CRMs are a huge industry, every big company has one, and the most popular CRMs are worth billions. We don’t actually know where the term “Personal CRM” is coming from, because in fact, they don’t have much in common. In this article, we’ll show you 3 key differences between the two to give a better understanding of what a personal CRM is, and what it is not.
Personal CRMs are people-oriented, CRMs are not
When you add a contact to your CRM, you want to build a relationship with that contact, but not for the relationship in itself. With CRMs, the relationship is a means to an end. That’s why most customer relationship management tools have some sort of pipeline or funnel. You want to close the contact, to hire him, …
With a personal CRM, the relationship in itself is the goal. You want to build a relationship with this contact, simply for the sake of it. For the value that you’ll get out of building a meaningful relationship with this contact. This is also why personal CRMs don’t have sales pipelines or any sort of funnel.
Personal CRMs are private, CRMs are not
With traditional CRMs, contacts “belong” to the company. They are usually owned by one team member, but this team member is only in touch with this contact because the company wants him to. Most likely, your email interactions with this contact are publicly shared with the rest of the team (for collaboration, transparency, …).
On the contrary, contacts that you add to your personal CRM are people from your network, that you want to stay in touch with even if you leave your current company. Your interactions with these contacts only concern the contact, and you. You might want to share the fact that you know someone, but not the content of your email interactions!
Personal CRMs are cooperative, CRMs are not
We use specific CRMs because they give us an advantage over our customer, our lead or potential hire. Hubspot , for example, has become a very popular CRM because they let you track your sales leads as they navigate through your website. You can find out if they visited your blog page, your pricing page, and so on. Streak, another popular CRM, let's you track the people you email, based on their IP address, allowing you to find out if they are on vacation, on a business trip or at the office.
Gathering information about our contacts that they don't have about us and don't know that we collect, in order to gain an advantage, seems definitely wrong to us. We won't build such competitive features into our app.
Personal CRMs on the other side, are all about working together. Building a network is a winning game for both sides. You are not hunting, closing or so, you're building a connection.
Do you see any other difference between CRMs and Personal CRMs? Let us know in the comments!