Personal CRM or Contact Management

January 30th, 2016

I am looking for a recommendation on a good system to manage contacts. This is not to use for sales or drive marketing campaigns. Just like many I meet lots of people and get their contact information. But 3-6 months later it's hard to remember who is who. I may recall talking to someone about a subject when can't remember who it was. It would also be a good feature to have reminders to stay in touch and follow up from time to time.

Ultimately I'd love for the system to be able to work with gmail (Google Apps), facebook messenger and possibly skype.

Clifford Jones Managing Partner, CME - Interim CMO, Writer for The Business Journals, B2B Digital Marketing Expert

January 31st, 2016

I suggest you ask a few more questions before making a fully-informed investment decision like this. Ideally, you find a CRM solution that fits your current needs and you will not outgrow it for a long time. The reason this is important is all of them require a learning curve to get maximum ROI.

How many contacts do you plan to manage?

Do you need to customize the fields of information you want to manage for each contact, and if so, to what extent?

How many custom fields may you need or want now or in future?

Do you want your CRM to integrate easily with any marketing automation like autoresponders, shopping carts, membership sites, directory listings, etc.?

To what extent will you want or need guidance to implement your new CRM system and are you willing to invest in professional coaching or implementation, if needed?

Just a few added elements to consider. While there are more in depth questions to explore for making a fully-informed decision, I hope this helps.

To your success, Cliff

Diego Machado CEO & Co-Founder at TowerHouseStudio

January 30th, 2016

Hi Zhenya, in our company we have been using https://www.insightly.com/,

its a CRM, but you can use it as a contact manager, and you can schedule event with alarms to do follow ups, also you can track all your emails and be able to follow a conversation from inside the contact.

Hope it helps.

Kevin Carney Content Marketing works, but needs better tools.

January 30th, 2016

I saw and really liked ProsperWorks, but don't really need it bad enough (right now) to pay their monthly subscription fee.

I have used Insightly and found it to be very cumbersome to use.

Chris Owens

January 30th, 2016

Zhenya,

We're in the middle of building exactly what you're looking for. It's a killer business networking productivity mobile app called LincSphere. You can see a short demo of it here: http://bit.ly/ls-demo

The iOS version will be out in March, with Android to follow, along with a web interface as well.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions / comments.

Best,

Chris

Richard McLean Co-Founder Webscale Pty Ltd - KeyPay Cloud Payroll

January 30th, 2016

We have recently started to use prosperworks.com for contact management - its pretty flecxible and has a very nice chrome addon for GMAIL - take a look..

I should also say that I have assessed 16 CRM packages before settling on prosperworks.com - it fits our business really very well.

Kunal Lodha

January 31st, 2016

Have a look at http://www.hubspot.com/products/crm
Its amazing & free.

Best of luck.

Stephen Mitchell

February 10th, 2016

Nimble may or may not be a great CRM, but an opinion that comes with a link where someone gets commission? Not quite as good a testimonial... more an ad.

Url:

?lead_source=partner&lead_source_id=paulbradleysmith

Stephen Mitchell

January 30th, 2016

I don't know, but from my understanding of your needs right now? Evernote - it's free and just take notes. Biz card scanning. Audio notes. Screen captures. And so on. And it's free. On every platform.

Wayne Willis CEO, Formula XO, Inc.

January 31st, 2016

I use Full Contact and am very happy with it. It pulls in addresses from various sources (phone, Facebook, gmail, csv's, etc.), creates an integrated database (suggesting merges where appropriate), links to social media accounts (enriching the contact card with their social identities) and then syncs back to gmail and phone. There's a chrome plugin that enriches gmail so you can see relevant infomation about a contact who you are composing a message to. Free version is pretty powerful. I use paid version at $10/month and it's worth it to me. Only negatives are: a) no Skype intergration, b) because I pulled in my gmail address book, I got a lot of entries from people who send newsletters and promotions ... so I have entries that I won't need or use, and the delete process is one-by-one and a couple clicks.

Cody Halff CEO @ThePersonalCRM and former Analyst @Scaleworks. Connoisseur of SaaS, marketing, Mexican food.

October 25th, 2017

Zhenya, I had the exact same problem. Used to keep a massive spreadsheet with my professional relationships because all of the contact management tools I tried were too sales-focused and way heavy for what I needed.

So my team built FollowUp, a lightweight Personal CRM that lives in Gmail. It brings contacts into your inbox so you can manage them as you interact in your daily workflow. We have both one-off reminders you can set on contacts, or followup reminders that help you stay in touch (you select how often you want to communicate with a person - if that time passes and you haven't emailed, we remind you to reach out).

We also have a two-way contact sync with Google that keeps your contact info consistent, and features like multiple notes per contact and recent convo history to provide more context on your relationships. If you're still looking give it a try and let me know what you think!

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