Managing Your Contacts

Posted by techgirl

Posted: March 6, 2009 - 3:22 pm

Comments (0) |

your contacts are important - manage them wellThere are many contact management solutions out there that help you organize your contact lists or address books. The usual solution works like a searchable rolodex. The better solution helps you actually manage your relationships with your contacts. Using those more robust solutions is referred to as CRM or Contact Relationship Management.

One of the most well-known CRM services is Salesforce, however, for a small business with a small budget, Salesforce has a group edition for $9 per user per month. For the individual, that comes to $108 for the year. Salesforce helps you manage your contacts as well as client accounts, opportunities, and leads. It integrates with many popular email applications and keeps your information safe and secure.

Some competitors to Salesforce.com include NetSuite, SugarCRM, Relenta, BigContacts and HighRise.

Tactile CRM in the UK actually offers a free level for 2 users/2 opportunities, 250 contacts and 10MB of file space. Two completely free solution you might want to check out are FunClient and FreeCRM (FreeCRM also has a professional edition that is more secure and advertisement free).

Getting Organized

For the general user who isn't looking for an enterprise-level solution to organize and manage their contacts, you might try ContactHero.

ContactHero is really more about staying in touch and managing interactions with your contacts than connecting directly to a sales cycle. The service lets you import contacts from your Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo! accounts as well as a few others. You can sort your contacts in several ways to view them easily including first name, last name and company name. I personally like the first name view since I have a hard time remembering last names. If people work at the same company, you can link them so you can see that relationship and access related contacts more easily.

You can also schedule calls through ContactHero and receive reminders of the calls you need to make each day. You can even schedules emails to be sent now or later to contacts - a handy tool to stay in touch with your network automatically. You can even access your ContactHero database from your mobile device.

ContactHero isn't free but does have a 30-day free trial. After that, it is $9.99 per month.

Other contact management solutions online including Plaxo and Keepm.

No matter how many contacts you have or what you want to be able to do with them, there's a solution on the Web that can help you.

login or register to post comments