The Harvard Business Review observes that “Networks deliver three unique advantages: private information, access to diverse skill sets, and power.”
Private networking is important because information that everyone has is not that valuable. Personal contacts can offer you data no one else knows. This information can be an enormous advantage to you if there is trust between you and your colleagues. What’s more, having a diversity of perspectives allows you to create a better product and to do your job more effectively.
The address book has traditionally been something that helps busy professionals organize their contact information. You might think that the address book has become obsolete, but the truth is that it is alive and well. It has merely adapted to the internet era, becoming more useful than it ever was.
Introducing Covve
Covve is a professional address book app that is more than just a place to store your contact information. It is a tool that helps you to build, manage, and expand your own private network.
Covve maximizes your capacity to uncover warm leads by connecting you with the acquaintances of your current friends and colleagues. You are thus able to build a secure and exclusive network of contacts. As you do so, Covve helps you prioritize which connections are the most important and helps you nurture them.
Signing Up for Covve
It’s really easy to get started. You just need to download the Covve iPhone app from the App Store and sign into it on your phone. An Android version of the app is already in beta testing and will launch soon.
You can also sign up for Covve for free through the company’s website and sync with your Gmail or Outlook address book.
Should you choose to use the mobile app and give permission for Covve to access your phone’s contacts, it will back up your information to the Covve servers. The app will then create your Covve address book, which will be in sync with your phone’s contacts.
Covve will process your contacts to identify additional information, such as their companies, job titles, industries and countries. It will also spot any duplicates you might have. On a typical address book, this process will identify a few hundred potential contact improvements. The amount of time it will take to prepare your address book depends on the number of contacts you have. The app itself does not have to be open during this process.
Once the account is ready, you’ll be taken through Covve’s walkthrough, which is helpful without being overbearing.
Organizing and Prioritizing Your Contacts
One of its most beneficial features is that Covve helps you to classify your contacts according to which are the most important. You have three options for how to label them. You can archive, favorite, or tag each connection. “Archive” and “favorite” are fairly self-explanatory; those labels are for your least important and most important contacts, respectively.
Tags allow you create whatever categories are most useful for you as you organize your address book. For example, you can create tags for “family,” “partners,” or “clients.” When you have finished filling in your info and tagging your contacts accordingly, you’ll be able to get a helpful visual overview of your networking options.
Visual Overviews
You can access visual depictions of your data by logging into the Covve website. Covve displays your information on two types of maps, world and industry.
Covve also gives you a diagnostic graph showing you categories of information that you have and are still missing.
In Touch Helps You Network by Giving You Reminders
In Touch is a feature that helps you to remember to stay in touch with your most important contacts. When you first start using Covve, the app will present a contact and give you 5 options for choosing how often you want to stay in touch with him or her: “I’m already in touch,” “monthly,” “quarterly,” and “yearly.”
At the beginning of each week, Covve will present a short list of the people you need to get in touch with that week. You can also set an additional reminder through your settings for the end of the week.
Finding Leads
One of the main purposes of Covve is to use your current contacts to find new ones. Covve does this through the Lead feature. “Leads” are people your connections know but whom you do not.
Through Covve, you can search for new contacts related to your field or your current projects. For instance, you could do a search by industry and location, such as “accounting San Francisco,” or by a particular company, such as “Goldman Sachs New York City.”
Covve will tell you if you have a contact who knows someone who meets the qualifications of your search. But it will not share the private details of anyone with whom you are not connected. What you can do when you find a lead, however, is text, email or call your mutual connection so that you can be introduced to your new lead.
Before actually finding leads, you will first need to invite your synced contacts to Covve. You can invite contacts by text or by email. And if they agree to join, they will get one month of Covve Pro.
Privacy and Protecting Your Data
As it is aimed at business professionals, Covve does its utmost to protect the privacy of its users. It is hosted on Microsoft Azure, uses 256-bit SSL encryption, and regularly updates its security and backs up its information.
Covve guarantees that users can delete all their data at any time they wish. To do so, you simply delete your account through the app’s settings.
Pricing
Among these other features, the free plan also allows you two leads per search and a maximum of 8000 contacts.
The Covve Pro plan only costs $4.99/month. It updates your professional info every month, gives you unlimited leads per search, full contact visualization, and up to 15,000 contacts maximum.
Covve’s other plan is for businesses. It provides a graph for your company, unlimited contacts, weekly reports and expedited support, as well as training webinars. It costs $12.00/user/month for 50 people or less.
Covve Is the Address Book of the Future
You never know what business opportunities could be available if you only had the chance to discover them. Through its innovative design, Covve’s address book allows you to mine current connections for leads. By doing so, you can achieve growth your company would completely miss otherwise.