Achievable goals, better results

The biggest temptation when deciding to implement a customer information system is to track too much information about each customer. On the surface, more seems better. Why not keep track of spouse birthdays, favorite sports, customer revenue expectations, and favorite restaurant types?

If any of those information types would actually be used, then you should track them. However, the more likely possibility is that all of them would not be widely updated and accordingly, would "get in the way" of a clean and functional system.

Our recommendation is to be extremely cautious when deciding what information to track and to subsequently implement changes slowly. This "minimalist" recommendation is not because of any IntelliPad flexibility deficit. In addition to Outlook contact information, IntelliPad tracks participation in events and mailings, several types of contact categorization, and offers the ability to create up to fifteen of your own data fields for contacts and another fifteen for contact companies. These data fields can be lists such as favorite sports, dates, or text.

A good starting point for a successful CRM implementation is to keep name and contact information consistent firm-wide (including incremental data fields as really needed), and then for both end-users and the marketing staff, simplify how mailings are produced.