ClickUp as an Email CRM - ClickUp Example ft. Abi

One of the big requests that have come up again and again over the past few months is that you guys would like to see more behind the scenes into other people's ClickUp accounts. You see a lot from us here at ProcessDriven, but what about other people? How are they running their things? This video is our step towards rectifying that. So we have invited some of our members from inside the membership to share the behind the scenes on one process that's working particularly well for their business. They're going to show us the process, the ClickUp workflow, and let us know what snags they ran into along the way. Today, the ProcessDriven member who has decided to join us in the hot seat is at end the Abby. And, well, I'll just let her introduce herself. Hello and thank you so much for joining me again, Abby. I am so happy to have you here. As you said before we started recording, I am just really excited to see what you've been able to build out in your ClickUp. Have you teach us some things. I'm hoping to get some inspiration. And before we dive in to ClickUp and all the wonderful geekiness, I was wondering if you could introduce yourself to those who have not had the privilege of meeting you yet inside the membership.

Thank you for having me today. My name is Abby. I am a virtual assistant. I'm located in Tenerife in the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. So it's mostly hot here all the time. I have a few clients, they've all been word of mouth, so I don't really haven't got a website or haven't done anything to my Facebook page since I started because I'm completely full. I can't take one anymore. So it's enough just wrangling the ones that I have and click up because I have a major FOMO. And when I saw Leila on YouTube, I was like, oh, I need to get into this girl stratosphere. She's amazing. Like, let me into Click up more. Yeah.

Oh, well, we're so happy to have you inside the membership. I think clicking up is what it is because of people like you who are bringing that energy and are genuinely invested in helping other people go through this journey. Because it sounds like with you and your husband, you know, you're the process person and there's tends to be one or two in each group and then you're kind of just on your own fighting the chaos. I picture a little sword.

That's absolutely right. Yeah, it's. I mean, One of the best things about the clicking up community is the community. Everybody's so giving. I've never been in a community that is so selfless and just so giving. And you know that if you post a rant or something like that that nobody's going to go, oh God, look at her. They're going to go, gosh relates. You know, you're like, oh, not alone. So it's great. I absolutely love it. So if I can do anything to help, even if it's just to see, this is definitely how I don't want to do it. When I set up my system, I'm happy to be the example as long as somebody's happy to learn from my mistakes.

Now, as you can imagine from that clip, Abby has so many different things she could share with us some lessons learned that might help you in your journey. But because we have only limited time here on YouTube, we're going to be focusing on just one clip of the discussion. So we're going to be talking about how Abby uses the email from ClickUp feature to make the CRM really flow. Now just to set the scene in Abby's workspace, each task equals a customer or a client that she's working with on behalf of her client. So each task equals a person. She's also using a dropdown field on the right side in lieu of a status and if you don't know why she's doing that, watch this video here. But she's using that dropdown to organize the different steps in the customer journey. I think the rest of this is pretty self explanatory but if you have any questions as you're going through, just drop them in the comments below. For now though, let's just play that clip.

So I really only the top bit which is they're a new inquiry. We send them to an application. They when they've filled out the application it comes back to us and I schedule an appointment for them and I offer them a slot and if they make an appointment then they talk to the coach and then the coach will ask me to send them a PDF of her services and and then generally they then get moved over to the client process.

Oh but see that's what I really like about this and I'm going to just ask you, I assume the answer is no, but I'm going to ask because a lot of people think you have to have a CRM and it has to have tons of automations. It has to shoot out emails and sync with this. Do you have many automations like third party anything in here or is this manual and working well?

It is manual, it is working well. However, I have taken advantage of your Integromat link and I will be slowly integrating Integromat to do things like when it's added to this or then it will shoot them the automatic email because when I send somebody something, for example, if I was going to do this, then I would click email and then fill out an application. The good thing about the I like about the templates in in ClickUp is you can call it whatever you want but that isn't the subject line because in Google may you have to call it what the subject line is. And sometimes I just can't find, you know, is that the, you know, is it that this one or is that something this one? You can say I just finished out an application but it will actually say thank you for your interest, you know, and it has all the links. So I would like to automate that process so that when somebody fills in. But I'm not far into Integromat yet to do that and for the moment it's only me. So this is.

