Just a Personal Point of View
On the Road to Customer Tracking Software
16-Jan-2006
by Susan Pichotta
Part 1
THE DECISION
When I started my first software business in 1993, I wrote a lovely little customer
tracking program that did everything I wanted, including tracking prospects, customers,
the source of customers, advertising outcomes, reports and statistics. It was great.
Then I had a catastrophic hard drive crash, and despite a
background in mainframe computer operations (where backups are pervasive), I didn't have a
backup of this. It was gone.
Since then, I've looked at other customer tracking software, but I never really
liked what I saw. Like every software developer, I knew I could do it better myself.
They didn't flow like I wanted, and darn it, my way is the best way. I always thought,
I'll write it myself!
It is now 2006. It has been 10 years since I lost that stuff, and I still don't
have any customer tracking
software in place. I've started things a couple of times, but never got around to finishing them.
Now I have years worth of sales emails, in folders sorted neatly by
month - but that doesn't cut it. My only way of looking up a customer is to search
those emails. And to count how many of each product I've sold requires me going: one, two, three...
This is no way to run a business. It's time to grow up and stop looking for perfection,
and find something good enough - which is what the non-programmer portion of the world
does when looking for software, isn't it?
What I'm looking for functions under different names, but mostly I guess it's called CRM,
or Customer Relationship Management. It's also called Sales Management, Sales and Prospect
Information, etc.
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