Personal Relationship Managers

Inspired after reading Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, I sat out to create a system to organize my contacts. Just as in the book, I looked for a tool to organize my contacts by categories, by interest, and by location. I set up reminders for when to reach out again. Sales people recognize this as a Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM. I was looking for something simple, and yet better than putting all my contacts into a spreadsheet. I also wanted access from my phone and from my computer. Hence, building my own CRM using Filemaker was not the right solution. This is when I stumbled on an entire new category of applications, called Personal Relationship Managers, or PRM. I’ve been looking into several of them, and experimented with two specifically, Ryze and Etch.ai. Thus far, I conclude that this category is very new and lots of work remains. I am not convinced that either company has reached version 1.0 yet. Here are a few of my early observations:

Ryze

Ryze is a mobile application which reminds you when to reach out to your contacts, and allows you to track notes. You start by importing contacts from your phone. You can then add tags and set up reminders.

• When you open the application, It selects 3 or so contacts and reminds you reach out. I found this hard. I rather browse through a queue of contacts I need to reach out. I can then select who I reach out to. By browsing the list I may make the connection between an article I read and a specific contact who may be interested in it.