ClickUp CRM: How to Use ClickUp as a CRM

As an agency, keeping prospect and client data in one central location is extremely important. Without it, your team's going to be constantly going through documents, emails, talking to your account management team, and flipping through paperwork just to find the needed and necessary client information. And we all know that's just going to be absolute chaos and make your team way less productive than they could be. So whether it's client goals, health scores, billing information, agendas, notes, closed one or closed lost reasons, stages, anything that you would store, like contact records in a CRM, you can do all of this inside of ClickUp. And yes, I'd always recommend having a CRM like HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive to have more of a sales CRM. I mean, they have features that ClickUp just doesn't because ClickUp is a project management tool and those are CRM systems. But ClickUp is a perfect way to design a CRM specifically for your client services and your delivery teams. They're spending their whole day inside of ClickUp. That's where their work lives, that's where they do their work and close their work out. So we need to make sure that we have something built out for them so that everything is in one place for them. We're going to be creating a central source of truth. And yes, you can use a CRM instead of ClickUp on the sales side. I'll show you how to do that, but it's very helpful to have one for your delivery team. So let's first walk through what a fully built out CRM in ClickUp looks like. And then we'll take a step back and discuss how you can actually build it out yourself. All right, so step one here, let's walk through what a CRM already looks like inside of ClickUp, fully built out, with all the views, with all the records and everything in there. So as you can see here, on my left hand menu, I have all my spaces, I have my ClickUp hierarchy, but then I have an extra space here called my CRM. In my CRM that's a space. And within my space I'm not going to have any folders for this. I'm just going to have three different lists. And just so you know, within this you can make this more simple or more complicated, it's really what you need. For example, I could just have a deals list where all my deal records live. I don't need to have the company's contacts list unless I want to add in that additional detail. So it's really up to you. But in here, you'll see I have a deals list. I have my company's list and my contacts list. So let's walk through each of these and discuss all the views and everything that's included. So my deals list is where I'm going to include, as you know, all of my deal records. And so the reason we have a deals in a company's list is because potentially as an agency or any kind of professional services, you might have different deals tied to a certain company. So maybe a company you're having a website project as well as just a basic retainer. If you have two of those things going on and they sort of bill separately, you might want to have two deal records per one company. So that's the reason we would have a deals list and a company's list. But again, you could just do a deals list if you want, kind of combine the two. It's really up to you. But in this you'll see I have a lot of different custom fields and things that's going to be included. So I'm going to walk through all of this for you. So the first thing is the tasks. And these tasks are going to be you can have your own sort of naming convention on them. But as you can see here, I just have sort of the name of the company. We have Dunder Mifflin and ABM Retainer. That's essentially the product or service that they're paying for. So that's sort of my naming convention that I have listed out here. After that, in this view, I have comments which are going to be extremely important. You're going to have comments on here that are related to sort of your account management updates, which I'll show soon. You're also going to have a status custom field. The status custom field is going to have the different statuses of your engagement. So whether they're onboarding, whether they're active, offboarding or inactive. Again, you can adjust that however you want. But that's sort of our basic engagement steps that we're going to need for our statuses Due dates. The due date can be related to when the weekly or bi weekly meeting is. So you can make these recurring. As you can see here, I have my meetings on Wednesdays. So that's when the due date is going to be service. This can be a custom field here, a label custom field that essentially just has all different services that you offer. So that way if it was a dropdown, you can only do one per deal here. But if you want to have sort of multiple here, you can make this a label. As you can see here, I have services like website redesign, inbound marketing, email marketing, SEO, paid social, so on and so forth. I can take that and I can label all of my deals that way so that I keep the service that's tailored to them right there. I also have a health score here. And this is a basic dropdown custom field. You can either do a one to five scale or a green, yellow, red. You can make it simple, you can make it more complex. The biggest important piece of this is that all of this is documented. So your account management team is going to be responsible for actually updating this client health. And you didn't make sure that they know what does green mean, what does yellow mean? What does red mean? So make sure you have this information documented somewhere in your ClickUp workspace. Oftentimes we'll have a knowledge base here at the everything level or even at the CRM, you can have a document where all that's stored. Just make sure you have that somewhere. In addition, here I have a text field that just has my objectives. So in this we can just see, okay, increase pipeline by 25%. Increase close one rate by 25%. Whatever their main objective is, make sure it's there. So we all know and we're striving towards that so that it's documented and no one's sort of foggy about what the objective is for that specific client. In addition, we also have billing. This is really just to kind of label whether it's monthly, whether they've paid five of six, however you want to do. This just makes it easier to have sort of that labeled. It doesn't have to be complex here, but just kind of a way to label that. And as they do pay, so once they get paid 6 of 6 for fancy refrigeration here, I