It lets you access all the contact information and view everyone your business deals with to make your sales efforts effective and simplify lead qualification and outreach. Your contact list plays an instrumental role in your business. Hence, you need to nurture your contacts and ensure they get suitable products, services, and the right communication to retain your customers or convert them from prospects to customers. This is why you need a system to manage your precious contacts and track interactions your business had with them. Contact management software is designed to do just that, and its benefits are worth exploring and including in your sales toolkit. This article explains all about contact management software, its uses, and benefits and introduces you to some of the best tools available in the market. Let’s start!
What Is Contact Management Software?
Contact management software is a tool that helps you store the contact information of your customers, prospects, and vendors and track the communication between your business and them. The information can include addresses, phone numbers, emails, social media handles, orders, open quotes, sales history, associated companies, and so on. The software also allows you to easily organize and filter contacts to help you find specific customer subsets. You can also filter the contact list by industry, title, relationships with your business, etc. In addition, you can manage communications using the contact management software and integrate it with other tools like calendars to schedule meetings and get notified of participants and timing. Contact management software can have features such as:
Automation: Automation is the key in modern businesses, and contact management software includes it to free your time to invest in more important matters. It is designed to eliminate repetitive, tedious tasks and automate storing customer data and communication tracking.Interactive dashboard: It features a clean, interactive dashboard to display all the customer information. It saves you from getting overwhelmed with huge information while making it easy to track clients, pitch them at the perfect time, and help increase sales.Analytics and reporting: It’s important to know if your efforts are paying off, and for this, records and analytics help. These features in contact management software help you handle your sales processes effectively and make better business decisions. You can also view email replies, track social media comments, and analyze sales calls to enhance your strategy.Integrations: You can integrate your contact management software with different tools you already use and increase your productivity. It will also enable better visibility of your processes and interactions, help you assign tasks, track time, work efficiently, and a lot more.
Difference Between Contact Management Software and CRM?
When you say “contact management software,” many confuse it with customer relationship management (CRM) software. Therefore, it is important to understand the difference between the two and who must choose what. The features of contact management software are often added to CRMs. But what if you don’t need the entire CRM? If your business needs are met using contact management software features, this tool will be enough, and you won’t need to invest in the complete CRM. You can leverage the standalone tool – contact management software to store and manage your contacts and streamline your communications. The difference between a CRM system and contact management software is that the former is a full-featured system. A CRM tool can handle leads, and orders, manage customer data and offer marketing, sales, support, and service tools. It uses contact management as one of its main components. On the other hand, contact management software is a lightweight version of CRM. It handles the contact information of everyone who deals with a business and tracks their interaction with the business. CRM software can be utilized by a business of any size, especially the larger ones with many contacts, data, and interactions to manage. It can cover all information related to their customers, prospects, and vendors. But contact management software will be more useful for small to medium businesses with a manageable number of contacts and interactions.
Why Is It Important for Your Business?
Using contact management software for your business is helpful in many ways. Here’s how:
Stores Contacts Automatically
Contact management software stores all the contact information of your prospects, clients, and vendors automatically into the system in a single place. The system synthesizes information from various sources like social media, direct conversations, phone calls, live chats, website visitors, purchase records, inquiries, etc. It helps you view all the data easily without getting confused or wasting time entering all the details manually. In addition, it also helps you offer personalized products and/or services to people.
Centralizes Communications
Every communication your business has with a prospect or client gets stored automatically in the system. You can view this record to think about offering suitable products or services based on the interactions. It will also help you follow up with them in a suitable time frame and better understand their needs and challenges. In addition, it also forms the basis of how you can communicate with similar clients.
Helps You Make Better Business Strategies
By looking at your contact list and communications in a single place, you can determine the right type of products and services to provide. It will also help you strategize your marketing campaigns based on data-driven insights. As a result, you can get better outcomes and enhanced customer interaction.
Better Collaboration
As the entire team can view the data, it increases visibility and transparency. As a result, it streamlines workflows, reduces frequent meetings, results in fewer mistakes, and keeps everyone in the loop.
Enhances Customer Experience
You can offer a better customer experience by analyzing the data and providing improved products and services. It will increase their reliance on your brand and enhance customer loyalty. So, if you want to avail all these benefits, choose the best contact management software like the ones I’ve mentioned below.
Pipedrive
Track emails, contact history, calls, and everything in a single place and have complete visibility of your schedule with Pipedrive. It helps you grow an unlimited database of organizations and contacts and see the entire timeline of your contact history. Manage the sales conversations from the preferred inbox and automatically receive emails linked to contacts and deals. You can directly make calls from the web for faster call recording, tracking, and insights. Pipedrive allows you to set up meetings with your invitees by setting a mutual time between both sides. Set your schedules to check and manage activities and save time. Besides, you can send trackable proposals, contracts, and quotes to notify when the document opens. Furthermore, Pipedrive offers many features, including contact maps, file attachments, customizable signatures, reports and insights, security, integrations, and mobile apps. Choose your deal starting at $12.50/month/user with a FREE trial.
