How to Build a CRM to Manage Prospects & Client Contracts in SmartSuite

Hello, hello and welcome back for another live stream. This week we are talking about building your own CRM inside SmartSuite. Yeah, we're going to cover a little bit on some contracts too, and a real application of how we can bring this to life inside the reality of actually a nonprofit CRM example today, based on popular request. Hope you guys will find that interesting or be starting here on the hour. So in the meantime, just get yourself comfy, tune into the chat and let us know if you can see and hear. Okay. Foreign for anyone just tuning in here, we are getting started on the hour. Just 30 seconds or so to start this live stream. Get yourself comfy. We'll be starting shortly. I see we've got a few folks tuning in here from YouTube and Facebook and LinkedIn. Awesome to see. And with that, I guess it's time for me to join you too, huh? Can't just like be the faceless voice the entire live stream. Welcome guys. Welcome to the build your own CRM live stream. In this little live show, we're going to be going through the soup to nuts. Build out of a client relationship management system in some ways inside of SmartSuite. But of course, whether you're using SmartSuite or whether you're using a piece of paper, what we're going to be really talking about today is the functional processes and systems that go into your CRM build out. Because it doesn't matter how amazing your tool is, if you don't have the right data in it and you don't have a workflow surrounding that data, well, then it just becomes a shiny thing that sits on your virtual shelf and collects dust. So around that enable it piece today we're going to be going through the SmartSuite application. And as we're here, I'd love you guys to answer the question that's kind of popping up here at the bottom of the screen. That's so awkward. I can't do it. But let me know where you guys are joining us from and what your title is. Job titles aren't always the most indicative for small teams, but I'm trying to understand what perspectives we have in the audience so we can tailor some of our examp today to your actual realities. But as we wait for those to come in, I'm going to take us into our lovely little whiteboard and whimsical today and start with some big picture conversations about CRM applications. Our agenda for today as we dive in, as you can see in our lovely SmartSuite agenda is the following. First of all welcome. Hopefully I did that. Okay, next up we've got a reminder to sign up for your account and, and then we're going to be going through the CRM basics, building out those basic CRM structures and then reminding you about some fun stuff to come. If you are someone who is not yet a SmartSuite user but you want to follow along today. Just an obligatory reminder to use our affiliate link to sign up. SmartSuite is offering who knows how long like a special little thank you to our subscribers here on the process driven YouTube channel where if you sign up with our affiliate link and contact them you will save an extra 10% on your paid account. Terms and conditions apply. Insert, insert those kind of disclaimers here. But really, really cool offer from the SmartSuite team. Something they did not have to do but they are choosing to do just because they appreciate this community so much and really grateful for them for taking, for offering that and I hope you guys will take them up on that offer as well. So that's kind of our roadmap for today. We're going to go into our whiteboard, start the presentation. But before I do that little piece, I just want to check in on the chat. I know unfortunately I'm not able to show some of these on the screen again because, because technology. So I'm just going to read through some of them here. I see Luxitim is looking to switch from ClickUp to SmartSuite. Amazing. Glad to hear that databases are important. Thomas is a CFO coming from Sweden. Luxton's an E commerce designer. John is a principal for the doggone good technology. Love that name. Nick is London SVP of Project Management. Ooh, that must be a busy job. Charlie is an insurance agency owner and we have Sharon here joining us from Texas and the Virtual Exchange center joining us as a pedagogical pedagogical consultant. I hope I'm not butchering that. Lecturer and international conferences speaker from Israel. Amazing, amazing stuff. I definitely butchered that because I'm not nearly as sophisticated as all of you, which is great and that's why I'm glad to be here. So what we're going to be going through today is a CRM example. I'm going to be going through the basic principles and then we'll be applying it. Regardless of whether you are a senior vice president of project management, an agency owner, a Shopify client specialist or something else, I think we'll be able to transfer the principles we discussed today to just about any use case with a Few modifications if you're struggling to make that translation as we go. That's why we're doing this baby live. Because I want to hear your questions, I want to hear what you're stuck on and I want to make sure we can, you know, best serve you guys who are here with us live. So I see some questions already coming in the chat. Amazing. We'll make sure those get added in. But let's start off with a conversation of what is CRM stuff? What does that stand for? Well, in my kind of loose definition here, a CRM or a client Relationship Management system or flow, is a way of tracking relationships to our customers, how we are relating to our customer database. It's often used on the sales side, but it doesn't have to be. So as we go through today, I'm actually going to be talking not just about, you know, using a CRM to sell more things, more widgets, more whatevers, but also how we can use a CRM to nurture an existing relationship. Because ultimately, managing a relationship applies to the entire sales cycle, the entire customer journey. Looking at this little chart here, this is just a quick visual reference of what the journey is that we could be capturing today. Granted, we only have one hour and I want to make sure we go through all the technicalities you'll need to know about SmartSuite. So we won't be able to go through every piece of it. But a CRM can track the journey all the way from somebody that exists on the Internet. Like, you know, we've got Ross here, so Ross is here. We could have Ross in this category as a person that exists, a thing that exists. And then maybe we've got someone who's a potential customer who not only exists, which is, you know, a good check mark to have, but is potentially interested in, say, our services or donating to us or working with us or sponsoring us. Then from there we have someone who's currently doing that activity, whatever that is. They're actively in our orbit in our collaboration network. After that, we have someone who previously did that but currently isn't. And then we have fans. These are the hyper fans, people who have worked with us in some way, but, you know, they experienced Nick's project management services. Or we experienced Charlie's approach to insurance delivery and was like, oh, my gosh, you need insurance. Go to Charlie, Charlie's your person. And that's the fan stage. And regardless of which stage someone is at, what status, we consider them to be in our orbit. CRMs can still help facilitate that journey. All a CRM does really, at a baseline is track where someone is in this puzzle. So if I were to just add a little icon, let's add a person here. There we go. All we want to do is keep a track of where a given person is. How many do we have in each area? How many are flooding our past