Don't you love when you put on a jacket you haven't worn in months and find a $20 bill in the pocket?  It's like winning the lottery, without the inconvenience of having to live in a mobile home or make due with fewer than 32 teeth. 

I love it out of all proportion.

I feel like I hit the software lottery this week.  Several months ago, I downloaded Evernote.  Evernote is a free, web 2.0 note taking software application that allows you to store data in many different formats organized into notebooks. 

There are a lot of cool things about it, but one of my favorites is its ability to sync information between a PC, a Mac and the cloud. The trouble is that I couldn't come up with anything that I really wanted to do with it.  For some reason, the notebook metaphor didn't really speak to me and I couldn't wrap my head around a use for Evernote that I wasn't already doing in some other way.  And of course, the phrase, "if ain't broke, don't fix it" ran through my head.

At lunch the other day with a lawyer friend of mine (also an Evernote user) we started spitballing about different ways to use the application, and I finally happened across one that works for me:  I've decided to press Evernote into service as a CRM application, to keep track of contacts that I make networking and marketing my practice management assistance program. 

Although it is early going using Evernote in this capacity, I am pretty pumped about it so far. I can input data in a bunch of different ways, tag each "note" in countless ways and search and sort the data very easily.  I don't bother actually keeping the contact info in there as I'm more or less locked into using Outlook and a Blackberry for that, but I use Evernote to keep all the emails, notes, and PDF documents I need about each contact. 

I create one "summary" note for each contact so I can easily find the most recent activity, and then each additional item is a note, tagged by contact. I find it to be just the right amount of CRM for me -- it would not do for someone used a heavy duty CRM for tracking leads, etc, but in my experience, most lawyers don't know what CRM is, let alone have a powerhouse program for it that they are wedded to.

If you don't have a CRM program you love yet and you would like a free, simple way to keep up with your marketing and business development efforts, take a look at Evernote. Best of all, it won't cost you one cent from that $20 bill you found in your jacket.