Monday.com
Monday.com allows you to handle all your business contacts in a single place so that you will never miss any leads and be on the top when it comes to sales. Contact cards give full context by showing every contact-related data like tasks, documents, activities, and deals. Track each activity of your contacts using a timeline and gain visibility into what needs to be done to enhance your business growth. Maintain good customer relationships by providing what they need. Monitor team performance to gain clarity over the impact of your business through high-level dashboards. Monday.com is a flexible, secure, and scalable work OS that power your business to perform fast. Integrate with multiple tools you use to make your work even more streamlined, from managing contacts and receiving calls to getting a 360-degree view of every customer. Take the FREE trial of the plan you like according to your business needs.
Freshsales
Track contacts’ communication, improve customer engagement, develop long-lasting relationships, and unify data with Freshsales. You will get complete details of your sales and marketing contacts in your database. Freshsales allows you to make strategies and run campaigns to drive more conversions through greater engagement. Allow your team to have all the essential information to avoid inefficiencies in communications. The Activity Timeline gives you a chronological view of customer engagement. You can also check website activities, and gain visibility of audience engagement and email activities. Improve your sales productivity by ranking hottest leads, speeding up sales prospecting, managing the sales teams across geographies, etc. Maximize your team’s efficiency by running successful campaigns, prioritizing prospects, converting emails to contacts, setting up internal alerts, and providing unified experiences. Try it for FREE or take a growth plan at $15/user/month.
Bigin
Small businesses can now manage customer relationships more efficiently with Bigin. All the essential information, including activities, tweets, emails, and more, will be safe in Bigin so that you can access and use any detail at any time. Engage prospects by embedding web forms to get visitors’ details, sending and receiving emails, and keeping the entire view of each interaction with the prospects. Manage multiple pipelines using options and customizable deal stages, and workflows to eliminate repetitive tasks, and follow-ups. You will get notifications to have better collaboration and dashboards where you can view the complete picture of the sales pipeline. Use mobile applications to make sales on the go. With an integrated telephone system, you can manage calls by purchasing phone numbers for the team. No contracts, no credit cards, start using the software for free for a single user, or choose a plan that suits your business and avail yourself of the FREE trial.
Keap
Keap helps you optimize customer experience and enhance your growth by managing your contacts and organizing everything with ease. It offers an automatic lead capture feature that lets you collect a list of contacts through landing pages, social media, and lead forms and organize them properly, so you never miss any leads. Get a perfect view of everything in one place and take quick actions whenever necessary from the contact record directly. You can access contact details from the desktop and your mobile device with Keap’s mobile application. In addition, you can tag and segment every contact quickly to enhance the automation process based on client data or activity. Migrate your existing contact lists from Constant Contact and MailChimp with ease. You can also integrate third-party tools, such as Quickbooks, HelloSign, and Shopify, and sync contacts directly. In addition, Keap helps you consistently increase your business by converting more clients with excellent features. You can also set reminders and view the conversion reports to make better decisions at the right moment. If you are a single user expecting 500 contacts, pick the best plan at $79/month to get features like CRM, email marketing, lead capture, easy automation, text messaging, invoicing, payments, appointments, and more. Still in doubt? Take a 14-day FREE trial and dig deeper.
HubSpot
Manage all your contacts minus hard work using contact management and database software – HubSpot for FREE. Add contact records along with the companies in a single click and log sales activities automatically. Keep all the records without extra maintenance and update them automatically. You can also manage everything on a single screen without jumping from one spot to another to access contact details, meetings, communication history, activities, etc. Integrate with known tools like Outlook and Gmail, which will help you access your contacts’ emails. HubSpot provides many services that help you do your work and increase sales. These services are lead and pipeline management, company insights, email tracking, email templates, Instagram and Facebook lead ads management, forms, contact activities, conversations inbox, etc. Get the software today and manage your contacts with extra benefits at a starter plan of $45/month.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell is a robust CRM tool that aids sales teams in completing more transactions. Sales professionals can manage your complete sales pipeline from one location with Zendesk Sell’s feature-rich platform. Zendesk Sell includes all the tools sales teams use to be successful, including the ability to track leads and contacts, create personalized reports, and analyze sales data. Zendesk Sell is cloud-based, mobile software that automates the sales process and aids in increasing efficiency for sales representatives. It provides the contact and customer details, activity history, and pipeline management that sales teams require to be successful. Zendesk Sell’s built-in email monitoring, automatic call logging, and customizable deal phases make it simple to monitor crucial sales activity. It is one of the most well-liked sales systems that millions of companies use worldwide to make data-driven decisions. It provides a range of features that can match the particular requirements of a business. Its ability to log customer information, sophisticated reporting capabilities, and integrations with other business tools like Salesforce provides complete visibility into clients and the sales process. Key Features
Zendesk app framework to build custom solutionsHistory of customer interactionsAdvanced sales metrics for sales forecastingTracking of activities and sales opportunitiesDeal and Account ManagementVarious messaging options to stay connected
Zendesk will meet your expectations if you’re seeking a cloud-based platform for end-to-end sales management. It provides a 14-day free trial and different subscription price plans for small businesses to large corporations.