can go ahead and I can update that right there. We also have the start date versus end date. That allows me to just kind of see how long that engagement is, as well as the length. This is just a calculation widget here that takes the difference between the start and end date and just shows me how long this engagement is with this company. So you'll see here that's what's stored there. Then as I scroll over, we also have the sales lead and deliverer lead. That way I just know who sold this deal as well as who is sort of the main account manager or strategist or delivery lead for this specific deal. And then the coolest part, and this is the reason that we do have different lists. Here is I can create sort of a relationship field here that allows me to tie in the company and the contacts associated with that company to the actual record. So all of this is going to be layered up. So if I were to go to this Dunner Mifflin ABM retainer task right here and if I pull up my relationships, as you can see here, that allows me to see the company that's associated with as well as the contact. So I can easily go this is the task in the companies list here, Dunn Mifflin and then Michael Scott is my contact and then I can have all the information for Michael Scott here in the details. So I can have his email, his LinkedIn, his job title, phone. It's all tied together and we'll show you how that works pretty soon. But as you can see here, I can create those relationship fields that allow me to essentially pull that information into these so that they're all related together within the companies and contacts list. So that's the gist of a lot of the custom fields. We also have a few other things that's going to be shown in different views. This is just my active accounts view, but as you'll see as I scroll down here we also have close date, deal stage, lead source. I can also pull an MPS and I can direct that directly from Retently or some other MPS platform. I can utilize, make and build out automation that puts all that in here. So if I send out an MPS review I can get all the information pushed to ClickUp. But as you can see here, Close date, deal stage, lead source. Some of this is more of the sales side and I'll show you how that works as well. But we also have things like primary inactive reason as well as revenue. I can store all of that as different fields inside of ClickUp. So just to show you the views too that we have here, they're especially important in the deals list. But I'm going to have my active accounts that's again just showing all of the accounts here that have these filters where it's not inactive and it's closed one. So it just makes it so that I'm not showing all of those that are no longer active clients that I still have stored in here for historical information. But then if I go here to the deals I can see that if I wanted to build this into a sales CRM, I can do that because I'm able to easily drag and drop. So for Databox we have an SEO project. The gray here is the sales lead. It's an opportunity. But you can easily drag this to once the contract has been sent, once it's closed, won, closed, lost, so on and so forth. This board view makes it super easy for me to store all that information, see it and create a nice sort of pipeline like HubSpot does in their platform. So I can make it super easy with this deal stage. Again, that's just going to be a dropdown custom field that I'm using. So I'm not using a status on this board view. I'm just using a deal stage to kind of show me that information. And as you can see, I can also pull in information like the sales lead or the lead source if I want to do that, another dropdown that says, okay, did they come from organic search, paid search, email marketing, so on and so forth. I can store all that information right here. In addition, the activity view where I'm going to be showing comments, this is going to be extremely important because what I want to have happen is every single week I want to make sure that and I have it stored here at the space level in my CRM guidelines. I want to make sure that my account management team is filling out these weekly updates. So each week they're going to go through and they're going to copy and paste this. You can use a tool like text expander that allows you to easily build this template and deploy it really quickly inside of the comments. But they're gonna go through this weekly update, they're gonna take this and on every single one of their deal records. As I go here, I can come here to the comments, I can take this, paste it and I'm gonna go through. As an account manager, I need to say, hey, why would this customer be unhappy? Are you happy with this account? Have there been any changes in strategy or timeline? And what do you need to help with on this account? So that way they can ention someone that says, hey, I need to add a designer to this, I need another person to be added. So that way everyone knows and leadership can come and see. Hey, what do we need to really make this a better engagement with Dutter Mifflin here? So that's extremely important. That's something else that you're going to want to have your account managers do. And you can change this template if you want. But these are four questions that we would highly recommend. They really give you good historical information. And when I leave that comment and I fill it out over time, if I go to this task right here, I'm going to see all that historical information in the comments. So all that's going to be stored here to make it super easy for me to go and see that historical information. And then in addition, as part of the leadership team, I can come here and I can go to this activity view where I'm only showing the comments that are in this. So if I go over here and I'm just showing activities, you'll see we have comments checked. That allows me to see all of those in one place. And I can go through and I can either comment on this, I can, I can set a reply, or I can just like it to, to let Jeff or whoever's filling this out know that I saw that and I'm replying to it that way. So you always want to have this activity view here to show the comments. Make it super easy to funnel all of those account management updates every week into one view so you don't have to go through task by task and reviewing it. In addition, we have an opportunities view, which essentially is just me filtering down by statuses where I can kind of see just where the status is an opportunity. So I can create that