Your relationships outlast any employer or platform, so keep your own database, export backups, and check the exit door before adopting a tool.
The idea
Your relationships run deeper and last longer than any job or platform, so keep a copy you own. A company CRM belongs to the company, and so does the data in it, including the notes you typed yourself. Platforms change the rules overnight. Your employer may limit who you can do business with later, but nobody can stop you from knowing people, so those people belong in your own database too.
How to do it
Keep your own relationship database separate from your employer's, then connect it to company tools where that helps.
Spend five minutes now exporting backups from LinkedIn and any other tool you rely on. Stash copies in a couple of private places (Dropbox, a thumb drive under the mattress) and forget about them.
Before investing in a new platform, check for a decent exit door for your data. You won't read the 15-page terms; you can at least check that.
If your employer pays for a tool, find out who owns what.
Example
Until summer 2015, Facebook and LinkedIn let you take your contacts to other apps. You could connect LinkedIn to your CRM and see which past clients had changed jobs. It was awesome. Then some product managers realized portable data makes it easy to leave, and both shut access down. LinkedIn now gives you a spreadsheet, after trying to kill even that. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp give you nothing. I wrote this up in 2022, when Twitter's new ownership made the future of the global town square look shaky.
Relatable: Relatable exports everything to a spreadsheet whenever you want, and I tell everyone who uses it to keep a copy anyway. How-to: Export your contacts to a spreadsheet.
Related frameworks
CAPITAL: Aggregate: Build one database you own with everyone you know, fed automatically from email, calendar and phone, as the base for everything else.
The Will I Use It Test: Pick whatever relationship database you'll actually use, from spreadsheet to CRM to whiteboard, and drop anything you don't.
Automate the Pull: Connect email, calendar and phone so your database fills and updates itself, then merge duplicates on email address.
Include Everyone: Put everyone in your database, personal relationships too, and prioritize afterward instead of filtering at the door.