Best Contact Management Tool For Small Business
When you run a business and lead an organization, it becomes important for you to maintain a well-managed and organized communication channel in order to ensure a smooth functioning in the team.
It's not just the team that should be connected with each other to produce results, but also the external factors that need to be considered and communicated with. By external factors, we mean the producers, leads, customers, unengaged customers, outsourced employees, advertising agencies, and more.
Business is a comprehensive process of small, repetitive, and constant processes that work in a lineage to get the desired output. And if one of these hierarchical processes is disrupted due to any reason then so do the other following processes. Therefore, it becomes important to keep everything intact and in place.
Needless to say, having a communication gap in business has huge implications on the organization. To eliminate this gap, there exists Contact Management Systems that keep every information and details necessary to contact relevant people in one place.
What is a Contact Management System?
Contact Management System is a tool used for contact management, organizing, and sharing of information related to contacting relevant people. Contact Management System allows you to share grouped contacts, documents, notes, and more with large groups of people.
Contact Management Systems are used for all scales of businesses, may it be large, medium, or small. It helps you in storing and sharing contacts of vendors, customers, and potential customers. It also helps in tracking the documents shared, notes shared, and communication taking place.
It allows you to easily organize and filter contacts to help you find specific customer categories. It lets you refine the contact list by industry, department, title, relationships with your business, personal relations, etc so that it becomes more convenient for you to search for the right person at the right time.
Contact Management Systems are developed keeping in mind the importance it plays for businesses to help and contact people in an organization on a daily or regular basis.
Contact Management Systems holds various features like:
1. Automation
Contact Management Systems are created with the idea of automating your daily tasks related to contacting people into hassle-free and effortless sharing of contacts and organizing them.
It helps in saving your time of manual contact sharing into group sharing, and investing that saved time into something more important and productive. Contact Management Systems eliminates monotonous, repeated, tedious tasks and automates storing customers' and other relevant people in the organization's contact data and communication tracking.
It not only automates contact sharing, but it also automates certain tasks like having reminders for a scheduled call or meeting with a client or team, or manual document sharing or project sharing with the team or clients, or labelling contacts according to the fields they belong to like customers, producers, leads, etc.
2. Integrations
Contact Management Systems provide third-party apps and tools' integrations that help you in easing your daily different tasks like sharing documents, notes, reminders, and more.
It will also facilitate a better vision of your work processes and communications, help you assign tasks, work efficiently, and a lot more.
Most of the Contact Management Systems are well integrated with iOS, Gmail, Outlook, and more, which allows you to import and export your contacts from old devices or accounts easily according to your availability of device and convenience.
3. Orderly Organization
Contact Management Systems lets you add tags or labels to groups and individual contacts. This keeps your contacts and contact groups in a very neat and organized manner.
With this feature, you can name your department, groups, and contacts accordingly. It becomes easy to find and share contacts and groups of contacts with other relevant people in your contact list.
You can bifurcate groups and departments accordingly and allow selective access of information with selective people in the team. Unlike power packed CRMs, contact management tools focus on the ease of use, and affordability for huge businesses, small businesses and solo users like freelancers looking for a better and easier way to manage their contact information and details.
4. Reminders
You can manage communications using the contact management system and integrate it with other tools like calendars to line up meetings and get reminders of participants and timing.
So, whenever you have a meeting, you can add reminders to the contacts. That way, you will never be late or forget about scheduled meetings.
What is the difference between Contact management Systems and CRMs?
Contact Management System is a tool that hosts all the key information about your clients – name, address, email, phone number, transaction notes – as well as a recorded history of their interactions with your business.
Whereas, CRM is a comprehensive software solution to manage interactions as well as relationships with customers, potential customers, and partners.
May it be sales, customer service, business development, or marketing, CRM streamlines the functions of each team. It stores the information of clients and leads, identifies sales opportunities, and manages marketing campaigns centrally.
CRMs are different from Contact Management Systems in the following ways:
- Area of functionality
- Automation
- Report Generation
- Segmentation
- Documentation
To have a detailed understanding of the featured differences, you can click here.
Why is it important for your business?
Having Contact Management Systems in your organization is important because it ensures that the communication and contacts data are well organized and managed.
1. Increases Productivity
You must be thinking, "How can a Contact Management System increase the productivity of my work in the business?" But, it is true. When you have a Contact Management System that keeps your contacts well organized and managed, your time is preserved from doing all the silly and small tasks related to contacts.
Like we mentioned earlier, it saves your time of manual sharing and saving of contacts. With Contact Management Systems, you can find all the contacts in the right place and at the right time. This will remove confusion, delay, and hassle from your daily tasks at work — which will, in turn, allow you to focus more on prioritized work, therefore increasing productivity.
2. All in One
When we talk about Contact Management Systems, we do not mean it's just a tool that shares and saves contacts. No. We mean that Contact Management System is a comprehensive platform that offers various features for your business that holistically helps your organization run smoothly.
The Contact Management Systems also allow you to store and share documents, notes, tags, and more. Contact Management Systems imparts an easier way to save documents and share them with people it is relevant to. It also gives you the access to select who you have to share the access of documents and notes with.
3. Organized Workflow
Having a Contact Management System in your organization helps you in keeping your workflow organized. How? Having your contacts in one place and finding them at the right time curts down the waste of time that can be used in more productive work.