view here. I can also do client health, which allows me to filter up or filter out by the client health scores. Or here I just have green, yellow, red. So that way I can go here and easily see, okay, shrut farm, CRO retainer, they're in the red. What do we have to do here? That way you can just see all this very easily in one spot. Especially as you get a ton of different deals in here. You want to make sure you have a view just like this. And we can also do active accounts by lead where you're essentially just coming and storing it by my leads here. So I can see all of Jeff's. I can look at all of his health scores, I can see Grace, his health scores, Andrew, his health scores makes it super easy to sort of sort by those. And then in addition, those are just list views here. We do have some table view here. All accounts, this is just an easy way to have all the accounts, just all, even those that are inactive. I can store all that that right here. So. So as you can see here, I can come and I can just look all of it with all of the different fields I have available. Just makes a super easy view. In the table view, all that information is stored. The table view is great because if you have a lot of information in one spot, it tends to load faster than the list view. So I like to use it for things like this, where you're trying to just see a lot of information. It's much like a sheet or Excel spreadsheet, things like that. Just makes it super easy to see a lot of different tasks in one place. So that's our table view here with all the accounts. And then also I can just see the inactive accounts here. So if I want to come and see sort of the primary inactive reasons, whether it's poor communication, results in a meet expectations, budget issues, or just project completed, we can come and store all that right here too. So I can see all that. And then you're also going to have your account management updates. So maybe it wasn't a super high health score when they finished out and we can kind of see why was that the case. In addition, you can also, and what we do at zenpilot is after every single engagement, we come through and list out sort of what we learned, what we could do better next time. That way I can come to this view and see all my inactive accounts and I can see all that sort of document and go sort of one by one to see sort of how can we improve, how can we make our process better and things like that. You're also going to have this, and this is where you get into sort of having a sales side of things as well. But this intake, new deal. So on the sales side, if they're going to pass it from sales to delivery, I can create this form right here on this list and this allows me to come through and I can create this task directly into the CRM without having to go and create it. So for the sales team, if they don't have access to the CRM space here, we can create a public form here for them. I can just copy this link just like that. I just need to make sure it's public and then I can send that link to them and they can come through and they can just fill out this form. And essentially we're just gathering all of the fields that we need. So the deal name, the project status, which is going to be onboarding, the health score, which should be green, they're going to list out the objective, the associated service, start date, end date, project lead, so on and so forth. And if you have any relevant attachments and things like that, where they need to kind of show us maybe a loom video or something like that, they can always put that information here as well. Just make sure that there's a smooth handoff. I mean, you might be doing handoffs in other ways, but this is kind of a way to have a good intake to get all the information in here very easily and have a standard process on that for the sales to delivery handoff. In addition, with all of this you can have automations built out that when you get a deal created here in the CRM then that's going to create sort of onboarding tasks here in our delivery space. That way once it's created the tasks are already deployed and we're ready to go. We're just doing that onboarding super quickly getting the tasks out there to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. So you can build out automations with our CRM space here as well. You can also send these to Slack so you can have it on automation where whenever a deal gets created it gets sent to Slack and that way we know we can all celebrate because a deal has been won. Makes it super powerful for our team to kind of see that information in Slack to know when a new deal has come through. In addition, just a couple other views that we have here that you can kind of see. So we went through sort of opportunities, our client health, active accounts by lead, all of our accounts, those are inactive intake, new deal and then we have our pinned ones as well. So those are all reviews here at sort of the, the deals list which that's sort of the most important. But again we have our companies and our contacts. Not as many views in here but there are some fun things within it. As you can see here in the companies we're going to have all of our tasks which are just going to be the company names. We have comments here, address, URL, team size and just date updated which is essentially just when you updated it. So we kind of know if it's good information or maybe it needs an update. But, but then I can go through here and I can go to my client map and this is super cool because if I have the address on all of my companies here I can go to this client map and I can see where all my clients are located. So as you can see a lot of them are in Pennsylvania or servicing a lot of the the office customers, their clients. So we have a lot in here. Someone Scranton as you can see it just kind of gives you a nice view of where all of your clients are. Also have some in LA and it looks like some in Texas as well. So that's just kind of a cool map view that you can create. So if you've never used it, you can create a map view just like that and it's tied to this custom field here. For the address field. So super cool way to just have a nice view of your where your clients are. In addition, last thing is going to be the contacts. So the contacts I can have 2, 3, 4, however many contacts per deal and company. And again, all this is going to relate back. As you can see now I'm going to have all my contacts here. I can look at it in a table as well. And we'll just see all of our contacts