Well, I'm going to ask you what I'm sure other people are thinking watching this, but Abby, shouldn't I be automating everything right away? How do you. Why are you waiting? Why not just do all the automations on day one?

I think it's because as well, until you've worked with a system like on a daily basis, you don't know what you need to be automated or what. I mean, I did start to automate things and then people were receiving emails before I'd even had a chance to get my head together. I was like, oh no, I haven't got availability for them. Don't book an appointment then. And so if it's just you and you're the one that knows what you're doing, then unless you're automating to save time, which is my goal obviously then you know, there are downfalls to have things automated. If things are firing off quicker than you can, then you can keep up with them. At the moment we want to select who actually goes to those applications. So we don't want sundry to be sent an application link. So at the moment I'm not automating that part until, until. Until I'm a little bit further in.

So yeah, I think that's a great point. And especially things that involve a decision, right? Sometimes it's hard to know. Sometimes you make the decision and it's not the same every time because there's all these little factors that come up and until you really know what's going into your decision of whether to move them forward, you can't automate that. It'd be very hard.

Exactly. Yeah. Do you do. I had somebody the other day, when you go to a scholarship, do you do scholarship?

Ah, yes, yes, yes.

So that I definitely would have, would have been in the, in the, in the, in the, in the wrong realm if I'd have sent them an automatic saying yes, schedule an appointment here. My, my client would have gone, what are you doing? We don't do scholarships. But yeah, at the moment it's all manual.

Yeah. And I don't think, I think we say it's all manual and sometimes people view that as a negative. But I want to just emphasize for everyone watching this, what Abby's built here is working and it is ready to keep, it's ready to grow with her and her client. And I think that's really what this is about. We need to stop thinking about automations and having everything be hands off as the goal. That's not always the best outcome like you talked about with scholarships or, or you know, sometimes you want that human touch that is sometimes important to a process. See what I mean by Abby having so much to share? Oh my gosh. There are lessons learned that she has shared throughout this whole interview, let alone just the clip that you saw that could help anyone regardless of where they're at on their ClickUp journey. So I just want to wrap this up here with a giant thank you to Abby, which actually we already said, so let's just jump to that part. Well, I, I so appreciate, I mean I love seeing how this is being applied and it is a lot. And I don't think just like with ClickUp, you don't need all the bells and whistles to get value. Right. It be that thing, that one thing that pushes it over the edge.

When I did the I'm only in point three of the course yet because I thought that I could skip over the org chart just because as a va, I'm like, well, it's only me, so I'm doing all the things. So instead of doing that, I used it to apply to my client. And so that I was then as a va, as her va, I was able to say these are all the processes that she has for her business. And that allowed me to pare down my processes in ClickUp for the, you know, for the clients, the inquiries and stuff like that. Knowing where on the org chart that they felt. But because I was a solopreneur, because I was a ba, I was like, well, I can set that apart because that doesn't apply to me. But then you can't build out the rest of your processes until you've done that. So it's hard and was horrible. It is. To do the org chart. It's so valuable to do it. You can literally the rest of the course unless you do that. So you might be able to scrape by, but it won't be as you won't get as much value out of it unless you do that part. So I encourage everybody to do that. No matter how painful it is, it's worth.

I appreciate that cheerleading because I think a lot of folks think that's like, oh, that's. I mean, that's nice. I don't need an org chart. But it's a process org chart. It is.

Exactly. And again, that is the most valuable part about clicking up is it's not just about clicking up. It's about processes and, you know how you, you know all the thinking behind it. It's just. I honestly cannot rave enough about it. I'm just number one fan.

Well, thank you. I think the feeling is mutual. Once we found out that Abby ran a bar and she's doing all these other things, it's just. Abby's just one of our coolest members.

Thank you so much.

Absolutely. And I'll just wrap up and say thank you so much. Thank you so, so, so much for joining us on here. This recording, as you know, will be shared amongst the interwebs and with our members here. And if anyone has questions, especially a member, would it be okay if they started a conversation in the community to ask you some more about this?

Yes, absolutely. If they've got any tips for, you shouldn't be doing this, or you can. Here's. You know any integromat people who can say, I know how you can automate that to do that for you, then I'm up for it. Yeah. Any tips or tricks I can either receive or give out, and I'm happy to because the community has given so much to me.

Well, you guys know how I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you so much for watching. And until we talk next, enjoy the process.