Build a Small Business CRM in Notion - Full Tutorial

hey it's jared today we're going to build a crm in notion this is going to be basically a client crm for your business so what we're going to accomplish in this build out which is going to be kind of a long video so make sure to buckle up get a glass of water and we're going to walk through building out this entire process together because understanding how to build things in notion is where you kind of unlock the power of being able to utilize it for what it is it's easy to install a template and apply that and i'll definitely be giving you the templates that i create here but i think it's important to understand and learn how to utilize notion which is why i have a notion course that you can check out linked down below uh but in all truth like you're going to learn a lot in this video about how to create databases and link them together and make them work together in this video and of course i go a bit deeper into that in the course so make sure to check out that link but the reason that i utilize a crm for my business is so i can keep track of everything that i'm doing for clients everything from interactions that i have with them such as conversations like phone calls emails sometimes even text messages where they're making requests or asking if i could accomplish something for them down to actually deploying and making a project happen a bigger project which for me a lot of times is a big website design project or something with video production i need to be able to keep track of where i'm at on the project what i need from the client if anything and be able to just know where i'm at in case i need to take a break from the project maybe i'm waiting on something for the client and it's hard to come back into a project if i don't remember where i'm at and so notion has made it really amazing uh because i've built out my own system and it's worked out really well for me so i'm going to start in my garage here because that's where i start building everything in notion it's simply a page where i just store new pages and new databases that i'm working on so we're going to go ahead and create a page and we're going to call that client crm so go into client crm there are four pages and databases that we're going to create here this client crm is going to be kind of our dashboard for our client area and there's going to be four databases within that we're going to have a database for our clients so that's going to contain the name of the client some other information about the client and be just a place that we can go and view everything else that we are working on or dealing with uh with that particular client we're going to create an interactions calendar which is a way to keep tabs on the different interactions you have with your clients we're going to create a projects database and a tasks database as well it's important to have all of these things because that's the type of information and interactions you're going to have with your clients and the things that you need to track so that you can stay on tabs and know exactly where you're at and if you have relationships with clients where you need to be tracking your time such as your billing for your time by the hour or you have retainers or something like that you need to report on how much time you've spent on a particular project that month then you will find this very useful and that is how i utilize my crm so i'm going to make this a full width page because we're going to have a few things going on here i'm going to click in the body here and i'm going to type in um just uh we'll just call this resources and i'm going to convert this to a h2 i could have just done that by typing slash h2 and then i'm going to type in we'll start with the top i think interactions i don't know tasks is probably what we'll want to have i'm going to drag this over to the right and then move this over a bit because we're going to put as soon as we create our databases we're going to put a few of them linked in here so we can have a nice dashboard to view tasks that we're currently working on or that we have coming up projects that are currently opened and interactions that we've recently had so resources and then i'm also going to create one called databases underneath that we are going to create a page and call that page tasks we are going to create a page called interactions a page called projects and of course our clients all right so we've got our databases resources we'll deal with later i think i'll just move it down here so that it's kind of out of the way so let's start by going and creating our clients database i'm going to start out by creating a table and we'll call this uh client1 uh we'll just give them a name uh joe smith corp um i'm gonna change this to a select and is it a current client is it a archived client i've i you know i've kind of danced around with what i would call these uh i really only care if they're current um we'll call the status current archive or i guess we could say inactive might be another good one because sometimes we have clients that we finish the project they we still might potentially be doing work for them but they might be inactive and then archived they're just flat out gone we're not dealing with them anymore they moved on they're not a current client anymore so we'll call this one i'm just putting a couple of clients in here right now just to just to have a few things in place all right so now we have a name a status and this is where we're going to um build out anything that we want mentioned linked databases are going to start showing up here as well and so this will start to build out and have a bit more information but the individual client page we want to build out a template that has all the information that we want to store and as we build out these other databases we're going to bring in information into this page as well so uh with this created we're going to wait on creating our template because i can't link any databases until those other databases are created so let's go back to our client crm we've got our clients database created let's create our projects database we'll go and create a table as well so we'll call this one project name i'm going to change this to status and we'll go with new in progress on hold completed and then i also do an archived one as well because sometimes things just get cancelled all