Alex Mailer Blog

Wherever possible, use automation to become more effective. For example, there are contact management products like ACT, GoldMine, Telemagicand other competitors. These products can be used to track follow-up phone calls, meetings, letters, sales potentials, and other key information. Other alternatives include integration into products like Microsoft Exchange via Outlookor higher end Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products like Siebel, SalesLogix, or Clientele. If you can get all people in your organization using a similar contact manager and keep all databases synchronized (or just share one database), you will find that you have much better customer information at your fingertips.

Simplifying your contact management is a reasonable goal, but is going to take a certain level of expertise. For example, you can have mobile people entering information in PDAand synchronize this information with contact managers like ACTor mail systems like Microsoft Outlook. The combination of Outlook and Exchange is Microsoft’s key strategy to integrate information into all sorts of other systems, including accounting systems. Your business management decision will be where your “master” data is located and how much authority you want to grant for making changes. This technology is working, but is not trivial to implement yet.