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As I said in a previous article (click here for more), relationships are not really built between organizations; business relationships are built between the individuals who work in those organizations. This is one of the most important, flexible and powerful features of portal software: the ability to set up complex business relationships between individuals within related organizations and to view these in a variety of ways.
Building strong organizational relationships is not easy to do and not easy to manage. The management system will only be as good as the brain behind its design and the quality of the data that is input. But when it is managed properly, we can guarantee you (from personal experience) that the quality and strength of the professional relationships you forge between your team and individuals involved in related organizations will be such that they will not want to look at any other competitor.
There are a number of Classifications that should always exist in any portal application solution:
 Name
Email address
Login name and password for Portal Users (non-portal users do not have this data)
In addition, you need to have the flexibility to create a range of Classifications grouped into a Profile for an Individual.
Portal Users may Classify the following contact information:
Title description – there is no sin worse (apart form spelling a name wrong) than to get an Individual's title wrong. For this reason, you should make this field a free text rather than a pre-defined list. This is more flexible as there is a huge variety of potential titles out there and it pays to get it right.
Sales role – as well as the above, the Individual's will have a role to play in the sales process. This is a critical Classification and impacts any Sales Opportunity Management processes. If you have a sales person who is spending a great deal of time on a potential sale but is talking to an Influencer rather than the Financial Decision Maker, then you need to know the Individual's sales role order to manage that sales person effectively and trust his or her forecast.
Direct number – the main telephone number is implicit because of the relationship to the organization (if one exists). Store all important information like direct telephone numbers to bypass an unfriendly gatekeeper of the organization.
Mobile number – as above.
Of course it is crucial that this contact information is updated constantly. Some of it is easy to get -- email addresses and business telephone numbers -- but some is not so easy. Things like mobile numbers, date of birth, home address, etc. can be difficult and require a real relationship of trust to exist in many cases.
One of the best sources of information about individual is, once again, your customer service and/or sales teams. They are talking to customers and potential clients all the time and collecting contact information as they go. A common, and extremely frustrating, problem with managing contact details relating to individuals occurs when an individual leaves the customer organization and no portal user updates the record i.e. the record still shows that the individual works for the organization. Good policies for housekeeping are therefore crucial for success in managing professional business relationships.
What is the most important contact type that you will have with individuals?
Ok -- so you now have contact records and information about the organizations you deal with (and perhaps those that you don't deal with but think you should be dealing with) and also relationships with individuals who work for those organizations. Great. What now?
Well, there is a variety of things that you can do with this potential relationship information.
For a start you can build analytical information such as a profile of customers and potential clients by business sector or industry. In fact, if you output the profile information on an organization from the portal to an Excel file you can easily set up a pivot table to cross-reference this data in a variety of ways.
You can also build mailing campaigns and targeted email lists. You can export the information to Excel and then merge it through Word into documents and labels, selecting specific industry segments by your criteria and building focused and tailored mailers to individuals and organizations.
These are all extremely useful and powerful applications for your portal based contact management system. But that isn't the whole story by any means. Using portal software applications such as sales opportunity management, customer service management and project management lets you track all sorts of contact points and pinpoint potential beneficial business relationships.
Portal software is only just beginning to revolutionize the way organizations do business online.
Chic McSherry
CEO
iport4business.com Inc
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