Can’t afford a CRM? Address Book may be all you need

Jun 29, 2009 Posted by alan jones on Jun 29, 2009 in software | Comments

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.

bigyahu

Re: Can’t afford a CRM? Address Book may be all you need http://ff.im/-8ymU0

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

robtyrie

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.

alan jones

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!

bigyahu

Re: Can’t afford a CRM? Address Book may be all you need http://ff.im/-8×1nf

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Robert

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?

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