together and i i put that under archived so we've got new in progress that's good i'm just going to delete these so that they're not there and we'll add them when it comes time so from that project we now have a project name we have a status we will link up tasks here pretty soon as well and so now that we have this created and we can add more columns as we move along i just want to get these databases created we'll start out interactions as a table but then we're going to convert it to a calendar view so i'll have a name i'll have a tag and usually with the tags i will do like what type of interaction was it was it an email was it a call a meeting sometimes they could be both of these things and so i'll build that out and we'll just call this like type like what type of interaction was it we'll change i'll turn off wrap cells because i don't like it when things wrap down to the bottom line of course i usually don't have uh more than one or two of these selected so we'll just leave one in there okay so name type we're gonna put in a date now the reason that i use date instead of actually just using the date that i created the item because sometimes i back log and i go back i forgot to enter in an interaction for yesterday or the day before yesterday and so i want to have a manual way to enter in the date and so if if i was entering in an interaction for yesterday and i didn't have this date field all i would have is the created or the updated date that's automatically created that i i don't have shown right now and i don't want that i want to be able to go in and set the date and even put in a time if i wanted to uh and change that time so that i know the exact time and date that that interaction happened all right so now we have a real brief interaction um sometimes i'll also put things in here like who initiated the interaction was it me or the client uh some other information i definitely have videos where i talk about these sections more in detail let's go back now we've got three of our databases created let's create our tasks database keep in mind i'm keeping these super simple we'll add to the complexity as we start to connect these databases so we'll go with a select change that to status new as a status in progress completed on hold and even archived because sometimes tasks end up getting archived all right so now that we have our databases created we can start to link them together uh now i know that when i am adding a task i need to be able to tag the client and the project that that that that task is associated to so i can come in here and i would want to choose the relation so the relation option and i would want to choose client database and so i want to make sure i'm choosing the right one because i have a client's database already on notion in another section so i'm choosing clients and i will type in client here and so client will show up here so when i create a task and give it a status i can also assign it to a client then i want to assign this to a project as well because most tasks are going to be having some sort of a connection to a project so i need to go and type in project do a search for that and find the appropriate projects database and create that relation so now when i add a task it gives it a status i give it a client and a project and then i also want to link it to an interaction because a lot of times new tasks are generated in the middle of an interaction that i'm having with a client so i'm going to put in the interaction link it to that database interactions and connected so this looks great i've got all the information that i need there let's go back to each of these databases because now in the interactions i have the connection that i just made to the task it says related to tasks interaction and i don't like the way that this views so i'm just going to change the name of that to tasks and then in an interaction i may be getting new tasks i may also be discussing a project so i need to well let's let's keep this simple because we're going to get too many relations going at the same time i found it easiest to go into each of these and rename the relations so this one needs to be changed to tasks as well and then clients this one needs to be changed to tasks as well now i can come in here and so i've got projects that i need to add now so we'll go ahead and make a relation for projects and we'll make a relation for interactions all right so now in the client database we can view tasks projects and interactions and so i may even move interactions over uh and have it in that particular order and now i want to go back to each of these and make sure that they are named appropriately so this is interactions actually i need to make sure i did that right interactions and interactions this is clients and if you're if you feel like you're confused as to what you're supposed to name things you can always click in it and it's going to populate with the information that that relational database is is pulling in and you can make sure that you've titled it appropriately sometimes i can get a little confused because i've got so many of the same thing happening in different sections all right so now we've got our interactions built out we've got tasks clients i need to add projects in here so this can be kind of tedious building all this stuff out but it's going to work really nicely when we have everything connected so we've got projects there now okay that's good and now if i go over to projects projects is going to have an interactions and i can double check just to make sure yep okay good good we've got that's a column that i put in there that i didn't do anything with we're going to get it out of the way just to avoid confusion so now in projects we've got clients interactions and tasks awesome and in projects yes okay projects we just looked at clients we've got all three of them great interactions we've got all three of them great and in tasks we've got all three of them so now we've created the baseline for our four different databases with that particular information now we can go into our dashboard here and we can add in those linked databases and have them pull in information and display information so i'm going to type in link to get to create linked database i'm going to put tasks at the top because tasks is generally where i will spend most of my time uh down below that i will type in h2 h2 and we will put projects create a linked