Contacts Crazy
My life has been taken over this weekend by spreadsheets and contact databases and business cards and a plethora of tools to clean up my contacts. It is not just my personal contacts, but those pertaining to work, those for the dumpling tours, those for my general business network, and those for my Tiny Letter newsletter. My head is about to freaking explode.
How did this all happen? I have several email addresses, I have several extensive social networks, I have numerous correspondence across both email and network, and as such bits of information get dispersed everywhere. Then there is the accuracy issues as some of my main sources of information such as LinkedIn are not frequently updated by many folks.
My previous way of cleaning stuff up was to use Plaxo, but the software was clunky and really did not work very well from a cleanup and organizing perspective. It’s ties to social networks was also pretty weak. In more recent years, I simply shoved everything into Google Contacts and hit the merge duplicates button. But it was kind of a brute force approach and resulted in a lot of messy contact fragments. Also, it was a manual process. For all of these solutions, it still did not solve the issue of updates happening in email and with email signatures.
So I am trying something different. I have FullContact running and synching to a few sources like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gmail. I used it sparingly before and going to try in more in heavy duty mode now. I am also trying out Evercontact, which I had the free version of for a while, but now shelled out for the Max plan with the one year email scan to pull out new contacts and contact updates that I may have missed. Pretty soon I will also have the Enhatch business card scanning functionality working, so I will use that going forward for contact entry.
I admit that I do not have this contacts conundrum solved, but I feel I am getting closer. But I know there are plenty of other hacks to this dilemma. If you have a particularly clever solution, I would love to hear your thoughts!
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While contact management is not the biggest focus at Enhatch, we know how important it is for salespeople to have easy...
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