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Customer relationship management
jethro. | Nov 8 2005
Well, now that I'm (finally) getting on top of next actions a little better, I'm trying to do the same for the people I meet. Like many engineers/tech folks, networking is about as natural to me as interpretive dance. When I do manage to make a contact, it would be helpful to have a system to deal with it, roughly analogous to how GTD provides a trusted system to deal with next actions. That said, has anyone used such a system and found it helpful? This is important to me, so I'm not opposed to shelling out a couple of C notes for something like ACT! if it's the appropriate tool. It may be too big a hammer, though, for someone who's not in sales and doesn't actively track hundreds of contacts. I'd rather try a free system first to see if it's sufficient for my needs. Any glowing reviews, warning signs, or other thoughts from the assembly? 8 Comments
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 If you're an engineer you...Submitted by Procrastin8r on April 25, 2006 - 9:11am.
If you're an engineer you can probably do what I did, and build your own CRM using MS Access or FileMaker Pro. I've been in Mac world for the last 10 years, and I've been tweaking my contact manager for about that long. These days it's pretty awesome, but to start out all you need to do is decide what info you want to capture. Name, phone and email, obviously. I also have several "logs" that I attach to each contact so I can track things like phone calls, emails, etc. I also find that keywords are useful, but categories are more useful. I have about 7 or 8 categories that I divided my contacts into and I can sort them by category for quick reference. BTW, I'm not an engineer or a programmer, just an amateur, so if I can do it I'm sure you can do it 10x better. Good luck! » POSTED IN:
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