here. We're going to have their email, we're going to have their phone number, LinkedIn, job title and kind of anything else you would want to store here that's helpful for your team. Because I can come through here in the deals list and remember I can click into a task like Dunner Mifflin and this allows me to see those relationships right here and see how everything's related with my companies and my contacts. And then we'll see all the custom fields as well. So we're going to have one sort of record here for, for everything. And then as we start adding comments, we're going to see all those here. So it stores all of it and really into one task card here. Makes it super easy for your team. So now that we've done that, let's kind of quickly walk through how we can actually build this out and ClickUp. So that's super easy for you. So I'm not going to go through every single custom fields, but I want to go through the basics like the relationships and creating some views to get you started on this. All right, so obviously the first step for us is going to be actually creating a space. So what I want to do, I just want to go add new space. We're going to label this CRM just like this we can do next already exists. We'll do CRM number two just like that. Next. If you want to add a description, you can add a color and kind of go through all of this. Let's just do that for now. Next. And then for this, for the statuses, you want to make sure that these are consistent. But for our CRM space, we don't need to have a bunch of statuses and we kind of have one here for our records where it's just kind of open and closed. It's really. You only need those two. I don't need a bunch of other ones. I'm going to do next. And then this is where you can turn on some click apps, so we don't need too many. But one thing that can be super powerful is email. So If I have this turned on and there are some limitations to this, but essentially when I'm emailing it client I can send emails out of that ClickUp task that allows me to kind of pull all of the emails too into one spot. Again, you don't have like all the email addresses that you can use in there, but if you have one support at whatever your company is, you can have one email address for for people to go to and use that and send emails out of the actual task. So I can send it out of that Dunner Mifflin record. I can send them out of that task and keep and pull all the information right there. Super easy to create that central source of truth. So that's something that maybe you want to turn on. But a lot of these we probably don't have to but we'll just leave these on for for now. So I'm going to do next and then if you want to include other views here, I typically will just do a list view and then I'll create all the other ones. Not super. Don't spend too much time on that. After you're done there, you create a space just like that. So now we have CRM number two and now we need to start creating our list. So let's just go and click X out of that. So this list, we already have one built out. We can go ahead and let's just take another list. We're gonna name this one Deals and you can use emojis and stuff like that to make a little bit more pretty. But I'll just do deals like that. Now I'm gonna duplicate this and let's do contacts the list. Nothing in there. You can just create new lists if you want. But I'm just gonna do this and then we'll do companies. That's our basic. So now we have all those. I don't need that list here. I can always rename it if I want. But I'm just gonna do deals, contacts and company. So super simple, just like that. So here we're gonna go into deals and I'm gonna just start creating some things. We'll start off by thinking about we'll just create a task and then, and then we'll start adding in some, some custom fields here. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to say Dunner Mifflin website retainer. I just like to have a task task right there because that allows me to easily kind of see this right here which I find super helpful. So that can just Be labeled example, task, whatever you want it to be. Now what you want to do is you want to start adding in some custom fields. And what I'll do is I'll just go over here to add a new column and the first one I'd highly recommend for for anyone trying to get set up here. Starting off with sort of just a status field. So I'll come here to the dropdown, just label the status. Again, we like to use. This is a fun fact, but we like to use emojis here for some of these things. So like in some cases we have little handshake. So if I go here, do a handshake, see what pops up. Yeah, because when you go into dashboards and views and things like that, or filters, like at the everything level, having those emojis just make it super easy to find those because then they'll all kind of sort there. They'll all be sort of in the same spot. So it just makes it super easy. Based off my spaces if I want to have emojis there. Just a quick tip but super helpful. So we'll do status and I'm going to come here and I'm going to have onboarding, I'm going to have active, offboarding and inactive. You can add colors and things like that too. We'll just start off with that. So that's the first one that I highly recommend. After that I would definitely have things like client health. So if I come here, I'm going to do another drop down. I'll do client health. And with this you can either do a one to five scale or we can do the green, yellow, red. Remember as long as it's documented somewhere, that's the most important piece that they know. Everyone knows. What does this mean? Save time on this. I'm going to do green, yellow, red. I could do those emojis but so just be faster. And so those are the two main ones. And then you're going to go through and you can add things like mps if you want. That's going to be another dropdown. You can add objectives. Which objectives can just be a basic text here. So I can do this objective and that's easy to make because I don't need to do a bunch of other stuff. So we have objective. I can list those there and there's a lot of different. Basically whatever you need to store, you'll use a lot of dropdowns, use a lot of label and then you'll use some text fields. But we use things like email down in the Contacts. Later on, we can use that formula field when you're actually trying to do the distance between the start and the end date. But a lot of different options that you have here to use, so definitely feel free. If you have any