How to Build a CRM & Appointment Tracker in SmartSuite for a Coaching Business (Beginner Tutorial)

Offering coaching services or consulting services requires a lot of interpersonal skill, time and energy. Considering the majority of those things are finite, a smart coach or consultant will be looking at ways to systemize the back office of their business to make sure that they're only spending that time and energy on the things that actually create value for their clients. In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how we can use the software SmartSuite to actually build out a work management strategy structure that will allow us to organize our client information, book appointments in one automated, all in one spot work management software that was a mouthful. To get us started today, we're going to need to log into our SmartSuite account. Note if you use our affiliate link and end up using a paid account on SmartSuite at the time of recording, this SmartSuite is actually offering an additional discount to the community here at the ProcessDriven YouTube channel. Be sure to let them know we sent you by shooting them a message at support. And with that, let's dive into this video. Now, once you are inside your SmartSuite account, we're going to be going into our Add a New Solution area. You've kind of gotten the drill by now. If you've watched our other SmartSuite tutorials, this is where we're going to be starting from one of the solution templates available in order to give ourselves a running start into this work. Now, when you first go into this template area and maybe you search something like Coaching, it's actually surprising that as of this moment there is not a Go to template for coaching in SmartSuite. But I think today you and I are going to fix that by creating one of our own by actually repurposing a rather strange one, I might admit, called Patient Management. Now, I know you probably think I'm crazy for thinking Patient Management is going to translate, but I promise it actually does. When you load it inside your account, you should see something like this appear. First things first, as we do with all new solution templates, let's just go up to the top of this template here and review the key information. The stuff you always want to be checking for is permissions to make sure that this is only showing to the people you want to have it shown to. So if you have other team members in your account, exclude them while you're working on this. And beyond just permissions, you might also take a moment here to change the color, the icon, and the name. If you haven't gathered by the title of this YouTube video, we are not talking about patient management today and instead we are going to be talking about client management. So go ahead and rename that here. Once you have your solution information all dialed in, we're going to go over to the first application and just like in our other videos here, we're going to start customizing this to suit our workflow flows. Now, because this is not built for coaching like some of the other templates in SmartSuite where we don't have to edit anything, we are going to need to make a few edits here, which I think will be great practice for those of you who are beginners in SmartSuite who are still getting used to all the fundamentals when it comes to editing the fields inside a smartsuite template. I think the easiest way is just to click Open Record. This allows you to preview everything with that demo data in there and lets us see what we're working with all in one spot from the very get go. You see, there are a few fields that need to change. The very first one, full name, that one's probably good to go. But moving on, we need to adjust these one by one. First up, we're going to change, using the modify field settings option, the assigned physician to be the assigned coach or consultant or whatever. Notice if this is always going to be you, you might just want to call it coach and just default the option. So it always defaults to the record creator, which will almost always be you. However, if you have a coaching team, you might want to leave this as a blank option and then fill it in with the relevant coach. So in my case, I actually want to set up a filter here that ensures that I can only assign this to people where they are in the customer experience team. That would be one way to filter this down. If you have multiple departments beyond just coaching inside your business. However, if it's just you, your life's a little simpler. Just go ahead and choose that default. This field is super important because this is what's going to determine what shows up in someone's my work up here in the top at the start of their workday. So when I'm going in here and I'm saying, oh, what do I have to do today? This is governed by that field you and I just built. So heading back in here, we've now adjusted our coach field. Awesome. Next we have date of birth. Now I think this is fine to keep, but because we're not in a clinical environment, I'm going to modify this to just be called birthday. Next up we have insurance number and because we do not have insurance here and I don't have a relevant kind of match for this, I'm going to just go ahead and delete this field using the delete field option. Easy. Next up we have new patient and this one I am going to keep for new client but I'm going to modify it once again to change the word to client. Then click Update field. Next to this we have medications that is not relevant to us and next to that we have insurance company here. I'm going to modify this field and for this particular field I'm actually going to change this from being the insurance company to be the payment method because for many coaches and consultants they're working with people on different rhythms. And so this will just be a quick reference for us to keep track of who is paid in full and and who is paid in installments. Because I want to make sure that I have this all flowing, I'm going to go ahead and have these different symbols here to let us know who is in what category. Moving down, I'm going to adjust some of the options and click Update field. This will now give us a database of how people are paying. Below this