Started with a new company and one of my tasks has been to compile and mash the 5+ .xls sheets they have with their contacts on them from over the last few years to one, and organize it better. That’s fine, it’s mostly done (thank you out-sourcing!) but at the end of the day, it’s nearly 6mb, takes forever to open in Excel due to all the books (one for each state, one for each country) and 4 people need to have access for it / append it on a regular basis.
While the company I work for now is small with employees, and I’m currently working on a computer infrastructure as they currently don’t even have a simple NAS device to store files on for multiple person access, this contacts situation is unbearable.
So, I went out looking for some contact management software to help facilitate this. Ideally, CRM is where I’d like to go, but for now just focusing on contact management. I found Simple CRM and Contact Management for Small Businesses | ContactMe.com - pretty cool, very attractively priced, upload CSV files to them and an iPhone app - which is big for us because iPhone / iPads are essential for our day-to-day job.
I set up a demo account but still have some questions about it and they don’t really seem to have direct customer support, so I’m trying to track them down on Twitter now. Also found Connected | Your Personal Relationship Manager which looks appealing too, slightly more spendy and no iPhone app.
Right now I have about 5500 contacts with your basic information, name, email, address, store name, notes, phone, etc. etc… about 1/8th of them are for over seas companies, so I need a country option in there and would ideally like to be able to show just New York or just the North West territory of the USA, or something like that.
I’m trying to avoid going down the Access route or custom in-house db setup because I don’t want to support the hardware / backup of the data, so the cloud seems the most logical, and because we travel a fair amount. What else / where else should I be looking?