Give yourself a visible relationship-health score (touches made vs. touches planned), because a number you can see gets your competitive wiring to do the work.
The idea
We're wired for the short term: pizza over salad, Netflix over the gym, refreshing the inbox over calling a past client. A visible score borrows the mechanics that make games sticky and points them at the long-term work. At Contactually we started grading relationship health in 2011. Many users (not all) wanted to raise their grade immediately, which meant reaching out to their database, and I constantly got messages from people about their own scores.
How to do it
Set the goal: how many people, how often. 250 people once a quarter is 1,000 touches a year, about 19 a week, or four a day.
Score yourself against it. If you reach half your people on time, you're at 50%. On a report card that's a big fat F.
Use green and red. Green for relationships on cadence, red for overdue. Red nags you to fix it.
Ask the one question that matters: am I doing the activities I committed to?
Example
That's why Relatable got a leaderboard, which looks as out of place in a CRM as being handed a taco at the car wash. You earn points for the healthy habits: reaching out, adding details about people, logging interactions.
Watch out for
Score your own activity. You can't control how others respond, only observe it.
Don't copy what colleagues do just because you heard it in a sales meeting. Pick activities you enjoy, so you'll keep doing them.
Relatable: Relatable tracks weekly activity streaks, which does the same job: you see at a glance whether you're keeping up.
Related frameworks
Track Leading Indicators: Track the actions you take and the replies they get, since deals arrive too late to steer by. Your personal outreach should beat mass-email benchmarks.
The Capacity Formula: People times touches per year is the minimum number of outreaches you just signed up for. Do the math before committing.
Caveperson Wiring: Our brains evolved to treat outreach as danger and to forget people, so go easy on yourself, then build systems that compensate.
Reward Yourself: Relationship work pays off months or years later, so give yourself a small immediate reward right after you do it.