How is a Contact Manager application different from Contact Management or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) ?



Contact manager, contact management and CRM are all essentially different names for software applications that help you manage your contacts so you can make every contact count and turn your calling efforts into sales. In fact contact manager applications are often also referred to as sales management programs.

How can a contact manager software program make me more effective in building relationships?

You may wonder how a computer program can make you more effective in building relationships and ultimately sales. The key to contact manager applications is that they help you keep track of every activity surrounding a contact, so you remember what you've done, what you need to do next and what the potential opportunity is worth. Contact managers include organizational tools, such as those you use everyday - calendars, email, notes and task managers. What makes contact manager applications different from your other office productivity tools is that they link all these things to a contact or "opportunity" file, so you can set up appointments, assign tasks or send an email, while you're reviewing related notes and history. Contact managers allow you to be more efficient by having all your tools in one place. Contact managers also make you more effective by placing all related contact manager information in one file, so you are fully informed and focused on the sales goal.

What is meant by a contact manager "opportunity" file?

When you first call on a prospect, or make a first call about a particular business opportunity, you open an "opportunity" file in your contact manager application. That becomes the main file for tracking your opportunities. Contact information is linked to the opportunity file from your contact manager contact list, and you make notes in the file each time you contact the prospect about the opportunity, building a history in your contact manager application. Any appointments you schedule, tasks you assign and emails you send to the contact related to this opportunity all add to this comprehensive opportunity file.

Does contact manager software do anything else?

Yes. Contact manager applications include sales management reports that show your opportunity pipeline and forecast sales. Your contact manager reports can include estimated dollar value of your opportunities, stage in the sales cycle, probability of closing the sale and anticipated close dates. You can search and sort your contact manager reports by any of these fields, or by sales rep, region, contact or product. These contact manager reports are an invaluable sales management tool that can be created on demand and used daily to assign resources and tasks to those activities with the greatest sales potential.

How does Prophet Contact Manager compare to the competition?

Prophet Contact Manager is similar to other contact managers in function, but very different in how it performs those functions. All contact managers are built around the idea of creating opportunity files that include all contact information, history and activities in a single location, with the ability to search the information and generate sales management reports. All contact managers include some way to connect to calendars, task lists and email, so you can follow-up your calling efforts by scheduling next steps and sending appropriate communications. What makes Prophet Contact Manager so different is that it works within Outlook, making use of your current Outlook contact list, familiar email, task and calendar functions. You don't need to learn new office productivity tools. Prophet Contact Manager is simply an extension of Outlook. You'll recognize the toolbars and commands. There's essentially no training curve and you'll see virtually instant results.

How do competitive contact managers' productivity tools work?

Each contact manager application is slightly different, but none, other than Prophet, allow you to work directly inside Outlook?. You either need to use a duplicate set of tools within your contact manager for your contacts, calendar, tasks, etc., or you have to synch up to Outlook to transfer information between your contact manager and Outlook. These things make our competitors' contact managers more difficult to learn, more complex to use and, to varying degrees, redundant.