to write about.  For about a nickel a contact, Flowtown will take your email list or sign-up form and tell you quite a bit of information about everyone.  You have a first name and email address and Flowtown fills in:

• The rest of their name,
• The country they live in,
• What age they are,
• Their Twitter and Facebook profiles,
• ….and LinkedIn, Amazon, StumbleUpon, and a few more…

Whatever it finds out in the social cosmos  for your relationships it adds to you database for safe keeping.

It’s pretty easy for you to scan too.

Realistically, it helps you take your community and build a tribe.  It makes your message personal.  It let’s you get to know the group as individuals.

It builds a personal data sheet on each person on your list.  Here is what it showed for me:

And it doesn’t stop there.  Flowtown uses MailChimp (built right in) to help you connect and communicate better.

You can create some social media based conversations.  For instance, you can create a campaign where you email all your tribe members that Flowtown finds on Twitter with a simple message to “tweet up” on the interwebs.

And the same for the other services like Amazon, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, StumblUpon, and Facebook.  Flowtown manages the entire process.  If you aren’t connected, Flowtown sends an email and tries to close the loop.

You can actually use it like a full scale newsletter platform.  It’s amazing and super simple.

And all for a few pennies a person.

Seems like a small price to pay for friendship.

What do you think?

Have you ever had a moment where someone looked at you in mild disgust and said these words:  “Dude, Stop being so selfish”?

How did you feel?  Probably a little “icky”.  Right?

If you have half a conscious at all, you stop whatever you are doing and think about this for a minute.

“Was I being selfish?”, you immediately stop and ask yourself.

Being selfish is a bad habit.  It’s one that is pretty distasteful to those that are around you.

You observe it and it kind of makes you a little annoyed — irritated.

It’s also one of those areas where most of us admit we need constant improvement (I do at least).

Here’s what sparked this whole discussion:

“A few days ago, I received an email that really jumped out at me.  It was from a Sales Trainer who was trying to pitch a new relationship.

The email started something along the lines of ‘I want to get to know you’ but then I noticed that my name wasn’t even on the email (No ‘Hey Dan’) and that it was BCC’d to me (and probably a dozen other people).  And then the real punchline.  Right after the opening sentence, the email jumped into 4 paragraphs of what that other Sales Trainer was doing along with coaching words on how I could attend their events and help them be successful.

To end the email, there were 8 or 9 of the obligatory links to the Sales Trainer’s social presence (Twitter, Facebook, Blog…) with a note that I should connect and see what they were doing.”

How would you react to this?

I archived the email and then kind of sat there in a shocked state for 45 seconds thinking “How Rude!”.

And then another 15 seconds later I was chagrined remembering all the times that I had done the same thing without really trying.

Whoops.

Here’s something we can all agree on — Selfish emails are rude.

They disrupt the conversation.  They destroy relationships.

So, what can you do?

Listen to your emails.  Are you whiny, demanding, or otherwise unrealistic?  Do you take more than you give?  Is your email all about “you”?

Here are some basic guidelines to look for:

1. Make it about the reader.  (More “You” than “I” or “me” in what you write…)
2. State your message clearly.  (Don’t be confusing or vague…)
3. Keep the email brief. (4-5 Sentences Max)
4. Don’t demand anything.  (That’s pretty clear…)

Give.  Don’t take (at least until you get to know me better).

Don’t be rude.

Let’s work on this together.

Do you have 37 ways for people to get a a hold of you?

Work email. Personal email. Legacy AOL email.  Unused Yahoo email addresses. Twitter direct messages.  Facebook emails….

It can be exhausting trying to remember to check all the places where you have conversations.

Let alone checking each one regularly so you don’t let something worthwhile lapse.

You start a edgy conversation on Gmail, then you send a @DM on Twitter, and next thing you know there are seven new Facebook messages waiting for you in your inbox.

That’s where Threadsy saves the day.

Think of Threadsy as Outlook, Tweetdeck, and Xobni all rolled into one online platform that you can access from your browser anywhere you have internet access.

Take a look at how it looks:

All your messages in one easy layout.

Gmail has always been unusable when it comes to managing similar sounding email threads.   You can have a single string of emails where 40 or 50 messages are grouped together and you have to sort through a long list of items.

It just discourages having conversations that matter.  And if you are in the “change the world” business, you have to find a better solution.

Thready provides a view of your emails that is easy to read.  And you don’t have to open a new window to read your message like you do in Gmail.  When you select your message, the message sides down and you get the full HTML view of your emails message.

You can reply to the message with a push of a button, and Threadsy even has some neat signatures it lets you create using your social media profiles.

It’s a useful platform for combining all your edgy conversations into one location.

There’s a lot of different options to use and while I’m a big fan, you should spend five minutes using it yourself.

