When life gets busy, we need to be reminded to enjoy our most meaningful relationships. Sounds good, doesn’t work. If you’re anything like me, at some point in your life, you’ve tried to manage your contacts. And after spending 15 minutes input information like email, phone number, LinkedIn, company, role, the name of the children, name of the dog, cat, and alligator for just one person, you realize that absolutely no amount of friendship is worth this effort. Luckily for you, after a lot of trial and error.
Personal CRM Template
I’m happy to share a personal CRM template website design service in uk have built on Notion and have been successfully maintaining for the past six months. You lucky ducks you. Huge thanks to Notion for sponsoring this blog. Let’s get started. Okay. So right off the bat, a personal CRM is a personal relationship management system that helps you keep track of the important details about your close friends, family, and professional network so you don’t lose touch with them.
I can go on and on about the benefits of having a personal CRM, but just think back to the last time someone you haven’t seen in awhile recalled what you two talked about in a previous conversation. Or someone you didn’t expect wished you a happy birthday even when it’s not shown on Facebook. You’re probably surprised, a little bit creeped out, but overall felt pretty good. In my experience, a good personal CRM needs to have two things.
Remind You To Keep In Contact
First, has to be able to remind you to keep in contact with the people you care about. And second, has to be easy to update and maintain. And this is where my template comes in. Feel free to make a copy by clicking the link down the description and following along. Diving right into it. You might see in this snapshot view, I only have six very basic columns: name, relationship, birthday, industry, location, and whether or not they’re a VIP. But if I expand the view to include all columns, you’ll see additional properties for those people who are checked as VIP, and they have their own individual Notion pages. And therein lies the core concept of this template.
Concept Of Template
By being strategic about the people you include additional information for, you drastically decrease the friction of using this personal CRM. Now, before anyone’s feelings get hurt, non VIP doesn’t automatically mean not important. For people you already keep up with on a regular basis, for example close friends and family members, you don’t need to be reminded to catch up with them. By the way, if you’re not using Notion yet. I’ve been using Notion for ages now, way before they reached out for a sponsorship. I already have like playlists dedicated to my Notion workflows, so highly recommend checking out this tool. Back to the template.
You can understand the properties towards the left-hand side are must have information for all my contacts. And the ones to the right are VIP specific. And at any given point, I usually have five or fewer VIPs to keep things manageable. Starting with the must have information. I always note down the birthdays of my contacts whenever possible, because knowing and following up on this one piece of information can really bring two people closer together. This is gonna sound silly, but I have a workflow for noting down someone’s birthday.
Capture My To-Do List App
The second I find out what day it is, I capture it on my to-do list app, Then, I’ll go into my Notion and note down the next instance of that day and select a reminder for the day of the event. Then, I’ll go to my Google Calendar and input a recurring annual event to remind myself to wish them a happy birthday. I do both because right now, Notion currently does not have a recurring date feature, but it’s good to have all the birthdays in a centralized location.
Moving over to the relationships property. I personally have six tags here: friends, family, colleagues, school, high school, and college network and services. Services being like renovation or moving companies. What’s important to note here is that these tags are not mutually exclusive. Someone can be both my friend and colleague or my friend and part of my professional network. And this is where your own personal definition comes in.
Feel Comfortable Grabbing
For example, for the people I’ve tagged as friend are those who I feel comfortable grabbing a drink with. For the network tag, it will be for professional contacts I may want to reach out to at some point in the future. For example, a colleague who left for a company I may wanna join down the line. And here’s my first pro tip. Be honest with yourself, right? This personal CRM is for you. No one else is got to see this. So give yourself permission to not tag that annoying teammate as a friend.
Also Read: How To Find A Job After A Career Break
The industry and location properties are pretty self-explanatory. I purposely chose industry instead of company, because people might be changing companies all the time, every two to three years, but people rarely jump into an entirely new industry. And when you network, starting with people in your target industry is usually good enough.
Properties Are Filled Out
Once all these must have properties are filled out, simply create a few database views around your objectives. For example, for colleagues, I sometimes organize happy hours at work. And I wanna make sure I’m not forgetting anyone. Pro tip here. To keep things clean, you might wanna toggle off some of the properties you don’t need to see for that view. And for sort, I usually sort by birthday ascending so I know whose birthday is coming up next. Now onto the VIP properties.
You Need To Input For Vips
There are a total of four extra things you need to input for VIPs. First is the last contacted date. Whether you caught up with them in person or sent them a short email, record the exact date that happened. And for this view, I like to actually sort by last contacted date ascending. The status column is a formula I stole from the Notion teams CRM template. And it basically just says, if the time between today and the last time you contacted them is more than three months, return the words hit them up.
Otherwise, you’re good. Obviously, you can customize this by changing the number of months here and the words are return if the conditions are met. And the last update property here is just a one sentence summary of what you two discussed the last time you talked. The fourth VIP specific action is to fill out additional information on their respective pages. I’ve broken this down to three sections: background, contact information, and notes.
Self-Explanatory
For background, this is very self-explanatory, not gonna go over this. For contact information, the one thing I like to mention here is that since we all use so many different messaging apps nowadays, you might wanna remind yourself what’s the main app you’re using with that person since he or she may be more responsive on a particular platform.
For notes, you have two options. You can either create an empty Notion page every time we talk and write down the highlights there, or you can just simply input bullet points under a date like this. I’ve actually already created this template within this database. So all you need to do is to simply add a new person for each VIP. Speaking of VIPs, there is no strict definition, and that’s the beauty of it. In short, these are the people you want to intentionally keep up with on a regular basis.
Mentors Who Left Your Team Or A Company
These could be family, friends you don’t see often, mentors who left your team or a company, your current manager or director, and college friends who ended up in fields completely different from yours. Onto the most important part of this blog. How to maintain this personal CRM so you actually use it to build meaningful relationships.
There are two types of maintenance that I do: as needed and scheduled. Birthdays fall under as needed because you should add it to this Notion template and Google Calendar as soon as you find out, right? Like, don’t wait. Similarly, for planned meetings, like one-on-one networking calls or coffee chats, you should always take five minutes afterwards to immediately jot down the highlights so you don’t forget.
For Scheduled Maintenance
I set aside 30 minutes every two weeks and scroll through my messaging and social media apps to remind myself who I’ve met. If there was someone worthy, I would add them to my personal CRM and fill in the must have columns. Within this 30 minute timeframe, you also want to go into VIP view and schedule catch-ups as needed. Again, don’t overwhelm yourself. Keep the number of VIPs within a manageable range. Take out or add in VIPs depending on what you want to achieve at that point in time. Also, remember, a quick thoughtful email or message counts as contact. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a verbal chat. One last benefit of this Notion template or Notion in general is that it’s available across all platforms and not just tie to any one operating system.
