Notion CRM: Complete Guide
There are ZILLIONS of CRM tools on the market. It’s a key component of your business as you want to keep track of leads & customers. But, if you’re a small to medium business, there’s no need to buy expensive software when most of the features you need can be replicated on Notion.
Just add a pinch of automation, and let emails flood your databases.
Notion is a versatile productivity tool that can be used for a variety of purposes, including managing customer relationships. With its customizable database and automation features, Notion can be transformed into a powerful CRM system that can help you streamline your workflow and improve your customer interactions.
Notion CRMs
What is a CRM?
Notion CRM is a customer relationship management system built on top of Notion's flexible infrastructure. It allows you to store and organize customer data, track interactions and customer journeys, and automate routine tasks such as follow-up emails and reminders. A CRM on Notion is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor it to your specific needs and workflows.
Why build your CRM on Notion?
Your CRM is more than just a database of people's information. What's truly important is ensuring that all aspects of your operations systems work together and communicate with each other. For instance, when you select a customer, you may want to access all the projects or purchases associated with that customer.
If you're using Notion as your CRM, it's easy to link it with your projects and tasks database. This allows you to quickly toggle between customers and projects. If you're looking to centralize your data, Notion can be a great tool for keeping everything in one place.
Benefits of a Notion CRM
Notion CRM offers several benefits over traditional CRM systems. First, it is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor it to your specific needs and workflows. Second, it is built on top of Notion's existing infrastructure, meaning that you can take advantage of all of Notion's other features, such as task management and project collaboration. Finally, Notion CRM is more affordable than many traditional CRM systems, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Building your CRM
Building a CRM in Notion is a simple task that begins with creating a basic table. Although a gallery or kanban view is also an option, a table is the easiest to update.
The most important step is defining the information we have access to and what information we want to access in our CRM. Minimalism can save a lot of time - there's no need to store endless amounts of information that we'll never use. However, it's also important to consider that some information may not be necessary today but could be important or useful in the future.
The information required for a client CRM may vary depending on your business type, but here's a list of the most common pieces of information:
↪️ Identity Data
- Name
- Family Name
- Business Name
- Phone
- Address
↪️ Descriptive Data
- Job Title
- Status (e.g. “lead”, “customer”, “churned”)
- Industry
- Business Size
↪️ Qualitative Data
- Everything related to satisfaction
↪️ Quantitative Data
- Total spent by the customer on your products/services
- Promo email open rate
- Number of service tickets filled
Linking your Notion CRM
So what we’ve built so far is pretty basic - what’s really interesting is to connect your CRM to your other Notion components. It can be anything you’d like!
The only requirement is that what you’re linking to is also a Notion database. Not a page, a database.
Here’s a list of the most common databases you can link to your CRM:
- Projects
- Invoices
- Meeting Notes
- Contracts / Documents
- Finances
It’s really easy to set up
- Create a new property (a new column) in your CRM
- Select Relation as the type of property
- Browse & select the database you want to link
- Select “Show on [database name]” if you want to create a new CRM property in the selected database
(If you link it to your Projects database & if you select “Show on Projects”, you’ll create a new Relation property in your project's database, that will show the associated item from your CRM database.) - Now for each item (rows), associate the correct item(s) from the related database.
Now let’s say you associated your CRM with your Projects database. Each time you want to access a project associated with one of your clients, you simply have to click the project name in the Relation property. And you can create as many Relations as you want/need.
Automating your CRM
To make the most of your CRM, you may want to automate it. There are 2 steps here:
- Automatically collect information via a form
- Update/Create data
Step one really depends on your use. If you use your CRM as a list of newsletter subscribers, it should work for you. But if you need to manually scrap information about each of you’re clients, it won’t work.
✅ The user fills out its information
❌ Information is added manually
1. Connect Notion to a form
There are many tools enabling you to connect a Notion database to a form - but the best & easiest one to use is called Tally. Tally is very similar to Notion in its look and use. You can publish your form as a website a redirect your user to it or you can also embed it directly into a Notion page.
So create your form (it’s really easy to figure it out, especially if you’re already a Notion user) & then click Integrations. Sync it to your Notion account & map all the fields together. Save it, and you’re ready to go!
2. Automatically add/update your data
This bit can be a bit trickier, as you’ll need to use automation tools like Zapier or Make & you need your data-providing app to have an API. I won’t go into much detail here, but the general concept is quite the same:
- You go to Zapier or Make or any other automation tool
- You connect Notion & the other data-providing tool
- You map the fields together
- You test & you iterate until you’re good!
If everything is set up correctly, the information should be updated each time the automation triggers :)
Pro tip: Zapier has an entire blog post about using Zapier to automate Notion where they share a wide spectrum of all possibilities. You can find it here.
Free Notion Template
I found this great Notion CRM template from Nicole Replogle that might help you get started. You can download it for free at this link.
Here’s a quick overview.
The client funnel allows you to see and manage all your clients/contacts at a glance. This feature organizes your contacts by assigning them to different stages, ranging from lead to past client. You have the option to personalize the labels according to your sales process by clicking on the label and entering a new name.
While this page is not as functional as other parts of the software, it provides a comprehensive overview of your contacts. From here, you can easily track the number of clients you have and identify which leads you need to follow up with in the future.
I really like the “New lead” template. It’s super simple but goes straight to the point. When new or potential clients inquire about your services, you can set up a discovery call with them. You’ll provide them with an introduction to your services, your background, experience, rates, and processes.
Once a prospect becomes a paying client, store all relevant information under the "Client Resources" header. This includes style guides, contracts, and proposals for quick access. Having everything in one place is key to providing efficient and effective services to clients.
Current Clients page: it displays properties like which projects are related to which client, how much revenue the client has brought in, and the average time spent per project. Instead of showing contact timelines and next action dates, this page gives you the big picture. Nicole adds visual flair to the page with a chart from Data Jumbo that displays how much revenue each client has contributed to my income this year.
All this echoes to what I explained in the Linking your Notion CRM section of this blog post.
Download the template for free here.
Conclusion
Notion as a CRM is a powerful tool that can help you manage your customer relationships more effectively. With its customizable database and automation features, you can streamline your workflow and improve your customer interactions.
So why not give it a try and see how it can help your business grow?
Start now & create your Notion account 🙃
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