Therefore, when all your communication data is in one place it gets easier to track communication with the customers and the team members as well. It helps you look into all the data easily without wasting time or getting confused entering all the details manually. In addition to this, it also helps you offer personalized products and/or services to people.
Best Free Contact management system for Small business
Few of the best free contact management system for small businesses are:
1. Contacts+
Contacts+ is an intuitive contact management software for small businesses, professionals and teams. It is a powerful cloud-based address book that lets you combine contacts from popular platforms like Phonebook, Google Contacts and social media accounts to get a complete view of your contacts.
Contacts+ is full of features that complement other tools like iCloud and Google Contacts. This saves you a significant amount of time that can otherwise be utilized in tasks that have to be done manually.
Pros & Cons:
Contacts+ is a holistic platform and offers various great features like — Two-Way Syncing, Tags & Notes, Contact Deduplication, Great Integrations, Contact Cleanup and more that helps you in keeping your contact data very well organized and managed.
It also helps you in adding tags and notes to the tasks so that the communication is smoother and more transparent in the team. While Contacts+ has various pros, it also has a few cons like — Limited Contacts, Less Number of Pricing Plans, Limited Account Syncs and more affects the team and organization.
Lack of effective platform or useful features creates a barrier in the productivity of the teams and the organization as a whole.
Pricing:
Contacts+ offers a free version and a premium version. The free version can be used by the users after they have signed up for it. Both the free version and the premium-paid version have plans that can be opted on a monthly basis and yearly basis.
The free version can be used for monthly and yearly plans as well. All you have to do to use the free version is sign-up for free and there, you have your free version available for use. However, it restricts the number of contacts that you can have and the number of accounts that you can sync.
Whereas, in the premium plan you get two pricing options. One is for monthly and the other one is for yearly. The prices of monthly and yearly plans are $9.99/mo and $6.99/mo, respectively. On a yearly plan, Contacts+ gives you a 30% discount.
2. Pobuca Connect
Pobuca Connect is another contact management software that offers you complete rights of access that you can have over your team’s contact and communication. You can invite your coworkers, set their user permissions accordingly (editor, contributor etc.), you can also reverse access to users who have left the company and re-assign their contacts to another coworker.
Pros & Cons:
Pobuca Connect has various features inbuilt in the system that offers advantageous communication and collaboration within the organization. It has great features that gives you complete access over the Admin Panel, let’s you keep Internal Notes for the team, Reminds you to call someone, Keeps track of the Activity Log, Import from Google and many other features that you find by clicking here.
However, there’s one thing that acts as a drawback in this contact management system is that we cannot add documents to the contacts and share it with the team members or other relevant people. If it had been the case otherwise, it would’ve saved your time and would’ve kept your documents altogether in one place.
Pricing:
Pobuca Connect offers you three pricing plans that can be used by teams, professionals, and small-business owners. One of the three plans is free that you can use by just signing up for Pobuca Connect. The free version has limited features.
The Pro version charges you $2.99/mo and the Enterprise version charges you around $10/mo. The Pro version and the Enterprise version comparatively have higher ranges of features and integrations that may be more productive and time-saving for your organization.
3. ContactBook
ContactBook helps you organize your business contacts and keep them shared, so relevant people always have access to them. ContactBook makes contact sharing extremely simple and hassle-free. It is well-developed to simplify the process of sharing Gmail contacts across coworkers.
Pros & Cons:
ContactBook is a very useful and easy to use tool for contact management in an organization. It lets you save and share the contact information of relevant people at the right time. ContactBook has been built with the motive of imparting a hassle-free and easy-to-understand interface for contact management.
It has various features that are super advantageous for small businesses, teams, and professionals. ContactBook keeps everything organized in one place for more accessible contact sharing. It is well-integrated with other platforms like Google Contacts, iOS, Outlook, etc.
It gives you a complete access over the admin panel that makes sure it is in your control to allow as to who has the access over certain areas and who doesn’t. With its feature of adding notes, reminders, documents, and more — you will never forget an important meeting, task or point that needs to be well presented.
Pricing:
ContactBook offers three various plans, which are: Basic, Pro, and Business. Three of the plans are available on a monthly and a yearly basis.
The Basic plan is a best fit for freelancers and artists with a monthly plan billed at $5/mo and yearly plan billed at $4.16/mo. This plan offers various features like unlimited group sharing, space sharing, public notes, group tagging, source syncs, etc.
The Pro plan offers features of the Basic plan and additional features like private notes, 3 account syncs, 10 GB/space, and 25,000/space. The monthly pricing of this plan is $8/mo and $6.66/mo annually. All in all this is a great plan for small spaces to be well-organized in the contact management department.
The last plan that is offered by ContactBook is the Business plan. This plan suits best for the large-scale businesses and even small-scale businesses that require a huge communication channel for their organization. This plan provides expanded storage space upto 100 GB/space, unlimited contacts, unlimited accounts syncing, unlimited group sharing, unlimited groups and tags, private notes, and much more. The pricing for the Business plan for monthly purposes is $12/mo and $10/mo annually.
All in all, when you go for a yearly plan in any of the three Pricing Plans you save 17% annually.
Other Digital tools to check for Start-Up and Small Businesses.
Conclusion
We hope this blog was helpful enough to understand in detail about the Contact Management Systems for Small Businesses. It is important to know why and how contact management systems are useful and important for small businesses.
Having a Contact Management System in your small business helps in having effective contact management in the organization. We have listed down a few online contact management systems along with their pricing, pros & cons, and all about the best cloud management that they offer.
