Contact management systems are an excellent way to track the success of your various marketing techniques. You can put together a quick spreadsheet to track your contact data but why? It is time consuming and with the excellent contact management systems available commercially, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
Your primary role is business development not software development. Rather than spending your time creating a custom contact management system, you should be out there drumming up more contacts to put into a system.
There are many different contact management systems out there. You can spend more than $25,000 on a system if you choose. What you spend though, is less important than the amount of time you spend and discipline you follow actually using the contact management system.
When buying a contact management system, the off-the-shelf packages are, for the most part, pretty good. There are two contact management systems that get a lot of attention: ACT and Goldmine.
Act sells for a little over $230, provides links to PDAs and has an online version.
Goldmine is the second most popular contact management system with many of the same features at a price point of approximately $200.
Other notable contact management systems are Maximizer, which is similar to Goldmine, and Sales Force, which has a free online service that is very limited or you can upgrade to the Team Edition for $1000 per year.
Key features to look for in most of the modern contact management systems are:
Import and export capability from all the popular Microsoft formats - Word,
Excel, Outlook
Links to PDAs
Links to accounting software
More robust client server online solutions
Bottom Line on Contact Management Systems
Contact management systems are great - but they are only great if you actually use them. Do some research before purchasing a contact management system and make sure you are committed to using it. You do need to start using a contact management system so you might as well get into the habit early on - better to know what marketing techniques work right from the start rather than spending a lot of time and money on things that are not producing results.
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