Can’t afford a CRM? Address Book may be all you need
I’m more than a little forgetful. I have a mind like a… well, one of those things that let the water out but keep the spaghetti in… what are they called?
Never mind. Over the years I’ve developed a number of coping strategies to disguise my terrible memory. I would love to have the time and the money to use a full Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but I don’t (and I can’t quite remember why) but here’s a handy tip: if you’re a Mac user, you may not have to go much further than Apple’s own free Address Book product.
In Address Book you can create as many custom fields as you want (see the screen dump below) and then use those fields to build searches. I use the ‘met you at’ field below to quickly find all the people I met at a particular event or in a particular online medium, such as Twitter. And you can use the Notes field at the bottom to keep a record of your calls, emails and meetings with that person.
It’s not a fully-fledged CRM application, but it’s free. Give it a try.
10 Responses to “Can’t afford a CRM? Address Book may be all you need”
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Good tip Alan. I think you've had the same problem with full-fledged CRM apps that I have. A complicated solution in search of a problem. I note that in spite of elaborate and expensive corporate CRM solutions, companies like Telstra and Optus can't seem to present the phone number you entered at the beginning of their call to the person who can actually deal with your “issue”.
Just thought I'd add a favourite memory-problem-solving app of mine to the mix: MacJournal (and its companion WinJournal) from http://www.marinersoftware.com. While it's promoted mainly as a journal/blogging package, it's a great place to scribble those jotted notes and drop the photos etc we all collect every day. I use it to keep my diary notes of conversations with the aforementioned telcos, among many, many other things. It can all live in one file which saves itself and backs itself up (and has never lost a byte of data in the 4+ years I've been using it.
Cool, I'll go check it out. Thanks for the tip David!
Free HighRise account is a good option as well.
Sadly 37Signals no longer offer the free version of Highrise (http://www.highrisehq.com/signup
) and pricing starts at USD29. Unfortunately the USD/AUD exchange rate
adds to that and makes it way too expensive for your average Aussie
solo operator.
Thanks for stopping by Michael, see ya on Twitter.
There is still a free plan, you just need keen eyesight
http://skitch.com/airhead/bsy9k/sign-up-for-a-h...
The sanctimonious bastards! They make such a big song and dance about
not selling things for free, charging what they're worth, etc, and now
I find they do this! Still, 250 contact limit might work for a per-
project thing but probably not for someone's main CRM.
Hi there, I've been trying to add a custom field but have been unsuccessful. All I can do is rename existing fields. This is not very useful as I need to modify what the the field content is. I only have options of names or dates.
Am I missing something?
Sorry for the slow reply Robert, I've been away and off the grid.
Go to the Card menu in addressbook and choose Edit Template at the bottom of the Add Field menu item.
Once editing the template, click on a green plus arrow to add a new field. Choose any name initially. Then click and hold down on the new field and bring that list of field names up again. Scroll to the bottom of that list and you'll see “Custom…” and that's what you're looking for.
Enjoy!
I suppose Address Book is ok… but it's an address book.
Sugar CRM is free. Single User of SalesForce is free. FreeCRM is Free. Zoho CRM for 1 user is free. These are good free options that are affordable and many more function points than an address book. If Address books could be CRM systems, there would not be a multi-billion dollar CRM industry or the common function points that sales, service and marketing. If I was starting a small business on the cheap – I'd look at one of these.
One of the other bonuses, as you get more successful, you can transition easily to the paid versions. Just Sayin.
Thanks for the input Rob, you're right, it's just an address book. If
you actually need a CRM there are better solutions.
I think some people are talked into CRM platforms when they don't
really need them. And Salesforce is powerful but it's hard to find a
more difficult web platform to learn. It's the MYOB of CRM.
If you're a Mac user your Address Book is really closely integrated
with everything else on your Mac (and iPhone) and it can be really
handy to have info like when/where you met this contact, who their
colleagues are, etc. And you don't really need a CRM platform for that.
Cheers!