Pobuca Connect
Optimize the process of storing your business contacts with Pobuca Connect. You can store and share your contacts and search for organizations, names, job titles, etc., in a single place. It helps you to be more productive through better communication and speeding up the processes. Update the contact lists constantly by grabbing email signatures or scanning business cards and sync your devices to be updated automatically with the latest information. You will also access the user admin panel and invite your team with user permissions such as contributor, editor, etc. Pobuca Connect offers standard fields for organizations, co-workers, or contacts to store details such as name, surname, department, phone, gender, work email, role, etc. Use filters to search for your contacts according to gender, role, or department. Furthermore, you can capture email signatures, scan business cards, link contacts to the organization, produce internal notes, add contacts to favorite lists, invite co-workers, set reminders to call, check activity logs, and many more. Pobuca Connect stores backups on the cloud so that you will never lose anything. It integrates with PBX to sync contact lists using LDAP to let you experience more productivity. Get your contact manager for FREE or avail more benefits with a paid plan of $2.5/user/month.
Salesmate
Salesmate is a contact management software that helps you turn your contacts into deals. It can monitor, prioritize, and analyze every deal present in the sales pipeline. Manage your contacts and create pipelines according to the business type to deliver the best results. Visualize everything on a single screen and respond to every contact on time. The software provides a detailed and clear view of your client’s data, from contact history to dashboard activities. Plus, save your time by 37% in performing bulk tasks on contacts simultaneously. Furthermore, you can set reminders, create new activities, manage sales tasks, view past tasks, etc. Salesmate provides you with 50+ filter options so that you can assign various tags to each contact. You will have all the information at your fingertips with features like built-in calling, Messenger, Google CRM, sequences, sales automation, text messaging, team inbox, and many more. Try it FREE for 15 days and if this is something you are looking for, choose a package according to your requirements at $12/month/user.
Capsule
It’s time to move forward and try something different that helps you enhance your leads. Try Capsule‘s contact management software to manage all the contact information in a single place efficiently. It prevents you from wasting your time struggling with spreadsheets and searching for emails. See the whole history of the relationship between you and your contacts, including calls, files, notes, emails, and more. Capsule is always ready to sync your information so that you will get everything at your fingertips. Quick search allows you to search your email, text, and contact with ease, and full-text search enables you to see any text between emails and notes. Capsule also ensures that you work with zero effort by providing many features. Moreover, features like sales analytics, calendar and tasks, customization, sales pipeline, permissions, and security make your work faster. The price starts from $18/user/month. Avail yourself with a 30-day free trial with any plan.
Nimble
Nimble provides everything you need to manage your contacts, reach your goals, find opportunities, and build relationships. The Nimble Prospector allows you to access the benefits anywhere, including social platforms, web browser apps, and inboxes. Get a 30-degree view of your contact information and interaction history with your team. Stay always organized with the details to send emails and more. Moreover, you can send personalized and templated group emails by analytics, reporting, and tracking from personal email. Tie your team’s events, communications, and tasks automatically to every deal to ensure productivity. It also lets you organize the pipeline, appointments, tasks, and social signals in a single intuitive dashboard. Get the simple and smart CRM at just $19/month/user and try it for free.
Really Simple Systems
Track every contact, communication, and customer instantly with Really Simple Systems and set tasks for your team to follow. Its contact management software makes your work super easy by providing a 360-degree view of all the interactions such as calls, emails, documents, and notes. The advanced search option lets you find the info you want, such as accounts, opportunities, tasks, and contacts. Integration of your email provider will help you sync your emails from your contacts. Here, you will find VoIP telephony integration to recognize incoming calls. Additionally, you can use geo-locations on Google Maps while planning for customer meetings to find nearby accounts. Really Simple Systems lets you record every data and maintain a timeline and account history. It also offers you user permission levels, CRM customization, contact management, and many more. Use contact management software for free if you have only two users. Or, register for a free trial before taking a plan at $14/user/month.
