THIS WEEK has been a grand week so far in terms of plotting and planning for the business year ahead. I’d told myself I would take until January to explore a few online options for contact management, entry-level CRM apps, anything that could be tied back to the iPhone.

This morning was the turn of signing up for the Salesforce 7-day trial for their contact manager.

I’m looking for a service that will manage my own business contacts, plus that of the theatre and music side of my work life, and those for another project I’m rolling out over the course of the year. It’s got to be web based, have some element of grouping or tagging and an iPhone app or handy desktop app linking back to the web end of things are a serious plus. More to the point, it’s got to low cost on an annual basis.

Salesforce have a contact manager available online that I’m going to explore over the next couple of days, making use of a seven day trial. Ultimately the service costs $60 a year, or monthly at $5 a month and while I’ve not yet had the chance to play around with it, I had a call from one of their pre-sales team within a half hour of registering online to talk through a few things, introduce the service, suss out my needs and offer further calls if needs be.

Can’t say that I’ve had that happen before so it’s certainly left an impression. We’ll see what happens in a week or so.

Of course, recommendations are always welcome…