Strong Opinions @marksbirch

It is a brutal scene.  Contacts strewn across various email accounts, social networking sites, business cards, address books, and the like in some sort of highway pileup of chaos and destruction.  None of these places knows about the others, they simply grow bigger and staler at the same time.  Duplicates splinter and multiply, new contacts go missing, and accuracy is merely a long lost promise.

In olden days, things were simpler.  We had business cards and rolodexes.  The gods of business looked down upon the earth and declared things were good.  Then the Internet happened, and with this revolution came emails, social media accounts.  At the same time, mobile phones too off, meaning we were now on the road more often, taking our contacts with us in phone address books.

Contact management tools were supposed to save up from contactpocalypse.  There were various contact applications, syncing tools, and online organizers.  The most current crop of solutions live in the cloud, have better user experiences, and hook into billions of different CRM systems that now exist.  Instead of easing the problem however, they are merely exacerbating the problem leading us down the road to CRM failure.  It did not have to come to this, if only these tech companies understood what people wanted to do with their horde of contacts.

There are three key functions that any worthwhile contact management application should accomplish.  The application needs to maintain the golden contact record, enable simple research of contacts, and intelligently support relationship building activities.  Without all three of these in place, it becomes hard to justify the existence of yet another tool, which simply leads to more pain and misery.

• Golden Record – With contact information in multiple places, this is absolutely the first task that any tool needs to tackle.  You should expect that if you look up a contact, that the data is consolidated, current, and accurate.  If someone updates their LinkedIn profile because of a new job, emails you from a personal email address, or connects with you on a social network, then that should be reflected in the contact record without manual intervention on the part of the user.  In this day and age, we should not have to sync things, cut and paste text, and muck with spreadsheets to correlate changes, clean up records, and merge duplicates.
• Contact Research – It should be simple to find useful information about a contact.  When I meet someone new or someone reaches out to me, I like to get a sense of who the person is and his or her background.  Usually this entails a painfully slow process of checking various social networks, lots of Google searches and the like.  This is incredibly inefficient and unnecessary.  There are now open API’s to the key social networks and email systems.  There are also intelligent search engines from vendors like Zoominfo that gather and parse news and articles about people.  The next step is combining these functions in one place.
• Relationship Building – Keeping in touch with hundreds and thousands of contacts is a major chore.  Even with fewer contacts, people are generally not great at being up-to-date with folks.  Birthdays, job changes, interesting news, keeping sales prospects in the loop and such would all be likely triggers for reaching out to people, but we often miss the signals.  We have a very poor process for keeping those relationships fresh.  A better contact management system would help suggest follow-ups in a timely manner and keep an eye out for those relevant opportunities to keep in touch.

Now there are other things that can be added to this list of features, but if a tool is not able to perform these three tasks well, there is little point in the other stuff.  And while for most people, there is not as strict a need for these functions, there are enough salespeople, recruiters, entrepreneurs, and so on that have this pain today and are yearning for a better tool.  It will come in time, but it is still not here today.