Rate Your Need for a Contact and Customer Management Solution

Business is booming. You’re in cycle with an impressive number of customers and prospects, and you manage to keep them all quite happy. But, what if you could achieve even greater success without working harder?
Even better, what if you could be more productive, while actually working less?

It requires a lot of effort to manage clients via a mix of e-mails, contact info, documents, spreadsheets, and notes. It’s time-consuming and sometimes confusing. You strain to remember things that happened weeks ago. You’re forced to gather a bunch of separate documents and handwritten notes or gather information from people on your team every time you head out the door to meet with customers.

How much time and effort would you save if you could keep all of your customer information in one easy-to-access place? Would that enable you to spend more time actually doing business and less time managing it?

Many software vendors claim to possess the key to enabling this possibility. You’ve heard plenty of buzz about what PDA software, contact managers, CRM solutions, and other software solutions can do for you. But, how do you know the differences between offerings? Most importantly, how can you be sure that software can solve your business management challenges in the first place?

Time to Re-evaluate Your Day-to-Day Processes

This article is intended for individuals that are currently using paper-based records, written notes, spreadsheets, or a personal information manager (PIM), such as Microsoft® Outlook® or PDA software, to manage their business. The purpose of this article is to help you to determine if there is a better way of managing your contacts and customers and performing day-to-day business tasks.

In particular, this article highlights the differences between contact and customer management and a PIM by asking you to consider seven essential questions (which will follow in further articles). Answering yes to even one of them means that your business could benefit from transitioning to a contact and customer management solution.

What is a Personal Information Manager (PIM)?

PIMs, such as Microsoft Outlook and PDA software, were designed to help you organize basic personal computing information. They typically include an address book, calendar, and to-do list, mimicking the paper-based format of each. PIMs enable you to maintain your personal information, as well as basic information about contacts, but do not allow you to integrate information such as linking documents or e-mail communications to a contact. Some PIMs provide basic contact tracking and searching functionality. For example, a PIM may offer the ability to attach notes to a contact, but it would not provide a historical view of that relationship. Piecing together relationship histories with a PIM would require a great deal of time and patience, plus supplemental applications (such as spreadsheets or other documentation).

What is a Contact & Customer Manager?

A contact and customer manager allows you to manage all tasks and information related to developing and maintaining relationships with the people, groups, and companies with whom you do business.

Contact and customer management involves a variety of activities,
including the ability to:

• Centralize critical contact and customer information and stay organized.


• Manage and grow business relationships through top-notch communications.


• Prioritize your work to stay on top of appointments and tasks.


• Forecast and track sales opportunities for an improved bottom line.


• Access and report on information quickly for a complete view of customer interactions.


• Improve efficiency by integrating the applications you use every day, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes®, and accounting applications such as QuickBooks® and Peachtree by Sage.


• Access critical information on the go from Palm OS® and Pocket PC devices.

A major difference between PIMs and contact and customer management is that PIMs contain isolated (as opposed to integrated) components. For example, in a PIM you might look at a calendar appointment in one view and then separately reference your contact list for details about the person you’re meeting.

Contact and customer management provides a 360-degree view of your contact information so you don’t have to jump from one application to another to complete a task, plan your day, or execute your sales strategies.

Contact and customer management software is a tool to improve the way you build and maintain business relationships and enhance your professional image. It empowers you to focus on profitable endeavors, such as outshining your competition, by minimizing the time spent on routine tasks.
It’s an essential tool for consistently transforming contacts into customers and first-time customers into loyal relationships.

More to come......