As part of your marketing strategy, collecting and managing a lot of information about your customers, prospects and referral sources is absolutely essential.

To do this, you need a robust contact management system, which will incorporate customer relationship management (CRM). The system allows you to keep regular contact with selected customers, prospects and referral sources with a minimum of effort, and helps you to manage the sales process. Popular programmes include :-

1. Microsoft contact manager
2. Salesforce.com
3. ACT!
4. Goldmine
5. Maximiser

In addition to the obvious functions of maintaining names, addresses of companies and contacts, contact management programmes have numerous additional capabilities including :-

• The ability to tag each name with multiple attributes such as customer type, industry, profession, speciality, size of business, size of town, number of employees, birthday, SIC code
• The ability to sort and create lists by multiple attributes. For example you contact management programme could quickly identify everyone in the database who:
  • is an estate agent
  • works in a particular city
  • has a speciality in commercial property
• The ability to do direct mail without mail merging from another programme, since your contact management system has its own word processing system.
• A reminder system that tells you, among other things, when to follow-up on a mail piece – this feature is essential for telemarketing.
• The ability to import mailing lists in various formats
• A note-taking function that allows you to summarise conversations with a contact. You can also "attach" documents to a name.
• The ability to email via Microsoft Outlook directly from the database.
• Links to popular software programmes such as Microsoft Office and Sage