With a legacy contact manager such as GoldMine®, referencing another contact from within a contact record can sometimes require a very large (and ever expanding) pick list.

In this example, the business use is that contacts are members of a medical plan or HMO.  There is a need to select each member’s Primary Care Physician.  In GoldMine, this field has to be defined as a selection-type field, since GoldMine does not allow for linked relationships among contacts.

The result can be a very large, and user-unfriendly pick list.  This type of field is also very one dimensional, as no other linked information about the physician (in this example) such as phone number, can be displayed based on the lookup selection.

In a relational CRM system, such as Salesforce.com, the Primary Care Physician field within in a member contact record can be a filtered lookup on other contact records — filtered for the contact type = “Physician”, in our example.

The Salesforce approach makes for a much better user experience and also is easier to maintain in the long run.  In addition, other information from the linked record can be displayed in the original record as show here: