When I started becoming serious about the business idea of tamanguu, it was useful to comb my digital network on LinkedIn and XING with regard to persons who could contribute to tamanguu with their experience, knowledge or network and might be potential future customers later. This process was a real eye-opener since I recognised the strength of my network, which I wasn’t aware of and, therefore, didn’t use to its full extent in the past.
A main reason for this missing awareness was that I didn’t regularly check what was going on in my network. Actually, it costs time to stay up-to-date. Social networks like Facebook filter the flood of news and information based on your user behavior to those which are relevant for you and your network in that particular moment. What they don’t do is focussing on possible future opportunities or highlighting those with similar interests or experiences. However, making the most out of the network is about staying or getting in touch with people who you possibly could collaborate with to enhance your career successfully. It is about building a lasting relationship to the relevant, valuable contacts.
Well, let’s jump back to my story, as it comes to relationship building. With the large number of interesting contacts in my network, I started to reconnect with some of them. Certainly, there were persons who I had contact with in the past weeks, but also several people without any conversation for many months or even several years. Getting in touch with the latter ones was a little bit awkward like “Hey, we didn’t speak for 6 years. How is it going?” with having in mind that I wanted to ask them for advice or support. I could reduce some awkwardish feelings by bringing back common memories and experiences or addressing common steps in life since then like getting married, having kids, moving to other cities or countries. What I did abstractedly was to address the emotional connection, which is essential in relationship building. To keep this emotional connection, it requires regular interactions and opportunities to stay in touch in a reasonable way.
In this period, I wished to have an easy solution to do this relationship building and management. Therefore, I started researching for digital tools for mastering this challenge, which led me to several CRM (= Customer Relationship Management) solutions. Unfortunately, these had a different feel and other features, as I was looking for. CRM tools are generally sales-driven with a sales pipeline, focusing on selling opportunities and non-personal features like automated emailing with sales funnels. Therefore, personal, emotional relationship management was not in focus of these solutions… maybe that’s why they are called CUSTOMER relationship management. The collaborations and relationships in the music industries can be rarely put into a sales pipeline of a general CRM tool. Strong and emotional relationships, however, are crucial when it comes to collaborations and success in the music industries, because succeeding in music is driven by the emotion, passion and enthusiasm of the involved people. Simply summarised: many things, but especially music as an emotion-driven product, can be better sold when you are enthusiastic about it.
Finally, I realised that a relationship management solution must be a part of the big picture of tamanguu. With the whole experience since the discovery of my own network’s power, this solution even needs to support me in recognising opportunities for relationship building. In the end, the idea of a ‘Guided Relationship Management’ (= GRM) solution was born and is currently in development, so that the users of tamanguu will soon be able to benefit from it. If you experienced the same regarding your network or having the desire to get more value from your network, register for the beta version of tamanguu.contacts.
How can tamanguu help me to succeed?
Relationships are so significantly important in business and today’s relationship era that you can say: Without strong relationships you are not successful! At the same time, it takes a lot of time to build relationships that you often don’t have in your professional life. tamanguu accompanies and structures your business networking with focus and clear, intelligent action recommendations to build and maintain business relationships more effectively and efficiently.
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