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You Can't Get Away From It
"Hah!" I thought. "I'm a contractor with less than fifty clients a year. If there's one thing I don’t need to worry about, it's customer contact manager software." As a home business owner, you're always looking for ways to cut costs, and I thought I could cut out customer contact manger software to save on a business expense.
As you can probably guess from the title of this article, I thought wrong. Home businesses like contracting as a freelancer can greatly benefit from the use of customer contact manager software. Your time is even more limited when you have a home business than when your run a Fortune 500 company.
Since you are the only employee, you have less time to devote to such things as order processing, bulk emails and inventory. Customer contact manager software acts like a second employee, but doesn’t talk back to you. You might even be able to write your customer contact management software off of your taxes, but check with your accountant about writing off customer contact management software.
It's All In The Details
Home businesses owners can't help but buy tons of books about running a home business. Not only can we argue that we are "doing research" and not goofing off by not doing other things we are supposed to be doing, but we can write the books off on our taxes. Freelance writers do the same thing. When you don’t buy customer contact management software, you can buy more books.
Imagine my surprise when one of these books recommended that ALL freelance writers get customer contact manager software, "Get a Freelance Life" by Margit Feury Ragland (2006).
Ragland recommends customer contact management software to be used in ways you might not first expect. She especially recommends them NOT for the usual mailing lists, invoices and inventories – but to keep track of where you sent your articles to and what your sources were for interviews.
These are details that can be easily forgotten or lost. Most of the most successful freelancers do a lot of networking and collect a lot of business cards. You could put them in a Rolodex and promptly loose the Rolodex or put these details in your customer contact management software. Personally, I don’t have space on my desk for a Rolodex, but I certainly have space on my hard drive for customer contact management software to enhance Microsoft Outlook.
Or, It's All In the Databases
What great magic ingredient does customer contact management software have that the rest of your computer doesn't? The ability to manage many databases. Databases are a very intimidating word, but even a collection of baseball cards is, technically, a database. All it is is a group of information about one subject.
You can try to do this by hand. You can also try to do this by spreadsheet, which is a good way to keep a lot of information together. You can even do both. However, this gets tedious and does not help you as much as customer contact management software does.
Customer contact management software remembers tedious details more than you can (and usually doesn't need massive caffeine jolts to do so). It may sound like an extravagance to invest and take the time to learn customer contact management software, but you wind up saving time (and therefore, money) in the long run.
Have you ever looked for a minor detail that has suddenly takes on a HUGE significance? Perhaps you can't remember if you got paid by a client. Even if you only have five clients, you can become so busy that you don’t remember this incredibly important fact! You could go through all your filing cabinets – or you could just check with your customer contact management software.
You should take the time to select and learn your customer contact management software now while you're still a home-based business with one employee. When you are good at what you do, word gets around and soon your business grows. That is NOT the optimum time to learn customer contact management software. |