What is the best personal CRM?

I asked this question on Twitter about a month ago and ultimately decided to go with Airtable. Most of the CRM tools are too heavy (built for companies or teams) or too restricted (e.g. mobile only). A basic spreadsheet tool like Airtable has worked great because it's easy to use, multi-platform, very customizable, and integrates with many other API's/tools. At the end of the day I just need a list of people I know, categorized by role, location, and other factors. That said, I'm eager to try a product that's specifically built for the use case you describe. Maintaining this spreadsheet of people is the biggest thing lacking in Airtable right now.

I am able to use Airtable for a number of important processes and projects. I must have 15 ATs now with 4-5 that I use daily. I second Ryan's take on why he uses AT. Fascinating to see a free form product at the top of a crowdsourced list of CRM tools.

Was also going to recommend AirTable for personal CRM - love the flexibility

This is why we built FollowUp Personal CRM - we needed a simple tool to manage professional relationships, not leads. So instead of pipeline management, revenue forecasting, and other sales CRM features, FollowUp helps you stay in touch with contacts (followups, reminders, events from Gmail) and remember the important details about them (notes, tags, conversation history, contact enrichment). The most important piece was creating a method that's easy and repeatable. I've tried a lot of different contact management tools and the problem I consistently faced was actually sticking with them. Because FollowUp lives in Gmail you're able to manage relationships as you interact with them, in a place you probably already spend a lot of your time.

I've used this product and it's been exactly what I need. It links to my already existing Google contacts and calendar that I use very heavily. I use it to keep track of people that I want to continue to engage with in my network. I use the tool to set a desired follow-up amount of time for each contact (2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, etc) and then I never have to worry about "forgetting" to keep in touch with people. The app creates events on your Google Calendar and sends an email when you haven't been in touch with someone past the follow-up timeframe you set. It also has some additional data on the contact page, allows you to add notes, and shows links to social media presence.

I've been using FollowUp daily for the past 6 months and highly recommend it. It's great for keeping all of my contacts in order and making sure I speak to everyone I need to. If you're looking for a simple to use and accessible way to keep in touch with people, FollowUp is the way to go. The Upcoming tab is an added bonus to the personal CRM because I don't have to keep opening and closing my Google Calendar throughout the day.

Hey Eric, I would suggest Zenkit. It is great for adding and managing personal contacts. Also, you can easily add meetings with people to the integrated calendar view and work with task lists. Works on the web and on iOs. Android will come soon too. It can also be integrated with over 750 applications via Zapier. Go check it out here: www.zenkit.com

It is really designed for marketers, NOT a fan for personal use. and there is constant nagging request for upgrade.

I've tried many of these platforms, and it feels like there are more of them every day. My personal choice for a start CRM is HubSpot. It has easy to use out of the box features. Many of my friends also swear by PipeDrive. Finally, I was looking at but never really tried ProsperWorks, but if you are on GSuite, it's well reviewed.

I've tried many but at the end decided for Hubspot CRM

Run your entire business from your Inbox. Works with Google Apps.

Best lightweight CRM there is out there. Been using it for 2+ years, quick and easy to track, snooze and group your business emails. Snippets, major time-saving feature here! It has easily brought in 2x efficiency in my email management and response time.

If you use (and live in) Gmail I recommend Streak. It's a lightweight CRM that comes with a couple of nice features I can't live without: snooze emails, read tracking, etc.

It's free for up to 5 users and they have Sales, Marketing and support integrated which is nice. you can also use the API

I'm using it right now and is a very complete and affordable CRM solution.

Been using this for almost a year now, after trying InfusionSoft, HubSpot, ProsperWorks, Nimble and some others. Agile CRM has the best combination of functionality and pricing, especially for small business.

Just launched last week - seems super simple, but it gets the job done 🎉

Found it extremely slow. Maybe it was my internet that day.

