The power of CRM comes from the clarity of your approach. Think for a moment about your personal planner and organizer. In a sense, it is your personal CRM tool. What do you use? A calendar with scribbled names, addresses, and a lot of Post-it notes? Or are you more organized, using a FranklinCovey or DayTimer binder? Perhaps you are the high tech type, using the latest handheld personal digital assistant (PDA) to keep track of everything. How well does your personal organizing system work for you? We d like to suggest that you can be as powerful with Post-it notes as with a Palm, provided that you are clear about your intention and that you ve chosen the right tool for you. We would guess, however, that a fair number of you are using (or at least carrying around) the organizer that someone else thought you should have. Maybe it s even the organizer that you thought you should have. That s what happened to a good friend of ours. I got a $500 PDA that I ve never used, even after the first week of torturously loading in my loose data. I bought it because everybody else had one. They looked so organized and, well, kind of cool beaming things back and forth. I thought, if I get one then I d look organized too. I m still carrying it around along with a calendar and a lot of Post-it notes. Yet, another friend swears by her PDA, conscientiously entering every new name and phone number, religiously consulting its calendar before committing to meetings or projects, even using the portable keyboard to write reports and enter financial data. A $500 PDA is a bargain if you use it, and an expensive toy if you don t. And the same is true of a $500,000 CRM tool. To gain clarity about your CRM intention, think for a moment about your own customers, be they internal or external, consumers or business-to-business.