questions about maybe some fields you should put in here and how to build them, let us know. But a lot of different options that you have to build these out. The most important though is going to be sort of the relationships field here. So I want to show how to actually build this. So I'm going to come here, relationship. And then this one again, this can just be labeled companies. I can put in my emoji and things like that. And I can either choose to do any task in my workspace or tasks from a specific list. So if I come here, I can just choose my contacts list or my company's list. And so I'm going to choose companies. And essentially what that's going to allow me to do is I'll pull just any task from my companies list. So if I come here to companies and I add in a task to this, we'll go here and this will be done. Or Mifflin that. Now I can come to the deals list. And as you'll see, if I come here, this is only going to pull the company from Dunder Mifflin. So any companies that are creating this list, it's going to pull those up there and the same thing is going to go for contacts. So if I wanted to add in a contacts field, come over here to my plus button. I'm going to go, we're going to do another relationship field just like this. Now it's going to be contacts. Ask from a specific list, do my contacts list at a column, and then I'll come here. Let's add in a task for Michael Scott. It's like that. Go back to my deals list and then I'll scroll over and we'll find contacts here. And it's going to pull in Michael Scott just like that. So remember now everything is going to roll up to Dunder Mifflin makes it super easy for me to find all the information that I would need. But then you can kind of go through and after you start building everything out, then you'll be able to get sort of building out certain views. So as I have my statuses in here, I can create one that this can be filtered or grouped by status. This is the actual ClickUp status. But if I want to do it by custom field, then I can use that one. As you can see As I have different statuses, it'll be different. So if I did example, this one would be active. We'll be able to sort of group by those different stages like that. So as it refreshes. There we go. So another view that I'd highly recommend is creating a board view. So especially if you want to create more of a sales CRM in this, to create that board view that I was showing you earlier is I can create one based off of a deal stage. So if it's going to be prior to them actually coming into sort of this active deals list where now these are customers and I want prospects in here or opportunities, what I can do is I can create first let's create a dropdown here and we're going to label this deal stage just like this and then we're going to do it can be opportunity option. We can do contract sent. Again this can be however you need this to be set up. We can do closed one group and then close lost and add this. And now if I come here, let's just say that this one's closed one and let's say that this one is an opportunity. I can come up here, add. We're going to do a board view just like this. We're going to group the board by deal stage, add the board and then there we go. Now we have our done miff line as you see there in the closed one. Our example and as we start selling this contract sent, close one, close loss. So we can kind of keep track of it all here. So board view is another nice one to have that could be grouped by your status of the customers or it could be sort of more for the sales side to kind of get a nice pipeline in there. But that's really how you build out the basics of this. Again you just keep adding in the custom fields of what you need to fill all that information out. You definitely want to have those relationships here from companies and contacts. So that's super important to have. And then you start sort of building out the view. So whether it's going to be one that's grouped by the delivery lead or grouped by the status, client, health score, things like that. You want to make sure all that's in there and just create what is necessary for your team. And again, remember the most important piece is going to be those account management updates. So you always want to have a commons field and then you always want to create a template here at the CRM space level or in textexpander or somewhere else in a knowledge base that you come through and you grab create a template for this weekly update just like this. So remember the four questions of why would the customer be unhappy? Are you happy with the account? Have there been any changes on strategy or timeline? And what do you need help with on this account? Super important to have because that's going to what makes a CRM super efficient and helpful for your team is having all that information in here for them to see have for your leadership to kind of know, okay, do I need to jump in on a call to help out or do we need additional resources for this? Because we always want to make sure that we know who are our great clients that we should be asking for maybe a case study or testimonial and who are those that maybe need some help because we can really try to improve some of these relationships. So make sure you put out those fires before they even start by using the CRM inside of ClickUp. And there you have it. That's how you build a CRM inside of ClickUp. If you like this video, please like it and hit subscribe. We're going to continue to deliver content specifically for agencies who want to get the most out of ClickUp. And if you're ready to stop trying to self implement a project management tool because it's not working, you're spending too much time and effort on it and you're just ready to completely transform your operations, please go to zenpilot.com call and book a call with us. We are here to help. At Zenpilot, we've helped close to 3,000 different agencies all over the world build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations in ClickUp. And that's why we're ClickUp's first and highest rated solutions partner. So whether you're looking to boost productivity, increase profits, improve team health, or just create a system that runs without you so that you can finally go on that vacation that you just so well deserve. We are here for you. Taking your operation seriously will change your life and I want you to experience this life changing impact and I'm looking forward to you becoming the next agency success story. We'll see you again next time. Sa.