How about Business Contact Manager & Outlook?
Act has long been the tool of choice for sales people and my recollection is that it is very much oriented toward the sales process, from prospecting for leads up through the point where the customer makes a buy decision and the sale is closed. Ditto for Prophet.
Our customers have pretty well already decided to buy from us by the time they first approach us, so we need something to organize all of the communications, notes, etc. for each customer from that point on. I purchased Intuit’s Customer Manager for that purpose (since we were using their QuickBooks accounting software, and have since upgraded to Premier) but Customer Manager has always been painfully slow. Performance improved when I doubled RAM, but as the customer list as increased, performance has deteriorated. Which is a puzzle. The file size is only 24 MB and there are only 600 customers in it. [Admittedly, performance would improve if I didn’t have so much else running on the system. Outlook is always open and I typically also have QuickBooks Accounting, MindManager, Customer Manager and an illustration program (CorelDraw of Illustrator) open at the same time but I need all of them running to work on customer jobs and handle their inquiries when they call in.]
I wonder if Microsoft’s Business Customer Manager add-in for Outlook wouldn’t be a better alternative, allowing me to dump Customer Manager. Problem is, since the business is in its infancy, I would guess that the number of customers will grow to a couple thousand over the next several months and could easily reach 10,000 within a couple years. That seems like an awful lot to be carrying around in Outlook, but perhaps by then we could put all of that data on a server. Would that help? Or would I always have to carry a humongous file in Outlook? Don’t know.
