Business Contacts vs Personal Contacts

I caught up for lunch with a former work colleague last week and they posed this question:

“How do I manage personal contacts vs business contacts, specifically when one becomes the other?”

I was instantly reminded of an answer that I gave on LinkedIn a few years back (May 29th 2008 to be precise) to this very question. I got the added bonus it was voted the “Best Answer”

How do you manage your Business and Personal contacts?
For example, what software or online database do you use?
Do you merge business and personal contacts or keep the separate?
Sometimes business and personal contacts are one in the same, how
do you handle that?

My response was:

If money is passing hands and that’s how the relationship started, they are Business, irrespective if they get invited to a personal BBQ, a golf day with friends or a weekend at the snow with the family.I treat both work related and personal business contacts ie: the electrician for my house as Business contacts.

To differentiate, I append a note as to where I met them eg: Work or via a mutual acquaintance and the date I met them – “First Contact”. I always name the work place, so that as I change jobs, I build up a history and can search for them as needed.

If they are friends from my personal life read: school, university, hockey, adventure racing whatever, than they are Personal. If money is transacted, they stay friends, with a secondary note outlining the preliminary contact.

Outlook is capable of tracking all this. For online, if the contacts management is just for yourself, consider sites like HighriseHQ http://www.highrisehq.com or Zoho http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas. For a sales environment, where you are tracking your sales teams and need to assign ‘accounts’ and track client interactivity, you need something a bit more battle ready, check out SugarCRM, Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Each has its pluses and minuses, not least of all cost and complexity.The better CRM’s can sync with your Outlook Contacts & Email, export to a readily readible format like CSV (comma separated values) and manage complex relationships eg: multiple contacts within the same business, cross contacts, hierarchal relationships and allow data mining of your inputted data to identify sales or product/service trends.

Going to the next level, the CRM will integrate to your HR Payroll, ERP, Invoicing and capture web data from your corporate website. Additionally, good CRM’s can be keyed into a 3rd party analytics package (think: Google Analytics, Nielsen NetRatings, Omniture etc) to track user activity across your web site and customer Extranets – you can start predicting trends and unearthing opportunities for your teams. Smart companies are using CRM systems tied into their e-Newsletter environments to deliver custom tailored news content into end users mailboxes – and tracking their click through rates, reading patterns and user behaviour. I use a Blackberry, synced to Outlook, which is in turn synced with two CRM’s – HighriseHQ for personal and SugarCRM for work. I’ve used Act!, SalesForce, SalesLogix and Goldmine too in this fashion.

A final point – if you are deploying a CRM for your sales team, pay someone to implement it for you – their experience in avoiding the pitfalls will be invaluable. Nothing worse than shelling out $$$ for a system no one can use because it’s not setup correctly.

After my diatribe to said friend, we sunk a few more glasses of red to compensate for talking work in our off time. Was a good lunch.

Website Building Tools

Over the years I have collected a bunch of useful open source tools which have helped tremendously in building and maintaining websites. Most important – they are FREE! If you really want to go to town and have the funds get yourself Adobe Web Premium (Illustrator, Photoshop, Contribute, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Soundbooth)  and start looking at a software configuration management system, which manages your built environment with versions, baseline projects and affords the ability to build up a code base. But in lieu of burning some money, the free ones are below.

If you have any suggestions, I’d love to you hear from you and I’ll add the useful ones to this list.

File Transfer Protocol Program (FTP Client)
FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org

HTML/CSS Editing
Notepad ++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Image File Viewers/ Basic Editors
FastStone http://www.faststone.org – Slick looking interface. Really good for managing large numbers of images. Can bog down in network drive situations i.e. cataloguing images across multiple hard drives/server locations, however this can be rectified by dumping the Thumbnail database on a regular basis. Can view PSD’s.
Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com – Fast loading, non intrusive. Not quite as flexible as Faststone, it nonetheless is lightweight enough to run concurrently when you just want a fast preview of images sent to you i.e. email attachments.

Rulers for measuring windows, images, text blocks
Sizer http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html. Brilliant, lightweight application for quickly resizing windows to any parameter you care to program in i.e. 1280X1024, 1280X 800 (laptops), 1024X768, 640X480. Will work with ALL windows, outside of the browser i.e. Photoshop, etc.
Screen Ruler http://wonderwebware.com/screen-ruler/ Configurable floating ruler pain which has X & Y planes with configurable transparency.

Firefox Browser Plugins
Firebug, Cooliris, Screengrab! I wrote about Firefox Plugins’ in my post Software: Firefox Browser Extensions

PDF for Finished Art
Cute PDF Writer http://www.cutepdf.com/ If you are producing print quality finished art or into publication of e-zines or editorial variants of a book, collected works etc, consider upgrading to the Pro edition. Significantly cheaper than Adobe’s Acrobat offering and I find the compression algorithm and font handling to be either equal or on better.

Evernote
http://www.evernote.com
Fantastic web based application which allows you to jot down notes, import images and manage articles in a secure, password protected environment. Once items are imported, they are indexed and you can perform searches on them. The ultra cool aspect about Evernote is the ability to import images with writing on it and Evernotes servers run Optical Character Recognition protocols on it, allowing indexing of the words in the image. So, you can take a photo of a business card (MAC = Photobooth, PC = MSN, Trillion, Logitech Cam etc) and it will index the details.

Contact’s Management
So you have hundreds of contacts, they sit in your iPhone or Blackberry. Store them securely online and Sync them with one of the below:

• Google Contacts in Gmail - http://www.gmail.com
• HighRise by 37 Signals – http://www.highrisehq.com
• Zoho CRM – http://www.zoho.com