Give it a try and see if it’s easier to keep track of all your conversations.

Sometimes on the weekends I take my sons down to the park to play and I sit on the bench and watch as they interact with they children on the playground.  I laugh.  I observe.  I come to their aid when they are holding into the monkey bars with one hand.  It’s an interesting social experiment.

That brings me to Twitter.

I use Twitter as a listening device by day and a tool to retweet good content by night.  It’s my own personal strategy for absorbing large amounts of “people knowledge” without needing to jump into every conversation and share every feeling I have.

Remember that old “knowledge equals power” quote?  Your parents and teachers scared you with that so you would get better grades.  Not so you could turn into a knowledge snob.

It is troubling to me how snobby we have become?  We have become high-grade intellectual bullies.

Shouting at people who ask us for help.  Mocking those who disagree with our opinion.  All across the interwebs.

Has twitter spawned a generation of snobby, manner-less scalawags?  Why are we behaving like first-class jerks?

After all, any knowledge that we have is a result of someone else somewhere.

No one successful ever got in the position all on their own…

It took  a bunch of people who “had their back“.

One of the paramount perspectives for high performance is the idea of giving back.   It’s the idea that you give your gift of knowledge to the world and expect nothing in return. You give because:

1. It is your gift to give and
2. You were given to.

Right?  It’s a mindset that does not need to take greedily for one’s self (as a defense mechanism).

This is fundamental to understanding and maintaining high performance.

Takers are losers…

When you demand that people listen to you being a jerk, you are telling the rest of the world that you are a loser.

So give.

Care.

There are not many “walking on fire” acts of bravery that compare to  stepping into the shoes of “chief sales maker”….Whether you are the CEO of a 1-man start-up venture or the lead sales architect at a Fortune 10 global enterprise, gambling your reputation, your paycheck , and your lifestyle on your ability to generate a lot of SOMETHING from a wide-open disadvantageous position of  NOTHING is a complete adrenaline adventure…

It’s not something you start without fighting to be the last one standing.

And so I am confused why sales dudes of all shapes, colors, creeds, and skills give up so easily (and usually with the best of excuses).  Did I miss something, somewhere where it became fashionable to replace effort with hope?  And why does everyone have a “side-project” going on instead of a “life project”?

It’s really much more simple than that.  Success is about putting in the effort, the time, the passion to show up for your destiny.  And if you think about it:

If you quit today you never get to see the success of tomorrow.

I get asked all the time why I push so hard all the time.

I work when I am sick.  I work when I am pissed.  I work when I have worked enough.

So why not let down?

Why not slow down the pace?

Because I am inspired by who I want to be…  Because I am impatient with my own progress…   Because I want to be more than I am right now…

And more importantly, I don’t want to lose my edge…

I don’t think I am alone either.  I read this quote from Chris Brogan and it really put a framework around my thinking about always driving hard toward a goal.

The tides of life can either pull your dreams away from you or push you faster toward them.  It’s a struggle! But letting down means you let go of your dreams.  And for me, that’s just not an option I want to consider.

Your Effort Differentiates!

My CEO buddy Kriss Wilson posted a quote on Twitter from Buddha that fit right in to some of my recent thinking about selling and the differentiation between those who SELL and those who are “working on it.”

I return to my passion about effort and the idea of the PQ that creates All-Stars.

First — a quote from the mind of Kriss:

“Fools wait for a lucky day but every day is a lucky day for an industrious man.” ~Buddha

Quite a lot of selling is doing…

It’s about putting in the necessary effort to navigate your way around obstacles to be successful.  It’s about being indefatigable, unstoppable, completely motivated…

It’s NOT:

……saying,
…………thinking,
………………planning,
……………………preparing
…………………………debating,
………………………………creating,
……………………………………testing,
…………………………………………searching,
………………………………………………building,   or
……………………………………………………making calls!

It is about EFFORT and the art of EXECUTING!

It’s the age old principle of “making your own luck”!

No sooner had my mind stopping spinning when I got a call from Tom Searcy which led to another discussion with a CEO in need of “sales execution” — not any of the things listed above.

And I again questioned this.

WHY? Why is execution so hard for start-ups?

And it really comes to a handful of explanations:

• You don’t know how…
• You are too busy with less important details…
• You underestimate the required amount of hard work…

I usually find in working with high performing CEO’s that the last reason is by far the most common reason for lack of sales.  The “sweat cost” of “always on” selling is easy to underestimate and it’s deadly if not fixed”

Entrepreneurs give up just before they become successful.  CEO’s quit long after they should have given up on poor selling ideas.  High-end “sellers” over promise results without understanding the resources they are being promised by the organization.

What to do?

• Put in the effort!
• Stay committed to putting in the effort!

You can change just about anything when you have the effort to back up your planning!