The holidays and New Year’s are rapidly approaching. Most will agree that the only task more daunting that getting your holiday shopping done is getting your holiday cards out before the end of the year. One reason it can be so stressful is because you don’t have your contacts organized properly.
I may not send out holiday cards yet, but I have a head start because all my contacts are already organized and easily accessible. There are so many different contact management tools available that there isn’t a good excuse why personal and/or business contacts aren’t centralized in one place.
I know a lawyer that runs her practice with some old school tendencies, one of which includes not having any sort of database for her clients or vendors. Every time she has to find a phone number or address, she has to look through a massive folder to find it written down on a post-it somewhere. So much time wasted that would be better spent somewhere else!
Don’t be overwhelmed by the concept of consolidating your contacts. You can take baby steps to build an electronic database of your contacts, or do it all in one big block of time. Even if you only add 5 contacts a day to the tool of your choice, those are 5 that you will never have to search for in files, shoe boxes, old address books or rolodexes again.
If you do more with your contacts than just referencing a phone number or address, then you might want to invest in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution like Salesforce.com, NetSuite, or SugarCRM. However, if you just need a tool so you can keep everything in one place, there is a good selection of free resources, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Plaxo, and a new website Soocial, to name a few.
Update: I neglected to mention the free Personal Edition that Salesforce offers for single users. It obviously does not have all the features that the paid editions do, but it is still a great free solution.
Do you use something else besides these options? Let us know…we would love to check it out!
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