Contact Management Solutions Aren't Just For Corporations

Whether you run your own business concern or y'all're trying to keep your extended family organized — or maybe even both — having a robust system able to go along your contacts organized is important.

Organization isn't plenty, though. An electronic Rolodex isn't really plenty, though that'southward pretty much what most of us rely on these days. Instead, nosotros need to exist able to tell when we last talked to a given contact, if we promised to handle any tasks or any other details that our address books don't track. That ways we demand some sort of contact relations direction. CRM isn't merely for the folks with big fancy corner offices anymore.

GMail's Contacts Only Aren't Enough

It's very piece of cake to fall into the addiction of syncing everything to GMail. After all, Google is kind enough to automatically add together anyone you lot communicate with to your address book, keeping the whole procedure pretty simple. But when it comes to managing your contacts, GMail just falls brusque. Say I want to notice a doc in the hundreds of contacts that call my GMail business relationship home: I accept to know the proper noun of the doctor I'm looking for. Searching but for 'dr.' only pulls up the emails that have that discussion in them — far too many to sort through.

Information technology goes across missing job titles, though. Bated from very bones notes, I tin't really add together information to my contacts. If I want to call up a birthday or a project that my contact is working on, I add it as a note, and promise I think that it's there. Nosotros're talking about a less-than-ideal approach to contact management.

The Practical Reason Behind CRM

By the time you add upwardly your 2d cousins, the guys you met at that networking event last twelvemonth and all of the various maintenance people that keep your home in tip-top shape, you have a stack of business cards that that could rival the height of a pocket-size office edifice. Would you be able to lay easily on the exact phone number you lot need in an emergency, even after you've added all those numbers to your accost book?

I don't think I could. Information technology's a affair of how nosotros remember who we're looking for. If I needed a plumber, for instance, I'm probably going to think who I got his proper name from or when I last called him long earlier I think his name or company. The same can hold truthful for business contacts and a lot of CRM software makes allowances for the style our brains operate. Highrise, for instance, allows users to search through notes, emails and other data for keywords, like 'plumber' or 'programmer.'

Putting Business organization and Personal Together

CRM software is generally developed with a sales team in mind: rather than 'contact,' the C in CRM usually stands for 'customer.' That's why yous're able to add so much information. Anything that can lead to a auction, from remembering a birthday to a preferred piece of work out time, has to fit.

That doesn't mean y'all shouldn't add your personal contacts to your management organization. CRM solutions tin can help you make both your personal and your professional life more than productive. That statement assumes, of course, that you've managed to keep them split up. I know I haven't, and the thought of trying to keep them separate is more than than a niggling scary.

But why should we have dissever programs notifying united states of america of family members' and sales leads' birthdays? To manage two systems requires double the piece of work — perchance fifty-fifty more for that cousin you regularly do business with. With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn — where virtually people take connected with both personal and professional contacts — it seems more than than reasonable to start managing all of our contacts from the same place. I get the feeling that a lot of companies discount the value of maintaining a system for personal contacts — despite the number of leads and networking opportunities that come up from exterior the part. Luckily, in one case you've actually got CRM software, no 1 tin can cease y'all from adding your personal contacts every bit well every bit those people you lot know professionally.

The Sticking Point

Your contacts of all kinds are valuable. If you lot've ever done sales for a large company you know how hard employers work to keep a Rolodex when an employee leaves. A proficient CRM file is worth money — it's a matter of deciding how valuable your file is.

The real sticking point for CRM software and those of us without companies willing to pay for it has to exist the cost. Joel wrote near some of the online options yesterday and none of them had a price tag I could justify for personal use. Sure, there are some costless options, only they practice have some serious limitations.

The solution isn't precisely simple: it's worth our while to be more productive, just much are nosotros willing to spend on CRM? Mayhap we aren't able to justify a high price for our personal utilise, just what about managing the contacts that can help us meliorate our careers? Our ain businesses? Our exterior projects? The price I'm willing to spend goes up with each group of my contacts I recollect about managing — how well-nigh you? How many contacts outside of your 9-to-five job do yous have? And what are you lot willing to exercise to manage them effectively?

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/contact-management-solutions-arent-just-for-corporations.html