Chapter 7: Get Off Your Tuchus and Go Sell

Contact Management

When you start a new business, maintaining your contacts is one of the first things you absolutely must do thoroughly, correctly, and perpetually—and is probably one of the easiest and least expensive projects ahead of you relative to the value it will bring. Thankfully, the days of awkward and overpriced contact management software have come to an end.

It is surprising to see that a large portion of the business community takes no interest in proper contact management since technology has made it so easy to keep your information in systems such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Act, or Goldmine.

Systems like these can store all of your contact names, addresses, and phone and fax numbers, while integrating the data with your business calendar, phone services, PDA, Word documents, fax software, email, web links, and web data.

As a side note, we are big dislikers of Outlook for several reasons, including that it is by far the most virus prone software in existence.