Personal CRM Definition: A personal CRM is used to manage your personal & business relationships and gives you a way to store important contact details, categorise contacts, keep a history of meetings/events and remind you to reconnect. People who use personal CRMs are:
The term CRM is borrowed from the business term “customer relationship management” which came from the evolution of the address book and Rolodex that contained customer contact details like names, address, phone number and other important notes.
The core features of a personal CRM are:
If you think of a personal CRM like an address book with extra features, you’ll find them easier to use. The first step is capturing and collecting all your contact details. You can add contacts manually to all personal CRMs but most also have the ability to upload a .csv or Excel file of your contacts.
Once you have your contacts in your personal CRM, you can start putting them into buckets / categories. You can add categories by friendship, company, location etc. Next, add in when you last spoke to the contact and start thinking about how long you’d like to leave between contacting them again. The final part of getting set up is to add notes and tags to your contacts. Write down important details of your conversations, record gift ideas, create custom tags that help you further categorise them into groups and…you’re done!
We’re living in the information age and it can feel like we’re drinking out of the fire hydrant of the internet daily. Having a personal CRM means you can keep your contacts in a central, portable place, you can remember your contacts and send them regular messages, you can stay top-of-mind for them without needing to get them on an email list and finally, you can build more trust but remembering important details in your contact’s lives like special dates, children’s name and other things they mention that could easily be lost.
You want to keep everything as simple as possible and your phone or paper address book is almost as simple as it gets. Personal CRMs are for people who have outgrown their address book and need something more secure, more mobile and able to hold as many contacts as needed. The downside to address books is that you have a chosen format and need to stick to that format for the life of the book. You could use a spreadsheet as a personal CRM but this has limitations around the collection of ongoing notes on the record (due to the fixed size of cells). Using a personal CRM, you can adjust the format to include extra details and this applies to all contacts.
Personal CRMs can range from simple CRMs that you build yourself in task or document apps through to fully-fledged CRMs set up in customised software. In the more advanced personal CRM apps, you can:
There are plenty of things to consider when choosing personal CRM software. You need to look at whether it is personal or for business, whether you want free or paid, whether you want to use a personal CRM template or use personal CRM software, whether you need all the extra features etc. If you need help deciding, get in touch and we’ll be happy to give advice on the best fit.
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