Relationships
The author, fingers mangled courtesy of Apple Image Playground.
We have so many communications channels with friends and family, work colleagues and customers, it’s hard to keep track of it all.
In business, I am keen to use Client (or Customer) Relationship Manager (CRM) software tools. There are many such systems out there, with perhaps the biggest and most expensive (?), being Salesforce. As the name suggests, it is beloved by sales teams needing to track leads, opportunities and deals, and manage the sales pipeline.
My use case is simpler - to keep a timeline of my email conversations with a prospect, current or past customer. When did we last ‘chat’? What was it about? What was the outcome?
It is very much the ‘Relationship’ aspect of a CRM.
I find that trying to see this timeline via email history alone is awkward if not impossible. My lightweight CRM (sadly no longer being developed) makes a huge difference and allows me to piece together parts of the jigsaw puzzle.
However, I find myself chatting with contacts via LinkedIn and messaging apps a lot too. And I sometimes even speak to them! I could manually put a note in my CRM to track those interactions, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those communication channels could be collected and aggregated automatically in a single timeline by person?
Messages
Calls
Emails
Notes
LinkedIn
Ideally such a tool would support all email providers and multiple messaging platforms (SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc.).
It would probably be tied to my address book / contacts, and I might choose to see this aggregated timeline only for selected people, and not necessarily everybody.
What I have described here is very much a ‘personal CRM’. I don’t know if it would work in a team setting.
Do you know of something that does this already?
For collaborating with others, expensive CRMs that are restricted to sales teams miss the point most of the time. Anybody that is customer-facing ought to be able to view the history of interactions and conversations with a client, assuming it is not sensitive or confidential. Good software will allow you to mark such interactions accordingly.
Cloud-based CRMs are pretty amazing, as every entity in it (person, company, note, email, deal, etc.) has a unique URL that can be shared with others, and assuming they have the appropriate privileges, will be able to see what you are referring to when you say ‘Take a look at this…!’
No need to forward emails onto a bunch of colleagues, just ping them the URL.
Using CRMs this way is starting to drift towards and blend with customer support or service desk tools where you can assign actions to a colleague and put an interaction or conversation into a workflow that can be tracked and timed.
Wonder if there are products or suites of tools out there that allow you to engage with someone initially as a prospect, a potential customer, and then as a current customer that may enter a project or onboarding phase with you, and then exit the project phase to a support phase.
I have only been able to do this with three entirely separate software tools.
Sigh.
Here’s hoping.
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Related article - Business systems are still too messy.
This article was first published on LinkedIn, 10-Jun-2025
