Re: FWD: Contact management for consultants

[Mark Dempsey <mxd2 -at- OSI -dot- COM>]

As someone who's been in sales, I prefer the unstructured contact
managers.  The best are both structured and unstructured.

Here's what I mean:

Structured: ACT!, Goldmine, and others

Unstructured: Info Select, Zoot (more for info than contact management)

Both: Outlook

The disadvantage of structured contact management is that you usually
must navigate through a forest of fields, to enter the relevant
information. You also have to tab from "Firstname" to "Lastname," and
I'm impatient enough to want to simply type the dang name and address.

I like unstructured PIMs (Personal Information Managers), particularly
Info Select, because of their search capabilities.  You can search for
"Tom" if you can't remember a contact's last name, or for "landscaper"
or anything else without having to remember which field it's supposed to
be in.

The advantage of structured PIMs is that a) they can do mass mailings or
faxings much easier, and b) they do not depend so heavily on your
personal style of organizing information so they're usable by someone
other than yourself, e.g. a secretary.

Outlook combines a standard contact manager and calendar (contacts'
birthdays automatically appear in the calendar) and a note/postit info
bin (as well as e-mail and a few other things).  It also has some
network capabilities Netscape Calendar has, checking for conflicts for
meetings scheduled, etc. I'm using it now, but would go back to Info
Select in a hot minute if I were a solo contractor again.

My 2 cents...

Barb Philbrick wrote:
>
> I've found that the programs people use vary widely. There's quite a
> bit of shareware out there, plus the standards. (There's always good
> old index cards, too.)
>
> Personally, I use a database I created myself in Access.
>
> Barb
>
> On Tue, 14 Jul 1998 15:38:26 -0600, you wrote:
>
> >Name withheld upon request. Please reply on list.
> >
> >*************************************************
> >
> >I am an employee considering becoming a technical writing
> >contractor/consultant. I want to know what
> >software people use for tracking contacts.
> >
> >Act?, Access?, Is Outlook taking over? Are custom solutions the way to =
> go?
> >
> >Thank you in advance.
>
> Barbara Philbrick, Caslon Services Inc.
> Technical Writing. caslonsvcs -at- ibm -dot- net
> Cleveland, OH
>

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