database to projects and we're going to clean these up the views in a little while here i just wanted to kind of get this started h2 interactions linked create a link database interactions boom and we've got kind of our three areas i don't i could put clients down below but i i'm not going to i'm these are the most important things that i need i don't need clients down below because there isn't really a great way to sort your clients in any useful way other than maybe last updated or something like that and unfortunately it doesn't count a new task being assigned to that client as last updated it only counts it being last updated if you edited or made a change to that particular page or that particular client page and that doesn't really make too much sense to me so i'm not i'm not going to add clients here to this section now you could if you wanted to add a divider line or something like that just to make things look a little prettier you could definitely come in here and dress these up a little bit if you want to i haven't added any heading or emoticon or anything like that yet so everything does look pretty bland at this point so let's go back into the clients we're going to start building out a client template page now the reason that we're going to build out a client template page is so that every time we add a new client we can apply this template to it and this template after we update where these uh things link is going to display a lot of valid information that we want to have available at our fingertips because as we get this built out and we've got more clients and we've got lots of tasks and lots of things happening it's going to become harder to find and sort that information but if you can come directly to the client and see a list of all the tasks you performed for them all the projects you've worked on and all the interactions that you've had with them now that's pretty cool so let's go ahead and create a template and we'll just call this new client and in this area down here we're going to create some linked databases well let's first go ahead and just put in a heading so you'll see and oh you're starting to probably understand that i'm creating a lot of linked databases i think the real power in notion not only is in its ability to organize data and have it organized really well but being able to display that data in a lot of different ways if i didn't care about displaying my data in a useful way i might as well just be using a spreadsheet instead of using notion so i do like this and so in this i have tasks put in here and i'm going to go ahead and add a filter so i'm going to add a filter so with the filter client contains and then i'm going to have to choose a a client and so i might choose like hill media group just as the default the only thing that's going to be a bummer about these templates is whenever you go and add a new client and apply this template you'll have to update the filter manually for each of these which is okay it's definitely not a big deal but it does take a little bit of time there's no way for it to automatically apply that filter based on the name of the client that you entered so that's a bummer but not the end of the world so let's also do one for interactions and then we will choose a filter and add the filter client and then the name hill media group okay now we need to do one for projects and we'll do the same thing filter client contains and then just we'll choose that one just so that we have it all set so there's other information that i typically would want to put on this page such as who my contact is there and so i might build out a little area up here where i have like company info might be one piece of information i'm going to make these uh h3s actually because i'm going to do a couple of columns sometimes it makes sense to give you a little more room just to open this as a page so that you have a little bit more real estate to play with here so we've got company info um let's do let's see m important we'll go ahead and put this out here something that might file under important would be dates to remember um things of importance that might be important with maintaining the relationship of that client for example under company company info um i might put contact is jared hill because that would for hill media group would be the contact i wouldn't even fill these out in the template but i would have the contact person maybe a phone email and so company information under important i might put like um i don't know i probably leave this blank in the template but under important i would fill out information that would be important to help me maintain and just keep a good with that client and that could be a birthday of the contact that i have maybe some information that i find out they say oh today's my anniversary okay cool i'm gonna file that in here and remember that so that maybe next year i could send them a card hey i remembered it was your anniversary and you know those are just great things that you can do to maintain business relationships because just nobody does that anymore we're all so busy so let's just add a divider while we're in here just making this nice and clean i know that this video is getting long but hey we're 20 minutes or so in and we've built out quite a bit in this small amount of time okay so now i have my new clients template if i go into that hill media group here and you can see i have the new client template all i have to do is click that template and it's going to go ahead and apply all of that stuff that we just created and thankfully because this already was a hill media group essentially i don't have to change the filtering but i may uh have to if i'm going to apply that to this other business i will have to go and change the filtering as well so i'm just going to change the filtering on a couple of these just so that you can see how it's done we'll change this from hill media group to match the right client and same with the interactions and the projects all right so i'm also going to change inactive to current we'll just have a couple of them current one of them archived so now that we have this client area built out here any interactions we enter are going to start to show up here same with tasks same with projects and then when we open the page we'll also see a nice list of those with some of the information about that particular interaction or project or task as