Tip: How to work with spouses in Follow Up Boss

Managing communications across multiple parties can be hectic. Whether you’re working with couples, or selling a house that has multiple owners, it can be a task keeping track of appointments, messaging, and documentation.

Beyond helping you keep track of all your conversations across multiple parties, we’ve also been adding several new improvements to make this a whole lot easier and more productive.

Separate Contacts or Both on One?

This is probably the most common question we get. And for good reason. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but our best recommendation is as follows:

• When you’re still in a marketing/lead nurturing stage with them – keep the contacts separate. This allows you to send action plans to each person separately and track your conversations individually.
• Once they’ve become clients, merge them. As clients, you want to keep all the conversations with them, as well as key documents, dates, etc. all in one central place.

This is where the merge tool comes in handy. When you merge contacts, all the contact info and conversation history with both people get moved into the one central contact.

What should I name the contact?

Getting this part right is going to make a lot of other things flow better like using merge fields in your email templates and mailing labels for your direct mail. We recommend making the first name of the contact the first names of the couple – example: Jack & Diane

We recently made a change that makes this easier to accomplish by separating the first and last name fields on contacts (it used to be just one, which made mailing labels a mess in some cases).

Managing each person’s contact info

Now you’re handling multiple emails and phone numbers to stay in touch with these folks, and so you need to know at a glance which phone number is for each person.

That’s where the phone labels come in handy:

As an added bonus, labels show up on caller ID when you receive calls from that prospect so you always know who’s calling:

Recent Improvements to Working with Spouses

We’ve also recently been working on a number of improvements to make working with spouses a whole lot easier.

Email All from iPhone

It used to be a bit of a pain to send an email to BOTH people when you had both contacts on the same profile from the mobile app. With our latest version of the iPhone app, we’ve added a button that lets you email all of the email addresses on a contact with one tap:

Batch Emailing

The Follow Up Boss batch emailing feature makes it super easy to send targeted emails to lists of people in your database, but one challenge was that it used to only email the primary email on each contact, meaning the other emails on a contact (like the spouse for example) wouldn’t get the message.

Now we’ve added the option right before sending to ‘Include All Email Addresses’ to ensure all email addresses on a particular contact get sent the email:

Here are the full instructions for how to send batch emails.

Direct Mail

Staying top of mind via direct mail is a very straightforward process with Follow Up Boss. We generate print-ready labels in seconds!

This feature is great for sending out postcards and marketing, but you’ll be especially appreciative of this feature when the holidays roll around!

The benefits of our mailing label feature include:

• Listing both names on the address label.
• The ability to create labels for every address listed in the profile. (Great when you’re dealing with multiple owners or people who live in different locations.)
• We use standard-size Avery labels that can be found at almost every store or online.

Click here to learn how to Create Mailing Labels.

Never Miss An Important Date

Custom fields can show you all dates that are important in a couple’s life, including their birthdays, wedding anniversaries, or even a child’s birthday.

Once you set up custom fields in Follow Up Boss, we’ll place those events on your calendar in purple.

You can also keep track of all upcoming dates using smart lists – making it easy to create mailing labels or send batch emails to everyone at once to save yourself some time, but still ensure everyone gets a ‘personal’ note from you on these meaningful dates.

• Tracking Important Dates in Follow Up Boss
• Creating Custom Fields

Anything else you’d like to see?

We’ve been working hard to make it easier to work with spouses in Follow Up Boss, but know there are always ways we can improve. If you have ideas for how we can make this even better, head over to the feedback forum to submit your request and let others chime in as well.

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