Magma Music

If you can’t find a tool that fits, use a spreadsheet!

December 11th, 2008

For many years I’ve dug around for the best contact management software.  I’ve used Outlook, Outlook with the Small Biz Contact Manager addition, Highrise, FreeCRM, Salesforce.com, Access, and I even built my own web front-end for my contact database.  They all had too many features.  Even Highrise, by the 37Signals guys who are famous for limiting features to create better functionality, didn’t fit what I needed.

I wanted a very easy way for me to see who I need to contact next, in what order, how to contact them, what happened the last time we interacted, and maybe some email notifications if I needed to followup with someone.

Recently I decided to stop looking for the perfect tool and just use a spreadsheet.  It’s been a huge success.  I keep at simple as possible.  I have a separate worksheet for each category of contacts (i.e.  press, blogs, venues, other bands, etc.) and they all have roughly the same fields:

• Contact info (name, address, email, web site(s)
• Preferred contact method (email, web, phone, myspace, cave drawings, etc.)
• Last contact (the last date I sent them an email or called them)
• Notes (I usually throw in a date and a quick note like “12/1/09 - booked show”)

One of the most basic features of spreadsheets is the sorting capability.  When it’s time to run through some contacts and get in touch, I sort by “Last contact” (oldest to newest) and I start down the line.  If it’s time to promote a show in New York, I sort by state and secondary sort by city and then start through the “New York”s.

Sound simple?  It is. But it works far better than a bulky, over-priced, feature-”rich” CRM system.

And I love Google Docs for my spreadsheets.  I can share and collaborate the contact lists with colleagues and interns and I can access them from anywhere.  With Google Gears, I can access them offline too.  Google Docs also limits features compared to Excel or Numbers, so there aren’t 100 extra menu items to get in the way of simple contact management.

Sort away!

Entry Filed under: Techniques