Notes on keeping a relationship record: the people behind your work, and what it takes to remember them.
You remember the person perfectly well. What you have forgotten is the year their employer is having, and that is most of what the call is about.
Most CRMs are organised around deals moving through stages. A record organised around the people you know is a different tool entirely.
Every CRM asks you to fill in fields before it will remember anything. The cheaper capture gets, the more of your working life survives.
People change jobs roughly every three years. A record you never revisit is a record that quietly stops being true, one row at a time.
A system that silently rewrites what you wrote leaves you unable to trust any of it. Suggestions you accept or ignore keep the record yours.
It is the question every introduction starts with, and the one a pipeline is worst at answering. Organising around people makes it cheap.
Contact records decay because nothing in a deal-shaped system rewards keeping them alive once the deal closes, or once you move on.