Contact Management Made Simple AND Social

We have a new feature starting this week in which we’ll be bringing you our favorite resources.

The first thing you must know is that we never promote any tool or resource that we personally haven’t tested or used ourselves.

You wouldn’t want us to fake it, would you?

Secondly, every now and then, we may recommend products or services that we may be an affiliate of and, if you buy from our links, we may earn a commission.

The Must-Have Criteria

One of the biggest challenges is finding the right contact management system for your business. There are a number of software programs you can buy, most of which are expensive and complicated to learn.

We know, we’ve researched this ourselves when searching for a fully-featured product that was easy to use.

We had several important pieces of criteria that absolutely had to be met. They are:

1. Calendar with to-do list, event list with reminders.
2. Web-based. If it wasn’t accessible from anywhere, it didn’t make the list.
3. Simple to use.
4. Compatible with other products or services.

BatchBook Wins Hands Down

We were happy to find that many services these days have a trial period, whether it be 2 weeks or 30 days. After testing a few, we eventually settled on BatchBook by BatchBlue.

It has most everything we needed based on the list above. Sure, there are a few things we would like such as printable to-do lists, but the coolest feature of this service is that it has built-in social search feature for all your contacts.

What this means is that when you add a contact, there is a feature that will search for the social places on the web for your contact, such as Twitter and LinkedIn. It would be perfect with Facebook integration, but not yet, hopefully soon.

Integration with Other Products

There’s no sense in using a product that isn’t compatible with other services, so we were happy to see Batchbook already integrates with three services we already use, Freshbooks, MailChimp and Eventbrite.

We use Freshbooks for client invoicing, Mailchimp for email marketing and Eventbrite for event scheduling.

Batchbook has integration with other products, too, such as Shoeboxed and Tungle.

Batchbook on the Go

Mobile is where it’s at, and Batchbook is on the iPhone, so you can access all your contacts from anywhere. This is huge because with Batchbook, you no longer have to try and sync your contacts from one machine to another.

Run by Small Business Professionals

You’ll find Batchbook is run by small business professionals, just like you and me and are located in the US.

We’ve been using Batchbook since early October of last year and it’s the best we’ve found for features, accessibility and social integration.

Go to: www.BatchBook.com for a 30 day trial and see what you think.