Cloze has been the only tool that has stuck with me for >1 year, I have tried all of the above. Airtable is good only for archiving contacts, but there is nothing actionable you can get out of it. In Cloze, you can do emails, mail merge, groups, reminders, phone calls, tags, notes etc...and it pulls all things passively in the background. Airtable and most of the other apps use Zapier.. which is good but is too much work... I actually use Cloze > Zapier > Airtable for backups

This is what I use for personal / business. It's great because it smartly imports your contact data instead of having to manually input everything every time. The free plan allows for up to 1000 or 2000 free contacts I think.

I find Cloze great for business, it helps me focus on the important emails, remember to stay in contact with people, remind me to reconfirm upcoming meetings.

This is the best I've seen in this space since it's aimed at long-term relationships vs. pipelines. Believe it was designed for real estate agents, but might work for what you're looking for.

Personally, I also really like Airtable. It has a lot of flexibility, and the spreadsheet view is really nice. It's like google sheets on Steroids. However, if you are really looking for a tool that helps you setup triggers to follow up on people and to build a strong network, I recommend checking out Contactually. It was recommended once by a top VC out of SF and he is a big fan (he wasn't even an investor). Other things I've tried out, is to build it in a Trello board, as I love the kanban approach and put pictures of the people I'm building relationships with. The challenge with all your personal CRM tools, is that it requires time and dedication to keep it up to date. My most natural behavior is actually taking notes of interactions and put that in my Evernote. I then sometimes set reminders to follow up. I do the same with my gmail. Mixmax has also some cool stuff you can do to scale your personal CRM a bit more. I think the gmail function of reminder yourself

CRMs are for sales, so they all offer a pipeline view. If you're like me and need to manage a network, this is a problem because: 1/ not all my contacts are meant for the same purpose (think investors, journalists, advisors) 2/ one of my main objectives is to build a relationship over time (not a one-off deal). Folk helps me do this with LOTS of automated features that save time (import, enrichment, email threads, meeting logs, etc...) and with a simple layout to easily create and manage different categories of contacts/outreach efforts. Very smart product (and the design also helps!).

We designed Sellf CRM to be the Runkeeper for Sales People. We really wanted to change the approach by helping to focus around goals and organize activities to reach those faster. In doing this we took inspiration from Runkeeper, Runtastic and in general fitness apps that use goals, badges and competition with firends and we essentially replicated these into Sellf. Give it a try and let us know what you think! We've already have a large community of 100.000 users and would love to have you join us! Disclaimer: I am the CEO and founder of Sellf.

Love this App. Has made my life so much easier!!!

Automated update and link to pictures, social networks is very handy and time saving.

Hey Eric, give Plutio a try. It is a very simple and beautiful CRM for individuals. You could create a profile for your clients and contacts, group them in categories, and even invite them to start a conversations. Soon you will be able to talk to any of your contacts without inviting them, this will allow you to 1) keep track of all your conversions in one place, 2) have a bird-eye view of when you've last contacted someone and what it was about, 3) create actionable tasks and reminders. Hope this helps 😀

You could give Freshsales a try. It comes with a 30-day trial and a free plan that is loaded with quite a few features and should work well as a personal CRM.

using is with great success, very simple

I prefer Nimble Social CRM. It is very easy to add social media profiles of your contacts and to auto discover other channels they use. I sync it with my Fb, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google contacts so I have the entire list up to date all the time. NIMBLE.com

Hi Eric, Great question :) We just released 2 months ago, with contact integration and a lot of support for conversation tracking - and we're FREE :) Curious about what features you want related to "managing (your) own meetings and address book"? Would love to hear more, and help you with that! -Brendan

Podio is a toolbox of sorts, and can easily be used for 'PRM' (personal relationship management). It's easy to customize, something I appreciate since someone else's idea of how things should work don't always match one-for-one with mine. I also like the integration with other services. Nothing worse than trying to keep key data in sync across multiple services. Duplicates are bad, but merging/deleting records that aren't the same is worse.

I use it for all my non commericial clients, and it keeps me up to date on PC, laptop, Tablet and Phone

If you're willing to pay the $25/mo, this is by-far the best one you can use personally. Yeah, a bit overkill for personal usage but it's fully customizable and if you have a Gmail account or G Suite account for personal usage, it'll to you well!