well so this inherently isn't that uh pretty to look at you might go also and add a cover and add an icon just to make it look good those are things that i definitely would do but let's start making use of this let's go into this one project that we uh that was empty that we had created when we created the new database and call this um website redesign we're going to assign this one to a client so we'll go and do joe smith corp is the client the status is new and the task that i need because this is a new project is to send new project and then i'm going to click on plus to add that and it added it as a task here notice that it automatically added it to my tasks list up here that is pretty cool i really like that so now we've got it and it's linked to a project it's linked here as well i'm not sure why the client is not showing up the client should show up it should show up as joe smith corp but for some odd reason it didn't so we're just going to go ahead and link that because i don't know for some reason it didn't do that but now if we look at clients you can see under joe smith corp we have a new task and we have a new project and like normal i'm going to unwrap those cells because that's a pet peeve so say uh mr joe smith corp or whoever is there calls and has a question about their project i can add that in see i already added that but we need to link this up to him so let's link it up to joe smith let's link it up to his project and let's add a new task let's see uh let's see questions about seo he called because he had some questions about search engine optimization for his new website that we're working on so now i can see here in this interaction i've got all of that now when we built out our interactions database i said we were going to make it look like a calendar let's add a view and let's call this calendar view we'll click on calendar we'll hit create and so now we have a calendar view that shows joe's call so that it's always the default view that comes up we're going to drag it up to the top of the view list because if i go over to my smartphone and i don't have the view list set correctly i'm going to have to update that view list on every device that i connect to now i want to see a little bit more information than just joe called and then you know that truncated version there so under properties i might want to add client so that i can see what client called i don't need to see the date because it already shows up in the appropriate date spot uh if it's about a project i can have it show the project as well and i can also have uh the type of interaction show up as well which is kind of neat i did mention that it was a call so let's go ahead and just change that to a call and and leave it at that and i'm not going to assign it as a meeting because he just called out of the blue it wasn't a meeting so now i can view my interactions on a calendar and imagine a really nice calendar full of interactions as you enter them throughout the day when you have interactions with your different clients so now that we have our calendar set up we've got uh to assign that task that was created to joe as well the only real bummer in notion is that sometimes if you have different databases and you have those linked databases you you have to manually add them like as you saw uh the joe smith corp is just not populating in those new tasks i then will have to go and assign that even if i created that within an interaction that i already linked up to to joe smith uh corporation and so a kind of a bummer but it's not the end of the world what's really nice is when we go into our clients database we go into joe smith corp here which we didn't apply a uh a template to yet we're going to go ahead and apply the new client template to joe smith corp and then we'll start to fill this out joe smith we're working directly with the owner and his phone number and then we need to change the filter here to client is joe smith now this view doesn't necessarily do anything for me and i probably should have made the changes to this view before applying the template but what you would want to do is get the views of these databases that are that are being displayed here these linked databases get the views dialed in so it looks the best i'm just going to do this right now but i would recommend doing this to the actual template that you create and this this has changed for me ongoing as well now i kind of i tend to like the list view and so i would just type in list view choose list hit create make sure to move that list view to the top so that way it's the default one that i see i then need to go still and add a filter because it's a new view so i'm going to change the filter to client contains and then joe now you see it's just showing the name of the task i do want to see a little bit more information so i'm going to click on properties and i do want to see the status of the task i don't need to see the client because it's being displayed on joe smith's client page but i would like to see if it's associated to a project and an interaction and so now you can see i've got those two things there a nice clean look and if i go down and do the same thing for the others list view we'll go ahead and add the filter first client contains joe smith and then for the properties i would definitely want to see uh the type what it was um i want to see the date because it's not displaying that for me if i went to the calendar itself i could see the date but i definitely want to see the date here and that's probably all i need to see because i'll be able to see projects and tasks there i just want to see what type of interaction it was and the date which will help me better find it now we also want to set a sort to this as well because we want to see the most recent at the top and the least recent down at the bottom so we're going to go to sort we're going to add a sort and we're going to choose date descending for that sort because we want the highest or the most recent date on top and the the furthest away or at least recent down at the bottom so that is how we want to set that up and then we'll go and do the same thing for projects we want to add a list view choose that move it to the top of views we want to filter by client assign it to joe and then now we just have the project with new um i would like to also uh in the properties see i don't know if i need tasks associated with that because