How to choose a personal CRM

Start with the job, not the features

Most people choose a personal CRM by reading a comparison table. That is how they end up with a tool that has every feature and that they stop opening in three weeks.

The tools called personal CRMs do at least four different jobs: reminding you to stay in touch, remembering your conversations for you, making introductions, and serving a whole firm. A personal CRM built for one of those is usually mediocre at the others. So before any feature, decide which job you have. If your problem is losing touch with people, you want a reminder tool. If your problem is that you meet forty people a month and cannot remember what any of them said, you want memory. If your work is introductions, you want a tool that runs the introduction.

Once you know the job, the field narrows to three or four tools, and the five questions below pick between them.

Does the history fill itself in, or do you type it?

This is the question that predicts whether you will still be using the tool in six months, and it is worth more than every other feature combined.

If the tool reads your email and calendar and fills in when you last spoke, how often, and whether it went both ways, then it stays current whether or not you open it. Every conversation you have already leaves a trace, and the tool just reads it.

If you have to log interactions by hand, the tool is a spreadsheet with a nicer interface, and it will decay the same way. The last-contact column will be right for two weeks and fiction by the second month. Nobody keeps that up, however good their intentions on the day they sign up.

Ask it directly: if I never open this for a month, will the dates still be right when I come back?

What does it read, and what does it keep?

Any tool that syncs your email is reading your mail, so the question is how much and what happens to it.

Three things to find on the tool's own website, not in a support reply. Whether it reads headers only, who and when, or message contents. Whether it stores what it reads, and for how long. And whether it ever sends from your account, and if so, whether you approve each message.

A tool that answers all three plainly is being straight with you. A tool that buries them, or does not answer, has made a choice about how much it wants you to know. That choice tells you something.

Does it work where you already are?

A tool that lives in a browser tab you have to remember to open competes with every other tab for your attention, and it loses. The tools that stick tend to meet you somewhere you already go: in your inbox, in a Chrome extension on LinkedIn, on your phone, or inside an assistant you already talk to.

This is not a small point. The best personal CRM for you is the one you will actually look at, and where it lives has more to do with that than what it can do.

Is it built for your kind of network?

A tool for staying in touch with friends and former colleagues, and a tool for an advisor managing forty portfolio relationships and the introductions between them, are different products, even when both are called a personal CRM.

Look at who the tool's own site talks to. If every example is about birthdays and coffee, it is built for personal relationships. If every example is about deals and pipelines, it is a sales CRM in disguise. If it talks about introductions, portfolio companies, and who in your network fits a need, it is built for connectors. Pick the one whose examples sound like your week.

Will you still open it in week three?

You cannot answer this from a feature page, which is why the last step of choosing is a test.

Connect your real email and calendar to the tool you think you want, and use it for a month. Not a demo account with sample data; your actual inbox.

Week one tells you whether the sync works, whether the duplicates got merged, and whether the last-contact dates match reality. Week three is the real test. The novelty is gone, and you find out whether you open the tool on your own or only when you remember you are trialling it. A tool you have not opened by week three is one you will not open in month four.

Most tools have a free tier or trial that covers this. Use it for exactly this, and make the decision at the end of the month rather than on day two, when everything looks good.

A note on the tools that make introductions

If your job is the introduction, one more question. Does the tool run the introduction, or leave it to you? Most personal CRMs will remind you that you meant to introduce two people and then stop. A few, NetworkOS and Bridge among them, find the fit, run the double opt-in, send from your own account and watch for the reply. NetworkOS does the finding and the drafting from your email history; Bridge is stronger if what you need is a link people can use to request intros from you. Both are Google-only or Gmail-first, which is the thing to check before you commit.

The short version

Decide the job first. Then ask whether the history fills itself in, what the tool reads and keeps, whether it lives where you already are, whether it is built for your kind of network, and whether you will still open it in week three. The first question matters most. Answer the last one by connecting your real inbox for a month and deciding at the end, not the beginning.