Keep track of people when relationships are the business

The problem

Consultants, agencies, recruiters, investors and anyone whose next job comes from someone they already know have a specific problem that sales software does not solve. Their contacts are not leads. They are former colleagues, past clients, people met at events, someone who might refer work in a year.

Push those people into a pipeline and everything goes wrong. They sit permanently in a stage they will never leave, the forecast is fiction, and the tool starts nagging about deals that do not exist. Most people quit the CRM at that point and go back to a spreadsheet plus memory.

The cost is invisible and real: relationships decay quietly. You do not notice that you have not spoken to someone in fourteen months until you need something from them, which is the worst possible moment to get back in touch.

What AI can actually do here

Enrichment is the piece that removes the tedium. Instead of typing a role, a company and a location for every contact, the tool fills those in and updates them when they change. That matters most for exactly this use case, because the whole point is knowing what someone is doing now.

AI fields go further: a generated summary of what a company does or where a contact sits, produced from public information, so a name in your list has context attached without you researching it. Treat these as a starting point rather than a fact, particularly for anything you would repeat back to the person.

The genuinely useful automation is the reminder. Flagging that you have not been in contact with someone for a set period turns keeping in touch from something you intend to do into something that appears on a list.

What no tool does is have the conversation. If you would not have reached out anyway, a system that reminds you to reach out produces awkward messages, not relationships.

How the tools differ

folk is built for this shape of work specifically, with a LinkedIn extension for adding people as you meet them. There is no free plan and a two-week trial with premium features and no credit card. Standard is $24 per member per month billed annually or $30 monthly, including 500 email enrichments and 2,000 AI magic fields per month. Premium is $48 annually or $60 monthly with 1,000 enrichments, 5,000 magic fields, custom objects, sequences and API access. Enterprise starts at $80 per member annually.

Attio is more flexible and scales further, built on custom data objects so you can model something that is not a deal. The free plan covers up to 3 seats, 3 custom objects, 50,000 records and 200 emails per month. Plus is EUR 39 per user monthly or EUR 31 billed annually, Pro is EUR 93 monthly or EUR 74 annually.

Notion is the honest low end. A contacts database alongside your notes, free for individuals, EUR 9.50 per seat on Plus. It has no enrichment and no reminders unless you build them, but it is where your context already lives and that is worth more than features you will not use.

If you are actually running a sales pipeline after all, HubSpot CRM vs Attio is the more relevant comparison.

When you don't need a tool

If your network is under a hundred people and you speak to most of them anyway, your phone and your memory are the system. Adding software will not make you call anyone.

If you are the only person in the business and nobody else needs the context, the cost of maintaining a contact database can exceed what it returns. The exception is if you are bad at keeping in touch and know it, because then the reminder is the entire product.

And if these contacts are prospects with real buying intent, use keep track of leads and deals instead.