Blogs Managing Contacts
I sat through a presentation yesterday concerning contact management software, or Customer Relationship Management – whatever one wishes to call a means of inputting contacts into a software program. We have tried to implement this on several occasions and haven’t yet been successful. What do you do with your contact information?
I understand the need to manage contacts, especially as a firm grows and multiple people may work with the same person. I get excited at the opportunity to streamline billing, email blast folks, etc. This software provides a central location to store that information with one problem - this data has to be entered. I don’t like entering it. No one likes entering it. How do you manage your client contacts?
Tags: contact management, CRM
August 7th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I think it helps to add an email subscription opton to your website. This is the button that people can click on to be automatically added to your site’s email list. You can often do this through your website host for a very affordable price (I know that GoDaddy offers this option so I’m sure others do as well). Of course, you’d still have to do some manual additions for new clients but it should ease up the burden.
As far as entering the information manually into a more comprehensive software program like you’ve described, my best suggestion would be to hire someone temporary to do that work for you. The time it saves you will be worth the cost!
August 7th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Re: how I organize contacts … I actually just use Gmail and that works well enough for me but I imagine I’d need something more extensive if I had more than a couple of dozen clients at one time.