Building a CRM from Scratch in Airtable | Keep customer info organized

every business has some interaction with customers or clients and if you're not nurturing those relationships then you're potentially missing out on growth for your business so in this video i'm going to be walking through how you can use airtable as a crm if that's of interest stick around and let's get into it welcome back to the channel if you are new here my name is gareth pronovost and i own gap consulting a company that helps you to unlock the full potential of no code tools if you're a small business owner or a manager and you're looking for ways to improve your efficiency you're in the right place before we start talking about using airtable as a crm i do want to invite you to our upcoming webinar training once a week i hop on a webinar and i teach people how to build automated processes and systems using airtable and other tools so that you can reclaim your time personally i save about 20 hours a week using automation so if you would like to learn these skills yourself to reclaim some of your time as well be sure to check out the webinar link below or just go to garethpronovost.com webinar dash registration all right but enough about all that let's jump into my screen we are going to build a crm from scratch using airtable i am inside of my airtable account if you are new to the tool in general you will probably have not nearly as many databases here but go ahead and add a base now a lot of people ask me why i always start from scratch because 99 of the time when i'm building something in air table or when i'm trying to solve a problem with this tool i'm building it myself there are templates available to you that you can download or create copies of for yourself that other people have built these templates work great and i don't mean to suggest that you shouldn't go there and explore these templates but the reason that i start from scratch is simply because every business is unique every problem is slightly different from one person to the next and so the way that i build this is going to solve my problem and maybe not your problem so learning how to build an airtable is always a preferred skill than just copying someone else's template because it might be like trying to put a square peg into a round hole if you build the template yourself or if you build the database yourself you are going to be solving your exact problems in precisely the way that you do business so let's start from scratch and with that being said everything that i build here today is just an example so you can take these concepts and use them in your own business but if they don't pertain leave certain things out go ahead and name our database i'm going to call this crm and go on from here you see that when it starts out i just have that one table so i'm going to create a clients table why well every crm it stands for customer relationship management it's all about helping you nurture that relationship that you have with your clients and prospective clients so of course we're gonna have to store some client data somewhere so this is basically a people table i'm going to delete all of the fields that start here and i'm going to start from scratch i'm going to have a first name and this by the way i make sure that i use a single line text field here similarly i'm going to bring in a last name also a text field i'm going to include an email field so i call it email and i choose the email data type and then let's see what else i'll bring a full name here as well and this i'm going to use a formula for so i'm going to actually combine multiple pieces here using a concatenate formula it's kind of like stringing together multiple things i'm going to take the first name include a space and then bring in a last name so if i were in my own database for example it would look like this gareth pronovost is first name and last name and then the full name is gonna once airtable catches up be automatically filled out for us so i'm going to delete these other records i'll bring in an email address for myself as well and you can add a lot more stuff here if you have addresses if you have uh you know different onboarding documents for your clients various things like that you can add fields for that but i'm keeping this simple first name last name email address to get me going here next i'm gonna assume that my business operates with some sort of service based business so i'm going to have some kind of projects that we offer to our clients right i'm going to delete all of these fields get rid of again the stuff that starts out here and i'm going to bring in a link to the clients because i'm never going to do a project if it's not connected or not for a client so here's where i build that linked relationship i can name the field whatever i want and then i have to go to link this field to my clients table so just by clicking here i can connect it properly to my clients and every project is only going to be for one client now if you do business to business instead of business to consumer you know b2b versus b2c then you're gonna be including a company table here instead of connecting to the clients table again this is one of those parts where depending on your business how your business is structured you're gonna do it differently from how i'm doing it but i'm assuming that we do business like this is a b2c situation i am the project is for the client the individual not for a company per se so i'm going to go ahead and connect uh two clients and again i'm turning off multiple records because every project only gets assigned one client on the other hand if we look at now the reciprocal of that relationship clients is now connected to projects because we connected projects to clients and i have to ask myself the same question from this side can a client connect to more than one project generally the answer here is yes because we're going to see that a client may come back and do multiple iterations of work with us right if we offer the service over and over again it would be additional projects so i'm going to allow this to stay with multiple record linking here all right so how do we name our projects well in some cases you might just type in a project name project 1 for example in other cases you might uh name your projects based on who the project is for like what the client is or who the client is and what the start date is right so we could write a formula for something like that in this case i'll just keep it with the name and i'm going to connect to a client here and let's go a little deeper i can bring in a start date and i'll use a date field here and most importantly i'm going to include some sort of a status for this i'm going to use a single select field type i really like the single select field type because we get some more advanced functions that we can use with this we'll get to that in a minute but for now i'm going to say we have uh upcoming project that moves then into