Remember Sandy? We introduced the service primarily as a way to receive reminders about appointments and todos via email or text message. But it’s more than that. It’s a glimpse into the future of contact management software.
I recently used Sandy as a test for managing contact information online, including adding ongoing notes tied to those contacts, and I’m telling you, it works.
No software to install. No searching or filtering contacts to find them. No website to visit unless you really need to. No address books to sync.
Just sending emails, that’s all we’re doing here.
So, imagine sending an email — maybe in the future a text message — to add a contact, their contact info, and later on, related notes, to a database.
And imagine retrieving that info with another simple email. What a great example of contact management applications for your Blackberry or other smartphone!
Stick with me on this. Here’s how I did it.
As a side note, I’m convinced that someone will at some point develop a full-fledged, email-based contact management solution. But until that time, Sandy works well, but obviously you’ll need a free I Want Sandy account.
Once you’ve got the account setup, you’ll send an email to your account’s private email address to add a contact. The email can be just the person’s name, their company, or an entire record of info, like this:
Remember
Al Michaels
amichaels@mcgillicuty.com
(503) 123-4567
address: 1234 Main St., Beaverton, OR 97007
company: McGillicuty IT
title: President & CEO
Sandy is pretty smart, so it knows what a phone number and email address are without the label. I added the address label just to be safe. The word “Remember” is necessary because it tells Sandy what to do; but you can even abbreviate the word “Remember” with “r”. This email will create a full contact record with all the pertinent info. Click here to see how it will actually appear in Sandy. But I said this was online contact management, right?
Now, when you’re ready to add notes tied to Al Michaels’ record, simply send an email like this:
Remember Al Michaels note: Al’s interested in our X2000.
This will add that note to Al’s contact record. Click here to see how it looks. And going back to our initial post about Sandy as a reminder service, you can then tell Sandy to remind you to follow up with Al about something:
Remind me to Send Al the pricing matrix this Monday @mcgillicuty.
This will add an appointment in your Sandy account, and it will trigger an email or text message to you (whichever you prefer) as a reminder on that Monday morning. The fancy “@mcgillicuty” is optional — it’s just a way to tag the appointment with the company name to jog your memory.
But wait, we’ve got two more quick features to tell you about: How do you lookup the account when you’re away from the computer so you don’t have to worry about syncing all your address books? And what if you simply MUST add Al’s record to, say, Outlook for future use?
When you’re on the go, you can send an email like this:
Lookup al michaels
or
Lookup mcgillicuty
Again, Sandy’s smart, so the word “lookup” can be replaced with the first letter “l”. Within a minute, you’ll get an email like this back:
Hi, Brandon!
I looked up “mcgillicuty ” and found:
#1 Al Michaels
- Address: 1234 Main St., Beaverton, OR 97005
- Organization: McGillicuty IT
- Title: President & CEO
- Email: amichaels@mcgillicuty.com
- Phone: (503) 123-4567
- Notes: Al’s interested in our X2000.
- context: Remember Al Michaels amichaels@mcgillicuty.com (503)
123-4567 address: 1234 Main St., Beaverton, OR 97005 company:
McGillicuty IT title: President & CEO
The email you get back will also include a .vcf attachment that can be imported in just about any contact manager. Likewise, you can upload your existing contacts by importing them one at a time or in bulk with .vcf files.
The danger of this system I’m proposing is spelling. You’ve got to spell things correctly. An email request that says, “lookup mcgullicuty” won’t retrieve the record, because I spelled the company name wrong.
Contact management software for Blackberry and other smartphones using email and text messaging will happen in the future, beyond simple reminders. I’m sure of it. The notion of navigating through a cluttered, cumbersome series of software screens to simply add a prospect’s phone number is silly, when you think about it.
The idea of having a smart system that can figure out what you’re trying to do through simple commands issued in emails is just too powerful to remain obscure forever. And Sandy is a great solution for now, if you’ve got just a little patience to get through the learning curve.
UPDATE: If you’re really adventurous, you could even avoid sending emails to add and update your Sandy contact manager. You could use Jott, which works alongside Sandy, to send a voicemail that is then transcribed into a new or updated contact record. That’s if you want to trust the transcription process with obscure first and last names, along with company names.
For more reviews of contact management software, check our online contact management software comparison.
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Brandon, that’s a great way of using Sandy for contact management. How would you change or replace the contact information for someone you already added? Let’s say someone has a new phone number. Any ideas?
Ah, that’s just one area that makes this an almost-there solution. You can’t really edit the information yet–you’d have to go in to your list of contacts at the Sandy website and edit them there. I’ve put that on my email-based contact manager wish list.
But one other unrelated feature I didn’t mention is the more ambitious use of tags. You could use tags to indicate steps in the sales cycle, adding and editing them as you go, then viewing only those accounts in your email using the “lookup” feature I outlined.
Examples: @stage1 or @needsanalysis or @finalpresentation.
Unless you’d create a list.
Remember Al Michaels
* amichaels@mcgillicuty.com
* (503) 123-4567
* address: 1234 Main St., Beaverton, OR 97007
* company: McGillicuty IT
* title: President & CEO
I’ll have to try this but it seems you could use the update command to change records then. Only problem – you won’t get a .vcf file when you do a lookup but a text file. Will have to try it.
Good find…I’m continuing to look at alternatives.
Reporting back on the ability to edit contact entries in I Want Sandy…
You’re right, you CAN do this using the Update feature. You’ve simply got to reply to any lookup you do via email for the contact, then make a note of the entry #, then reply with “update” and the updated information. This is from the Sandy help guide, below:
“To ask me to update something, reply to any email I send you containing numbered items with:
update [#number of the item you want me to update] [text, date, time, and/or tag you want me to update]”
An example using my sample in the blog post. Let’s say we discover that Al’s email has changed. Here’s what we’d do:
update #1 Al Michaels al.michaels@mcgillicuty.com
You could also update the address, tags, add notes to the account, etc. I’m looking into the .vcf note you left.
We’re getting there. We’re getting there.