Ask HN: How do you manage business contacts?

[jtfairbank]

I'm meeting a ton of people for different organizations, and I'm having trouble tracking relationships and TODOs between them. This applies to customers, as well as people in the entrepreneurship community and partner companies.

I want a contact manager that allows me to record:

  * contact info
  * history- how we met and what we've done together
  * relationships between contacts (who knows who, who's working in the same company, etc)
  * followup items and TODOs related to each contact or organization
  * which team member is the primary contact for that person
  * lets me share all this with my team

Currently I'm using gmail's contact manager, and Trello cards to store more information. There's got to be a better way.

[boxcardavin]

I keep customers and business contacts separate, both in my head as well as digitally. There are too many biz people to meet and you'll either go crazy trying to keep up, or it will just be a time consuming 'hobby' cataloguing all of your interactions. Those relationships are like friendships -- If you don't see someone and talk to them enough to know what's going on with them, then they aren't good contacts. Yet.

[jtfairbank → boxcardavin]

Sure thing, but how do you track them digitally?

[boxcardavin → jtfairbank]

CRM for customers, searchable communications (text, google apps) and social media for biz contacts. Formal tracking is time consuming when I can just search for the person and review what we've talked about. I keep hashtagged notes all over the place (in emails, Slack, Trello) that I can search if I need to, but I rarely do. Being scientific about tracking interactions seems less important to me than being able to read the social queues I'm getting that day.

[kirinkalia]

I'd recommend looking at Pipedrive -- you can do pretty much everything you listed and they integrate with many other services, too: https://www.pipedrive.com/en-US/features

[jtfairbank → kirinkalia]

Checked them out, they seem super useful. Thanks for the tip.

[boxcardavin → jtfairbank]

Maybe I'll revise what I said, this does look useful and easy.