10 Applications for Keeping Client Contact Data Organized

Recently, Martha Retallick posted on the topic of building your contact list. As can be expected with such an important part of any business, there are a plethora of applications available for managing contacts and customers. You might be looking for something that’s lightweight, simple and fast, or perhaps you’re looking for a full-blown CRM (customer relationship management) solution. In this article, we’ll look at both types of application, and you can choose which is the best for you.

Address Book

Address Book is the contact application that comes with your Mac. It’s fast and snappy and not overloaded with bloat, and it includes just enough features to be a good choice for managing client contact data. You can categorize your contacts into Groups, so you can have a group each for family, friends and customers, or if you’re creating a business-only system you can have groups for different kinds of clients, vendors, service providers and outsourcees (yes, I made that word up). You can also create Smart Groups which collates a list of contacts together into a category based on criteria you set, which is very handy and takes a whole lot of organization overhead out of your day.

Sure it’s nothing to call home about, but it’s the contact manager I’ve used for years and it has always served my freelance business well.

Outlook

Outlook is the de facto standard of contact management on Windows systems. Unlike most of my Mac-wielding brethren I actually quite like Outlook, and I used it for six or so years before I changed operating systems. This may be because it came with PDAs at the time and was the best way for keeping email, contacts, calendars and tasks synced, but nevertheless, I found it a good all-in-one solution for most personal information.

After all that build-up you may be disappointed to learn that the one thing I hated about Outlook was its contact management system. Some people swear by it, and I know one guy who manages about 100,000 contacts using the program, so give it a shot for yourself.

Google Contacts

Google Contacts uses your Gmail contacts, and it is lightweight. If you thought Address Book was lightweight, you haven’t seen anything yet. You can add groups, you can add contacts, but the trickiest feature here is the Notes field. There are no filter-based groups or anything of the sort; just a very basic interface, with very basic contact information panels.

That might be your thing. The benefit derived from Google Contacts over something (slightly) more full-featured like Address Book is that you don’t need to sync all your desktop applications together — it’s always synced by default, accessible from anywhere that can get on the net.

Google Contacts happens to have a “Most Contacted” pane which shows you the people you’ve contacted the most from your Gmail account. I’m assuming it is derives its results based on a relatively short timeframe because there were people in there who I’ve only communicated with once or twice, but not people who I’ve communicated with tens or hundreds of times in previous months.

Plaxo

Plaxo is one of the more popular free web-based contact managers. While you can use it simply as a web-based contact manager in which you keep the information about others you’ve gathered yourself, it also endeavors to be something of a social contact managers. It seems almost mandatory that no niche be considered complete these days until it has a “social” offering.

You can fill in your own profile and choose who to share that information with — and you will want to be careful with those settings since this could involve your address, phone numbers, and email addresses you don’t want just anyone getting into — and in turn you can pull information from other people’s profiles into your contact entries for them. This is a great way to ensure your contact details are always up to date — if a reasonable number of your contacts are using Plaxo.

Plaxo also has a calendar and features for, dare I say it, sharing (another modern-day mandatory, I suppose).

Highrise

If I weren’t such a cheapskate, I’d probably buy a Highrise account, and for that matter a few accounts on the various other 37signals sites. They offer high-quality collaborative web services for a whole range of business needs.

Highrise gives you a business-oriented address book (evidently) and has a very interesting “Deals” feature, which the site describes as follows: “Deals let you keep track of proposals, bids, estimates, and sales for each customer, person, or company you have in your Highrise account. You can keep track of pending deals, deals you’ve won, and deals you’ve lost.” To me, Highrise is a perfect solution for freelancers who don’t need the stress of a full-blown enterprise-oriented CRM application but still want to track the details of their relationship with the client, not just the phone numbers.

Prices start at US$24 a month and there’s a “Solo” $29 a month option that would suit pretty much any freelancer fine.

Salesforce

If you want my own personal and highly unprofessional opinion about Salesforce, it’s not even worth looking at. I say that because I don’t waste my time with any application that requires you to speak to a sales consultant to get an account. Nothing to do with the quality of the application, I just think that approach to business online sucks.

Perhaps I missed something. In which case, it’s time for a site redesign, Salesforce — I spent a good amount of time looking.

As far as the product itself goes, it’s (surprisingly) very popular and prices start at $9 for small groups and go up — way up — from there. It looks to be quite a powerful system, allowing you to manage and monitor the sales funnel (including integration with your Google AdWords campaigns). Google AdWords integration even sounds enticing, if I were selling products online. I don’t think many of the features are relevant to freelancers and simpler (but still feature-packed), cheaper products that do a better job for those in our position are abundant.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM has a strong, often vocal, set of proponents, and I think it’s a good web-based offering. Most everything Zoho does is quite good, and certainly seems to cater more to real people than to that Salesforcesque marketing-speak.

There’s a free version for up to three users, and incredibly cheap Professional and Enterprise Editions. For most freelancers, three users should be more than sufficient.

Zoho offers a feature-rich application with the management of your campaigns and sales pipeline, and even offers customer support facilities. It’ll produce reports based on the aforementioned for your analysis needs, and there’s also an Outlook plugin for those who want to add a little CRM capability to the popular application we looked at earlier. Pretty impressive for something you can get free.

Oprius

Oprius has the simplest pricing plan of them all: free for 30 days, then US$14.99 each month. For that price, you get an address book which you can use to track your history with that customer. There’s a followup reminder feature and the ability to bring up a “phone script” when it’s time for the call.

You can also manage your mailing lists, generate web forms for lead generation and — if you like to mix task management with contact management — a basic to-do list.

It looks like a pretty solid offering. Although, speaking of looks, it’s not the prettiest web app out there and somehow reminds me of Linux operating systems. Please don’t send me hate mail if you happen to passionately believe in the beauty of Linux!

SugarCRM

One thing that will appeal to many of you — at least those comfortable with setting up web apps on your computer or host — about SugarCRM is that it has an on-premise, open source edition. It’s always pretty cool when a commercial company gives you something for free without any major compromises.

If you don’t want to host your CRM solution, there’s also Sugar On-Demand, the hosted service. There’s a $40/month Professional version and a $75/month Enterprise version. Here’s where you might want to go back to considering the self-hosted edition: these plans require a one year commitment and a minimum of five users. Heck, 95% of you won’t have five users. Not a freelance friendly offering at least in its hosted form.

That said, SugarCRM offers a plethora of features — marketing and sales force automation, project collaboration, team and workflow management, and even customer support. Definitely worth a look.

PipelineDeals

PipelineDeals goes by the same pricing plan as Oprius, which is 30 days free and then $15 a month (per user, so it’s more expensive than Oprius if you’re more than just one freelancer). That price includes unlimited data storage, sales and lead tracking, a sales calendar, sales document management, reporting, and most importantly, the ability to manage and share your contacts data and schedule followup contact.

Ultimately, your choice in a solution for organizing client data depends on what sort of business you are in and how you like to deal with that sort of information. I know one person who just keeps contact details (happens to be the 100,000 contacts guy I mentioned earlier, and who knows how he remembers them all), and another who will take notes on the color of your socks if you let him get a glimpse. There are offerings here for all sorts of users.

Tags: Dealing with Clients

Joel Falconer |
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Joel Falconer is the co-founder of public relations company Methodic Studios, publishes the gaming blog StartFrag, and is an editor at leading technology news site The Next Web. You can follow him on Twitter.