All About the Personal Relationship Manager (PRM): What It Is and Why You Need One

A Personal Relationship Manager (PRM) is a great way to help you maintain and nurture relationships and communications with family, friends, and colleagues. A PRM is a flexible tool that helps you keep track of important dates and events related to your relationships, so you can stay on top of them. This blog post will discuss the benefits of using a PRM and how it can help you manage your personal relationships and boost productivity. We will also discuss the similarities and differences between a Personal Relationship Manager and a Personal CRM

What is a Personal Relationship Manager?

A Personal Relationship Manager is a powerful tool that helps individuals manage their relationships with colleagues, friends, and family. It can be used to keep track of contacts, conversations, interactions, and important dates in one central place, making it easier to stay on top of important events in a contact's life. With a PRM, users can easily import all their contacts into one place, allowing them to quickly access contact information and stay connected no matter where they are or how many relationships they have. This is done via integrations to Facebook, LinkedIn, email, calendar, and many more. This makes a PRM essentially a very powerful digital version of an old-fashioned address book – with a lot more tools and capabilities!

A PRM helps users build relationships by tracking the contact information, preferences, and interests of their contacts, along with other notes about your relationships. This allows you to have better conversations, as you remember more details from the last time you talked. This also makes it easier to stay in touch with contacts, as users can keep track of important events in their life, such as birthdays, anniversaries, and other special moments. Additionally, users can set reminders and notifications for follow-ups, helping them to build more meaningful relationships through intentional follow-through. Many people currently use their contacts app, LinkedIn, or even customizable spreadsheets to achieve this task, but an intelligent PRM is much better than any of these solutions.

It's important to note that a Personal Relationship Manager is not the same as a specialized Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM). A Customer Relationship Manager is designed specifically to help you track business relationships and communications with leads and potential leads. It usually includes sales funnels, financial analytics, and much more to help you map and advance the development of your business. It's also usually a complex tool that is extremely customizable and complicated, giving it a learning curve.

A Personal Relationship Manager is a simpler tool that's designed to help you deepen all kinds of personal and professional relationships. It can be used in business scenarios, but it is focused on relationship data and not data about your relationship as a business lead. It's usually more user-friendly than a CRM, similar to a powerful digital address book.

Overall, a Personal Relationship Manager is a great, user-friendly tool for anyone who wants to stay connected with their contacts and build meaningful relationships. The ability to track contacts, conversations, interactions, and preferences, take notes, as well as set reminders and notifications for follow-ups, makes it easier to cultivate relationships and stay on top of important events in a contact's life.

Is a Personal Relationship Manager the same thing as a Personal CRM?

Personal Relationship Managers and Personal CRMs are very similar, but they are not the same thing. Both Personal Relationship Managers and Personal CRMs are designed to make managing relationships simpler and more meaningful. Both Personal Relationship Managers and Personal CRMs import contacts via integrations, provide regularly updated contact info, allow note-taking, and help you remember specific events. Both are also typically customizable and allow for some exciting automations. Both are favored by entrepreneurs, small business owners, consultants, real estate agents, and anyone else with lots of relationships.

However, there are key differences between a PRM and a Personal CRM. Typically a PRM is designed to be more intimate and personal than a Personal CRM, which usually has some of the leftover tools and processes of traditional CRMs. You can see this in the visual design of a PRM vs. a Personal CRM, as well as in the features they each have. Typically a PRM features fewer features like funnels and mass emailing, whereas a Personal CRM makes it easy to create automated flows and workflows. Personal CRMs are also typically more visually similar to traditional CRMs.

If you're looking for a way to better manage your relationships, you should consider both Personal Relationship Managers and Personal CRMs as options. Both have their place! If you want to create advanced workflows with your contacts, manage emailing lists, build funnels, manage contacts with a Chrome extension, etc, a Personal CRM may be the best tool for you. If you want a tool that feels a bit more intimate, a Personal Relationship Manager may be the right tool for you. With a PRM, you can easily keep track of your contacts, record past interactions, and set reminder notifications for future interactions.

The tips below mostly apply to both Personal Relationship Managers and Personal CRMs as they have a lot of the same underlying benefits and workflows. No matter which one you choose to use, your relationships and connections will benefit!

Why do I need a personal relationship manager (or personal CRM?)

Having a solid network of personal and professional relationships is essential for success in today's world. In fact, the famous Grant and Glueck studies show that relationships are a fundamental part of our holistic well-being! Unfortunately, it can be difficult to keep track of all your relationships, remember important dates, and make sure that no one is forgotten or neglected. This is where a Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM comes in – it can remove faulty memory as a factor, allowing you to have better relationships.

A Personal Relationship Manager can help you stay organized and efficiently manage all the important relationships in your life. This includes personal and professional relationships. A Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM allows you to keep track of important dates, events, and anniversaries, helping you avoid embarrassing mistakes and instead helping you build a deeper relationship. Some Personal Relationship Managers can even also give you life update notifications for people in your network, helping you rekindle relationships that you lost touch with.

A Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM can also help you stay connected with the important people in your life, even if you don't have time to call them or meet up in person. They can remind you to send your loved ones birthday cards or check in on them from time to time. They can also help you remember details about the people you care about, such as their favorite color, hobby, or food.

Finally, a Personal Relationship Manager can help you prioritize your relationships so you can make sure you give the right amount of attention to the people who matter most to you. They can help you stay on top of your relationships, ensuring that none of them are neglected or forgotten.

With the help of a Personal Relationship Manager, you can make sure that all your important relationships and connections are managed efficiently, allowing you to make the most of your personal and professional connections – and making sure you don't miss cool opportunities in your network.

How to use a Personal Relationship Manager (or Personal CRM)

Getting started with a Personal Relationship Manager is easy, and there is usually not much of a learning curve. Personal CRMs sometimes have more of a learning curve due to additional features and automations. But either way, you'll be set up in no time.

The first step is finding a platform that meets your needs. Whether you’re looking for an app that allows you to keep track of your contacts, or an online platform that offers features like reminders and task management, there’s a PRM out there for you. There are PRMs and Personal CRMs that work well for small business owners, executives, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Once you’ve chosen the right platform, it’s time to start entering your contacts and setting up reminders. We'll discuss finding the right platform a little more below. Don't worry, like I said above, everyone can find a Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM they love: here are tools suited for entrepreneurs, real estate agents, small business owners, open-source lovers, and many more.

Once you’ve got your PRM chosen, it’s time to start using it. The key workflows to learn are adding all your contacts, taking notes, setting reminders, searching, and reviewing for serendipity. These tips also apply to personal CRMs, too.

Add all your contacts

One of the best features of a Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM is that you have everyone you know in one place! With a Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM, you can easily connect as many integrations as you'd like, such as email, calendar, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Taking a few moments to clean up imported contacts and remove any duplicates or irrelevant people is well worth the time investment, as it will help you to keep your contacts organized and up-to-date.

Take notes

Having an organized, efficient Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM is essential to building and maintaining successful personal and professional relationships. One of the most important tasks for a Personal Relationship Manager is keeping track of who you know and how you know them, and provide you with helpful information when interacting with them.

One of the most important aspects of managing personal relationships is good note-taking. Whenever you meet someone or send them an email or text, be sure to take notes on the conversation. This will help you remember key details for the next time you talk, such as their preferences, interests, hobbies, and more. Specific notes will ensure that your conversations will be more meaningful and engaging. As soon as you begin working in a Personal Relationship Manager or Personal CRM you should start a note-taking practice.

Set reminders

Both Personal Relationship Managers and Personal CRMs are great tools to help you remember and stay on top of important reminders with family, friends, and colleagues. With a personal relationship manager, you can set up custom reminders for any occasion – and configure the notifications for that reminder. You can even customize the message to whatever you need. It can keep track of important notes, dates, and more, so you never miss an important event or forget to follow up with someone.

Search

Following from the benefit above of having all your contacts in one place, relationship tools also allow you to search across everyone you know. This is an extremely powerful feature, as it allows you to see matches across people you know via email, a meeting invite, LinkedIn, and more! The best Personal CRMs and Personal Relationship Managers include powerful search tools that allow you to add many keywords or qualifiers together to get a precise result. For example, you could search for "Software engineers in NYC that when to OSU and know Python"

Review for serendipity

The best Personal CRMs and the best Personal Relationship Managers also help you proactively see when someone you know is up to something interesting. Many of these platforms include a feed of updates and notifications from people in your network, allowing you to review it often and look for reasons to reach out. This feed often includes life updates such as job changes, mentions in the news, and other life developments. In addition, many platforms will also prompt you to get back in touch with contacts that you haven’t spoken to in a while. This can be a great way to rekindle old relationships and expand your network.

The Best Personal Relationship Manager and the Best Free Personal CRM

There is a lot of discussions online (blogs, Twitter/X, etc) on the best Personal Relationship Manager, best free Personal Relationship Manager, best free Personal CRM, etc. There are even best Personal CRM Reddit threads!

We aren't here to make a recommendation today, because choosing a Personal CRM or Personal Relationship Manager is a very personal decision. However, we're happy to point you to a few comparative guides that can give you the pros and cons of the various tools:

• DOIT Software's List of Top Personal CRMs
• Dex's Top Personal CRMs
• CRM.org's Personal CRM list

Conclusion

Whether you choose a Personal Relationship Manager or a Personal CRM, you are taking an important step in your own journey of managing your relationships well. It will certainly make your life easier than using spreadsheets, LinkedIn, or your contacts app! These powerful tools will allow you to see all your contacts in one place, take notes, set reminders, get notifications, search your network, and much more. Good luck with your journey!