we have conditions, allergies and surgeries. Now again this feels kind of weird for a coaching example. So what we're going to do is once again modify these fields to suit our use case. So how are we going to do that? First we are going to go to the conditions field and rename this internal notes. This will basically become our document to keep track of all of the information we have on this particular client. We can go ahead and click Update Field and have that reflected. If we had multiple people on our team and we wanted to retain client privacy, we could also at this point edit these field permissions, which is something that's really cool about SmartSuite and something that could be nice for any multi coach environment here where we can actually change who can edit and who can view this field. So, so for this particular field I'm going to make sure that everyone can see it, but the only people who can edit it are the team that is the coaching team. So there we go. This is one way we can kind of lock down that access and make sure that people aren't seeing or editing things that they shouldn't. Once I click save, I will have my client internal notes ready to go. And I think I can remove high blood pressure too. The allergies field we can actually remove. Although we can make some jokes about how we could have allergies in the metaphoric sense for some of our clients. And below that we have surgeries. Now, surgeries here is used as a sub item field inside of SmartSuite subitems, if you're not familiar, is kind of like the ability to have a record inside a record. And currently these sub items fields that we have here are just for surgeries. Now obviously that's not too useful to us, but we are going to edit this to be the equivalent to surgeries in the coaching space, which would be something like challenges or priorities. And this will be where we'll track the main objectives and things that we've overcome with the client throughout our coaching journey. Currently the fields to display are set up as the name and the title. But once I'm in here I'm actually going to also include the last updated, the first created. I'm going to remove that date field because I don't quite want it and I want to add an additional field called a description. So we're just going to call this here and this is where we can kind of explain what exactly is this priority? Why does it matter? And so on. And finally I'm going to add one more field here that's a linked record field. And why I'm doing this is going to make sense more in a moment, but I'm basically going to connect this priority or issue to the appointments we have so I can track when did we talk about this in our appointments? So let's just call this discussed during. So for this particular option I'm going to choose a more simplified display and then I'm going to click add field. Once this is created and I click update field, we'll see it update back here. And if I add a priority into this such as hiring hiring first virtual assistant, which if you're doing that, check out our video up at the top of this page about that. I can now connect this particular priority with when we discussed it during which meeting. Link the record and click add. So now we've got this here, this little challenge priorities area and below that we have another linked record, this one independently, not in a sub item relationship that links to the appointments. Now once we finished all of these fields, all we need to do next is rename our list names to say client instead of patient and rename the app itself to say clients. Once we have that there, we should be good to go to have a basic CRM inside this SmartSuite solution. Next up we're going to do the same thing on our appointments view. We're going to just make sure that the terminology matches. And personally I'm going to flip this over to a grid view for easy comparison and I'm going to look inside each event, adjust any fields I need to, and make sure that this reflects the terms and fields I would need as a coaching client. So let me just do that real quick. Very few edits needed on this one, just getting rid of a few terminologies, some titles of fields and we should be good to go on the appointments piece. So we've been able to build through this tutorial, a CRM for our clients, and a visual appointments guide to track all of our different coaching appointments. If you wanted to go a bit further here, we could go ahead and create some kind of intake form system inside our SmartSuite account. We have a little bit of a tutorial on forms up here if you want to check it out. If it's not there, it'll be there soon. And if you want to go even further, we could then set up some integrations into this setup. So rather than having to manually add appointments or manually add clients, we could take advantage of SmartSuite's third party and native integrations to connect things into SmartSuite. So for example, every time someone fills out a type form, we could have a new client created. Or every time a HubSpot deal closes, we could have a new task or appointment created. We can connect SmartSuite with so many other things using these integration options if you want to get even more automatic. However, I think this is a pretty good starting off point. And even though I know I'm going to see these appointments and tasks show up in my My Work section at the beginning of each day because I feel like this will be a nice visual reference. I'm also going to take this view, add it to my starred items for easy access, and come back to it in the future when I want to find these appointments or just browse what's coming up in the weeks or months ahead. Thanks so much SmartsBeat for sponsoring this video. And for those of you who are building out your coaching or consulting business inside SmartSuite and want to learn more about building CRMs or appointment databases. Or maybe you want to get more into the form side of things that we haven't had time yet to handle in this video, please do drop a comment below. Please do check out our SmartSuite affiliate link in the description below if you'd like a little bit more information or to try it for yourself. Thanks so much for watching and until next time. Enjoy the process.