How to keep track of the all the people you're in contact with

I realized that I was losing track of people I have been in contact with once I got a call from a prospective vendor and they referred to a quote that I couldn't identify.

I would like to track:

• Names of people I talked to on the phone (manually entered)
• Emails from that person / company

Any ideas on how to manage this?

The kind of software you're talking about generally falls under the heading of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). There are lots of folk out there supplying stuff in this arena. Three names that popup quite a bit:

• HighRise http://highrisehq.com/ (small and simple)
• SalesForce https://www.salesforce.com (less small and less simple :-)
• SugarCRM http://www.sugarcrm.com/ (open source CRM)

See https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:crm for some more that I've bookmarked for various reasons :-)

Disclosure: I work at Ragic

For small CRM applications, you can try to build it yourself with Ragic http://www.ragic.com Because usually your application is really small and specific, and a full CRM application is way too much work for you.

Ragic is really simple, you just create a data form for you to enter your contact info and contact history like on a spreadsheet, and it becomes a database. It also has a e-mail sync function to retrieve your e-mail and import them to your application.