onboarding stage that moves into implementation stage that then is complete so let's imagine that those are the four different statuses or stages that a project moves through go ahead and create that field and so we can set up various automations using this status field so for example when we have a project let's say that is set for the 11th we can build an automation that automatically says when today is the 11th we're going to update the status into onboarding and maybe that then kicks off some new uh automations as well like sending onboarding documents like a work agreement or an invoice or what have you there's a lot of automation that we can leverage in the background of our crm once we have it set up properly all right now we're also going to build tasks that relate to this project right so i'm going to use yet another table for tasks and we might have templated tasks or we might just create ad hoc tasks depending on the project of course if you have a more scalable business it'll probably be templated that your tasks are the same every time you do the project and i've done a lot of videos in the past that show you how you can leverage automation to automatically create all of those tasks but in this case i'm going to assume that i'm going to be creating these tasks manually now again a task is going to be related to the project so let's build a connection from tasks to projects here and again i'm going to build a linked relationship each task is only going to connect to one project so i will toggle off my multiple records here but again as soon as i build a linked relationship from one table to another the opposite side of that relationship is also created so my projects are now connected to my tasks so can a project have multiple tasks of course so i'm going to leave this part toggled on all right now i'm going to go into my tasks and bring in some tasks that are all for project one maybe i have task one task two and task three all right now i'm able to track this and i can include a due date on these tasks almost every task has a due date so when does this thing need to need to be completed by to bring in some dates really quickly and then also every task needs someone to be in charge of it so i can use a collaborator field type here to assign different tasks to members of my team now i can only assign a task to somebody if i've shared the database with them and you see that we get a couple of options i can allow multiple collaborators to be added to a task so essentially having multiple people in charge of the same task and i can choose to notify people once they've been added so i like these default settings for me only one collaborator per task and notify people so that they know that they just got a new task that they have to complete i'm going to create that field and of course in this example i've only shared this database with myself so i'm the only person available here to be added and when i get added if i am not the one who doing the adding i will see a notification here in the upper right corner of my screen now lastly i like to also add a complete checkbox here and that way as i go through these tasks and complete my tasks i can just mark them off now i can roll this data back into my project so if i want to see how many tasks for my project have already been completed well i have that linked relationship i know that i have three tasks one of which is completed so if i want to know overall how much of the project is done i would say 33 so how can we bring that in well first we're going to count the total projects and we can use a count field type here it's going to look at our tasks and count the number of connections that we have and so again we have three different tasks that are connected here so it counts three now i can use a conditional count field so completed tasks is what i'll call this field and again it will be a count field except i'm going to count conditionally only those tasks that have been checked off so if complete is checked then i want to count it so i'm going to go ahead and create this field and of course we know only one of those boxes has been checked and now i can look at project completion and i will write a formula for this and it will just be simply the completed tasks divided by the total projects make sure i choose my formatting to output this as a percentage and i don't necessarily need decimals so i will go with to the nearest integer and create that field and the nice part about this is i don't need to have these other pieces floating out here i don't need to look and see three projects one project completed 33 i just need to know 33 at the project level so it's really easy for me to then come back and hide those fields and you'll notice that that does not alter the way the formula works formula is still able to calculate just fine so this now allows me to manage my clients my projects and my tasks all in one place so that i can make sure that nothing ever slips through the cracks i hope you found this to be incredibly valuable please do know that the sky is the limit with this your own business processes are unique as i said at the beginning and so the way that you build your crm is unique and specific to you so roll your sleeves up dig around an airtable and explore all the different ways that you can visualize your own data and most importantly automate and streamline your processes so that you become more efficient and can grow and scale your business i hope you found this to be very valuable if you want to check out how i help people automate more of their time don't miss the webinar that's coming up this week even if you can't attend live i will send a replay to you so don't miss it link is below in the description or visit garethpronovost.com webinar dash registration that's it for this video let me know in the comments below what thoughts you have on this and i'll see you in the next one as always i hope you found that to be extremely helpful if you did and you'd like to learn more swing by our website and see how we can help we offer a free airtable crash course that will help you level up in airtable quickly and we also have some paid services including hourly consultations with our experts we have some online courses and a group coaching program and for advanced needs we can build a bespoke solution for you from scratch so swing on by and i look forward to connecting with you soon you

Channel: GAP Consulting

Views: 5,296

Keywords: airtable crm, customer relationship management, airtable customer, run your business with airtable, gap consulting, gareth pronovost, how to use airtable as a crm, airtable demo, airtable tutorial, airtable app, customer relationship management (crm), customer relationship management system, customer relationship management software, gap consulting airtable, gareth pronovost youtube, gareth pronovost airtable, airtable tutorial youtube, airtable tutorial 2020

Id: LwmB70_0Kdc

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021