You’ll hear two acronyms being thrown around these days, CRM and CMS. A CMS is a contact management system and usually refers to an online tool that enables website owners to update and change their content on-line—think wikipedia, allowing the user to edit content on-line without using additional software to change the look and feel of material. A CRM is a contact relationship management system and, simply put, is an organizational tool to manage your contact info, kind of like a good address book on virtual steroids.
Let’s face it, business is about relationship and you’ll need a tool to help you maintain, track, and organize those relationships. A friend of mine recently wrote an article on business relationship and he defined it as having three key components:
1) Personal Touch 2) Regular Contact 3) Credibility
A CRM will help you remember the information you need to make and maintain (1) a personal touch; a CRM will allow for tracking of when, how, and why you made contact with a person, i.e. (2) regular contact; and lastly when your contacts realize you remembered details from their life (because you recored it in your CRM) it will lead to credibility. “You remembered my birthday, how sweet!”
Finding a good CRM can be quite daunting, there are so many on the market these days and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. My core CRM is made by 37 signals, called highrisehq. Highrisehq has a simple interface, user friendly search capabilities, and a task-to-contact structure that helps you build in your next actions with ease. The best thing about highrisehq is the ability to attach emails to individual records—which I just love—additionally you can forward emails to your account to create new contact records on the fly, say goodbye to hand entry.
Highrise is basic and doesn’t have all the bells and beeps of the more mature CRM platforms like Sales Force, which is one of the most popular CRMs on the market. You’ll need a PhD to figure out how to use SF, its interface is complex and its not cheap either. But if you are a sales guru and don’t mind taking the time to learn about all it’s functions then it is worth checking out. I signed up for a test account and the Sale Force sales rep wouldn’t stop calling me, worse than a bill collector—I didn’t like the hard sell, let me try the software in peace is my mantra.
Free is about as cheap as they come and one excellent CRM that is free for up to three users is made by Zoho. This is a nice platform and the developers at Zoho are making it better and better all the time, it isn’t as complex as Sales Force and is a bit more user friendly. You can customize many of the features, it has a more sales feel to it than its cousins with capacity for leads, forecasts, campaigns, potentials—the reporting function is very slick. If you need something a bit more sales oriented than Highrisehq but not as complex as Sale Force it is a nice fit. Zoho also make an entire range of other online goodies, online word processor, spreadsheets,project coordination—if you want to take your computing online Zoho provides all the tools, though if you are a Google user it’s hard to compete with the Googlisious applications.
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