they're viewed above i don't need interactions yeah that's all i really need is just the status like where is this project i need the status i guess i could add the date um you know what i need to do for the projects i need to add a due date so let's go and do that and this is where you start to see what else can i add to each of these databases that's going to be useful this project has a status and it's linked up to a lot of things but what is the due date to this and we're also going to need a tasks due date as well so let's go ahead and drag this one over this project uh we're going to unwrap the cells this project will say the due date to it is march 31st and so we've got a due date there let's also go over to tasks and tasks is kind of a mess we're going to clean that up too here we're going to add a due date for tasks because tasks have due dates as well we'll go ahead and move that one over kind of clean up our columns here a bit and these are empty tasks that were created when we first created this database i'm just going to go ahead and delete them now so this task i need he had questions about seo and there's a task associated with that and then also uh i need to this is new i need to send him the new questions that i would have i want to make sure that i do that by monday the questions about seo and make sure those are answered by the 24th i guess i could even associate this to the web design project because it is and so sometimes you do need to come in here and kind of clean some of these things up as well now while we're in tasks i also need to know whether this task is part of a project or i can bill for this task how am i charging for this particular task so i need to add a column and i can call this anything but often i call this billing because i need to know how that's going to work and so with the select option and we'll just move this over to here billing is either project a billable task a retainer or no charge or i sometimes put non-billable all right so these are both part of the project and so that's fine project task billable i usually will change the color and kind of make these colors make sense uh retainer i've been using orange for that non-billable i'll just set to gray because if it's non-billable i don't really need to see it or pay attention to it project i may choose blue you know and and sometimes i'll come in here and organize these uh just so that they're easy to read you know alphabetical order essentially so now we've got the billing aspect here as well we also need to be able to um to sort by completion and add some views so when we're in here looking at our tasks how can i view what tasks are complete or what tasks are opened so i'll put all open tasks actually since i already have this view built out some of the best things that you can do is just duplicate views so i'm just going to call this one all opened tasks create okay we've got that created we'll move it to the top um this still looks good let's also sort by add a sort by completion date so we'll go to date due date and and i'll leave that set to ascending and then also we need to filter out tasks that are completed or tasks that are on hold or something like that so when status is not so let's see what's the easiest way to do it we have two of them so if status is not status is let's choose status is status is new status is in progress and it needs to be or it can be and because we don't have both statuses assigned to that so now we have all open tasks let's go ahead and duplicate this and call our duplicated view completed tasks boom okay so now that we're in all completed tasks we want to change that filtering to completed and we'll just remove that status is completed show me just the completed tasks and then under default view i can rename that one to all tasks so show me all tasks regardless of where they're at and so i might add a sort to that just so that there is some sort of order to all of this and we'll just put a descending so we can see the most recent tasks at the top and the at least recent at the bottom and we probably want uh so by due date i want the most recent due date to be at the top so we leave that one to ascending but when i'm looking at all tasks i want to see it descending so i could see most recent to the oldest tasks down at the bottom so think about your sorts and your ordering and stuff too that all needs to make sense so for open tasks most recent do or nearest do top uh longest off down at the bottom and then for for all tasks i'll flip flop that the other way around okay so we've got tasks built out you can see here in our dashboard it's starting to fill out a little bit it is as a a standard table view and you might not like that i know i don't i want to make it look a little bit better and make it easier to read so for tasks i'm going to add a view and i'm going to call this open tasks and we're going to choose list i'll choose create and then i'll move that up to the top like so then i need to sort and i'm going to make sure that they're sorted by due date ascending because i want the nearest due date at the top now i'm going to go over to properties and we're going to look at properties i definitely want the status i want the client i want the due date and that's probably good i don't need the project there so if you don't like the order of the way that these are listed you can drag them and move them around like i might want um the the status and the client to be flip-flopped so i can do that i can now have the client out here in the status here so projects i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to add a new view make it a list view and we'll call this open projects one other thing that we need to do is filter because we only want to see open tasks i forgot to do that so let's do that really quick filter status is new or status is in progress we want to make sure that we're only seeing open tasks if i want to see all tasks i could just go into the database and view them this dashboard is for current information not past information so under projects we also need to filter project by status so status is either new or in progress so we'll choose new or in progress and then i can also do a sort as well i might want to do a sort by due date ascending having the most nearest do project at up top now under properties i might want the client to be shown like show me the client and the stand the status and the due date