Client Acquisition and Relationship Management

No, not that kind of relationship. I am talking about keeping track of clients and potential clients, not managing my personal life. Back in the Fall I bought Sage ACT! to track potential clients and my interactions with them. While there are plug-ins for the software to interact with other standard applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, I have a number of problems with my version of ACT!. For one thing, the supposed integration with Outlook doesn't work very well and doesn't recognize e-mails sent by other people within the same organization, unless I set each person up as a separate contact. That's quite a task for larger language service providers with many different project managers.

Besides, I have moved away from Outlook and now mostly use Gmail to manage my e-mail. The e-mail address connected to my website domain name forwards to a Gmail account that I can easily access from my phone or any browser. That greatly simplifies negotiating projects when I'm not sitting at my computer - for example while having my morning coffee (at which point it's already early afternoon in Europe).

I am therefore looking again for another customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Samantha Gluck mentioned on Twitter a blog post with a list of some 20 CRM solutions for freelancers, with a brief blurb and links to all of them. This yielded a couple of promising options: Work[etc] and Insight.ly. The first one is expensive (at least for a one-person company), but includes a billing solution. The second one has a free version, but no billing module and seems less customizable than Work[etc].

Unfortunately both of them are cloud-based (i.e., hosted on someone else's server). I suppose this is necessary if I want to be able to access this information on the go, for example at a conference, but I'm not sure how I feel about entrusting my client contact information to "the cloud". On the other hand, my gmail contacts are already on Google's servers and all my e-mails are stored on my web hosting company's and/or Google's computers. So this may not make much of a difference.

About client acquisition: a few posts ago, I wrote about creating a second, more client-focused blog and alternating posts between this blog and the other one. In preparation I started to re-write some of the older posts from this blog that might be interesting to potential clients. But while uploading a new photo of myself (courtesy of my daughter and son-in-law who took and cropped/processed the photo, respectively) I realized that most social media sites only let you list one blog URL. So now I am rethinking the entire two-blog concept. Back to the drawing board, then ... (By the way, the new picture is in the bio section to the right of this post.)

Note: I will be at the STC Technical Communication Summit in Chicago next week and may not post next Wednesday, unless I have enough time (and an internet connection) at O'Hare before my flight back.

So I'm Buying CRM Software, After All

I promised in my last post that I'd explain why I am now getting customer relationship management software, when in December I had still thought I'd get by with Outlook Business Contact Manager and work-arounds.

For one thing, as I am adding more and more information to Outlook (and getting and keeping more e-mails), it has become rather sluggish. The only way I could find to group people in one company together in Outlook is to create a new account for each company, then add individual contact records. That was becoming quite tedious. The search function is also not as flexible as I need it to be and the work-around for creating letters, etc. just got to be too much of a problem. And Outlook interfaces for most programs seem to only look at the regular contact list, not the Business Contact Manager contacts (which are apparently in a separate database).

So I looked around the web some more and decided to give ACT! a try. I installed a trial version of their newest product, wound up importing my Outlook business contacts via a generic .csv file, and started to work with it. Most of my problems with Outlook seem to be addressed here, including options for more extensive customization than Microsoft products -- including Outlook -- generally provide. There is also a version for Windows mobile (the operating system on my Smartphone), which I may buy later.

Once I decided to spend the money on "real" CRM software, I found a deal where I could get more than half the purchase price back as a refund check. So I ordered the full version of the software.

Now, of course, another snowstorm hit in the Northeast, so who knows when it will actually be delivered ...