Nutshell
Nutshell is a contact management software that offers free assistance to import data from any source so that your team will start working from day one. View the essential and up-to-date information from your phone or desktop for every business and person your team interacts with. Nutshell allows you to minimize your effort in manual data entry by syncing phone contacts, collecting leads from the website, scanning business cards, etc. Nutshell browses the internet for detailed data, such as job titles, locations, social media accounts, and more when you add a contact. Get features, including sales automation, reporting, pipeline management, email, team collaboration, marketing, and more. It offers many software integrations to make your work easier, such as Intercom, MailChimp, Gmail, Constant Contact, PandaDoc, Zendesk, Zapier, etc. Start growing with powerful features at a starting price of $19/user/month and avail a free trial.
Copper
Are you searching for contact management software that syncs your customers, prospects, and leads details? Try Copper. It integrates with Google Workspace to sync required information between the tools. Avoid filling up the details manually, and let the tool do it automatically for you. You will also see the automatic update in your software while updating the information in Gmail. Copper helps you to add new contacts with a single click. It lets you view all the communication history, pipeline details, and other vital information your sales team needs to nurture a better relationship. Work less in managing your contacts and let Copper do the work to find more time talking with your customers. Try Copper for 14-days and see how it works for you, and then choose the best suitable plan at $25/user/month.
Contact Boss
Contact Boss can simplify your work by allowing you to enter new or existing contacts, organize and search your contacts, and be in touch with each connection. You will be the in-charge of having comprehensive reports, robust search capability, security tools, and superior auditing functions that run your business smoothly. Get never-ending features such as intuitive and lightweight functions, create emails after capturing contacts at a place, legacy data transfer, track activity with call and visitor logs, and many more. Furthermore, create and manage any event, either in person or online, easily. You can also capture all the inquiries easily and quickly with Contact Boss. Plus, security and audit functions help you in controlling user permissions. Contact Boss gives you the control to change or add users, unlock or lock accounts, view statistics, create contact groups, and change contact type. Schedule your work and tasks and set a reminder to follow up with your customers in time. Pick your growth plan and take a free trial.
Daylite
Keep all the interactions in a single place with Daylite and stay in touch with your vendors, customers, and prospects. Use the filtering options to organize and segment companies and people to target the right people at the right time. Control and manage everything you need on your home screen. You can capture new leads, create follow-up reminders, and store emails to the client, all from the email. Get reminders so that you never miss any follow-ups or meetings. You can give access to your team to search for the information they need. Show little details to your customers that show a significant impact. Remember your connections with ease and stay updated with their data. Moreover, you can track deals with the custom pipelines and create a list for the targeted reach-outs, control permissions and settings, and more at just $29/seat/month.
EngageBay
EngageBay is one of the best contact management software with sales and CRM integration to manage deals, tasks, and contacts. It lets you connect with customers through various channels while centralizing all the information that gives power to your sales team to have meaningful communication, engagement, and context with the prospects. You will have complete access to your customer profiles, including past interactions, response rates, engagement patterns, interests, contact details, call notes, task history, social presence, and a lot more. With integrations like Office 365, Google, and other platforms, you can easily collect information and import the data in a few clicks. Get 500 contacts and 1000 branded emails limit for free, or pick a plan if you need more bandwidth for $8.99/user/month.
Contacts+
Contacts+ is a smart contact management software for power networkers. It connects with multiple sources or accounts to create a unique address book. This way, you will get up-to-date info that syncs across various devices and accounts automatically. After automated scans, you can know about the out-of-date information that ensures you always have accurate info. Contacts+ detects duplicates and merges them into the list, and provides updates so that you can have frustration-free work. With a single piece of info such as social handles, email addresses, phone numbers, etc., Contacts+ gives you a complete profile. Use the mobile app to scan business cards and save them or upload them in bulk using the web application. Contacts+ is available everywhere across Android, Chrome, Web, and Mac and ensures the availability of the information wherever you are. Additionally, you can manage and access your contacts from anywhere and at any time. Get features like secure backup and storage, call identification and blocking, granular search, email signature extraction, birthday reminders, tags, notes, etc., for free but with limited accounts and contacts. Choose a plan starting from $6.99/month to have more accounts and contact limits.
vcita
Manage your contacts, clients, and leads from an online hub with vcita. It will help you stay in touch with the contacts who matter the most in your business and never miss any message. Import existing clients quickly and organize your contacts from your Gmail, smartphone, or Excel. In addition, take the contact manager app wherever you go via Android and Apple app and interact with your contacts, including accepting payments, sending appointments, sharing files, etc. Share important information with your team and let them know who matters most among your clients. Get a 360-degree view of client relationships such as appointment details, past meetings, shared documents, correspondence history, privacy notes, and previous payments. Build a strong customer relationship, save time, and enhance your business with a $19/month package or go for a 14-day FREE trial.
Conclusion
Managing the contact information of your customers, clients, and vendors and tracking interactions with them is essential for your business. It will help improve customer experience, improve business strategies, and achieve more sales with streamlined processes. Choose the best contact management software from the above list and avail of its benefits for your business. You may also explore the best outreach software to boost revenue and engagement.