of this particular project so we'll keep it uniform i'm going to put the due date furthest over to the right then we'll have the status and then we'll have the client so now really starting to look good interactions we also want to do the same thing for interactions i don't want to embed a whole calendar here i want a nice list of recent interactions so we'll just call this one recent interactions list create will go ahead and sort this by we want the most recent one at the top so what do we do date descending we'll go ahead and choose our properties we want to see the type i'll i'll want the date in there i'll want the client in there and projects and tasks i don't really think matter we'll just have it set like that well maybe to keep it uniform i might want to move the type down below the client just just so that we have some uniformity everything's looking nice and the same so now we've got a nice crm dashboard here that lets us see open tasks that we're working on projects that are currently uh being worked on any interactions that we've recently had with clients awesome because we can come to this in the morning or even at the end of the day and kind of check in with ourselves where are we at what needs to be worked on and and who do i need to follow up with or check in with all that good stuff i can then go into any of these databases for example the interactions and add in new interactions like today maybe i got a call from an old client you know uh hill media group you know wants to know if if i still have access to some old files that they uh gave me and so maybe i'll type in um so maybe there are images that i shot for christmas a while back that's an interaction i now need to create a task for that look for we'll go ahead and add that uh type this was a call and so i've entered that interaction but there isn't any information other than a title for this task that i just created so i'm going to go ahead and click on this and open this and then this is non-billable it's for hill media group i'll do this on monday and the status is new and so now i've i've created a task for it if i go back to our dashboard you can see i've got a new task for monday and a new interaction old photos and of course we've got these interactions i should just get rid of that were default created when we added this new database so this is starting to look really good and become super useful this video has gotten quite long and so i'm going to end it here but know that you can customize this and make changes and add in more information that makes sense for you you might want more things to track in your tasks so that you can sort and view things in a different way you may have more when it comes to projects that you need to organize we didn't create page templates for a project we didn't create task page templates at all the most important one for me was to create a page template for the client so that i can come in here and view all the information about the client and have one like master place just to view everything that i have to deal with uh whether it's a task a project or an interaction with that client so be thinking also about how you could build out a template for your tasks a template for your interactions and for your projects based on the way that you organize those things i know for me as a project i'll just really quickly show you here a a project template that i utilize with hill media group so if i go into client projects and create i'll just actually show you the template itself let's go and edit that template so you can see the template and we'll go open his page so i have a description of the project my key performance indicators of the project what does the client expect what are we trying to achieve with that project and then also i'll even put some things in there for myself like what are ways that that this project would be successful for me and then i even write that out down below milestone tasks i'll add and then i have a an actual inline database that i use for adding documents and things like the client might send me their logo they might send me a couple of photos maybe they have a branding style guide or something like that this becomes the place that i add all of that and i also have a template like this for tasks and a template like this for interactions as well so i think we have built out something pretty cool that's going to be extremely useful for you if you are in business and you want something that you can build and manage yourself building out something like this and another tool is going to be challenging there are no tools that do this in a simple way that don't cost a lot of money i have not found one yet i can manage my tasks in todoist but it's hard to manage my projects and my clients i can create notes and have these pages in in evernote but it's hard to link and tie everything together and have a dashboard for a client and even have a dashboard and know what i need to work on so instead of jumping between multiple apps i can easily just have one place to go in notion and keep things simple keep things organized so i could be productive and i don't end up procrastinating so i hope that you found this long video useful it definitely was a lot of fun building this out i didn't have any notes i just kind of did this and it was it was fun it was a stretch for my brain and i hope that it's a stretch for your brain as well so give this video a thumbs up subscribe to the new channel here and if you want to take my notion course there's a link to it down in the description below head on over and sign up i think you'll find that course very useful i definitely go into more detail and uh don't talk so fast so that's gonna do it for this video today thank you so much and i hope to see you back in another one take care

Channel: Jerad’s Productivity Lab

Views: 66,500

Keywords: notion crm, notion client manager, notion for small business, notion setup, notion, knowledge management, notion tutorial, notion calendar, how to use notion, notion template, notion app, my notion setup, notion.so, notion set up, notion guide, getting things done, what is notion, notion review, notion tips, notion dashboard, notion for business owners, how i organize my business with notion, notion business management, notion entrepreneur, notion for entrepreneurs

Id: AN-HcnV2Tz4

Length: 49min 17sec (2957 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021