customer area? What is our overall flow? Ultimately, if we're using our CRM effectively, the way we use this information will enable this overall flow to be faster. Now, if I was fancier, I'd have a nice automation or a animation moving this guy around, but instead you get my mouse just spinning him in a circle. But that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to kind of lubricate this journey of working with us or having a relationship with our business in some way. Okay, any questions on that initial piece? I think most of you are probably, you've been around the block, you understand what the basic of a CRM is. But for folks who maybe haven't set one up before, or maybe you have and it hasn't quite served its purpose of giving you this clarity or kind of easing this journey, Is this making sense so far? And if so, how far are you on this? Do you already have this in place for folks who are here, or are you someone who, you know, you know what it is, but you haven't yet set it up? How far are you on your CRM journey? Let me know in the chat. I just want to make sure I'm not making this too simple or too complex, depending on that answer. Moving on, though, while I wait for those things to come in the chat, because there's a little bit of a delay on my end, I'm going to just scroll on down and talk a little bit about what that actually looks like on a practical perspective, because we're here for a SmartSuite webinar and I haven't even shown you the software yet. Well, that's not an accident, my friends. I do believe here on this channel, we've probably already forced you to think this way. But as sexy as software is, our software is not going to be set up for success if we don't have a clear process in mind first. So that's why we're starting on the whiteboard today. Looking, though, at our lovely whiteboard, here are the kind of chunks of things that could go into a standard basic CRM. We've got things we need to do, that kind of lubrication of the customer journey, which is a Disgusting phrase that I just said twice now. Excuse me. And then we've got the actual information, the database stuff. Normally when you have a CRM, it's biased in one direction or another. You have a CRM that's really good at driving action. It's telling your sales guys who to call next, your sales people who to ping next, or it's really good at having you manage information. Typically CRM skew one way or another in this particular application today I think we can do a little bit of both. And that's why SmartSuite and Work Management software in general can be a really nice CRM for folks who are just getting started or just earlier stage right. You don't want to have two different tools or three different tools or 10 different tools to track in order to have, you know, your actions and your information managed. So instead we go to something like SmartSuite or any work management software. And our goal really in this is to make sure we have a nice way to be able to track both what we need to do and what we're doing it for in the same place without having to have five different pieces of software. We have to manage the cost of those and the complexity of teaching those. So I'm just going to check in on the chat here. I see some things popping up on the screen. I want to make sure I answer any pressing questions on this particular topic. Virtual Exchange center is asking, would you recommend putting CRM as an app into solution? Oh, you are jumping right to it. All right. I like the way you think we're going to be talking about this right here next. So let's actually handle this question right now. So looking at our visual chart here, Virtual Exchange Center, I'm pretty much like, I'm viewing this as like a virtual like Layla, get to the point. So thank you for that. Looking at this chart here, this is kind of how we can view the information we need to manage. And when it comes to the question of in SmartSuite's case, is it a solution, is it an app, is it a record? Where do we build things in the hierarchy, it comes down to functionality. So let's look at the two categories of things that involve are involved in a CRM. On the left we have actions, things we need to do, the action of using the CRM working that system. And on the right side we have information. Information is where we track the actual details in the database and we log activities that happen over. On the action side, the interaction between action and information is a two sided journey. If I can reflect that here in this little chart. And it's what allows the CRM to actually serve its purpose. Now, when it comes to these kinds of two layers we have in place, where do we build them in the hierarchy comes down to the information side. Primarily because in SmartSuite we get right out of the gate some great task management features, project management features. We generally do not need too much of a decision on this end as to where our action steps will go for almost every person in every application. In SmartSuite, your actions, the things you need to do, will show up in my work. We don't need to set up the architecture for that because we have great project management features right out of the gate. But on the solution side or on the functional side, the database side, this question from Virtual Exchange center is exactly what we want to focus on because this is where we do have a lot of modularity. We don't have to build our action management from tap from scratch, but we do need to build our information management from scratch, or at least from a template in some way. Currently, what I have categorized are two different types or containers of information that go into a CRM build out. These are contacts and opportunities, slash deals. Now, depending on what you are doing, these categories might be called different things and you may even have more than just two categories. But what these are is kind of like the baseline for most CRM setups. Contact is referring to the unit, the. The unit of relationship, I guess, for lack of a better word. So if you are dealing with donors, this would typically be the doning, donating. Oh my gosh, the donating entity. So whether that's a company, a person, an individual, a family, that would be your contact. If you are working with say a business service, like maybe you offer virtual assistant services, these would typically be your clients or potential clients and so on. To the right we have opportunity or deal. Now this kind of does have more of that sales skew to it. But all this means is what is the relationship result that we're looking for? Okay, so I know Opportunity Deal immediately makes so many of us think of vomiting from sales calls with like those really pushy salespeople. That's not. Please try to disconnect that association here. All this is, is just kind of like the result or the potential result that could happen from that relationship. Basically this is who's going through that journey we talked about at the top. And the opportunity and deal is the result we are hoping to achieve or results, plural. So whoever our unit is, whoever this Guy is that's probably going to be what we consider as our contact and then our unit of measurement for how successful the CRM will be our opportunity side. Now, I still haven't answered the question. I promise I'm getting to it. Where does this go in the SmartSuite hierarchy? The beautiful thing about SmartSuite is that there is not a right answer to this question. I know, look at me getting tricky with you. There's not because SmartSuite has different layers we can build out. We have the solution level, we have the app level, we have the record, we've got sub items, we've got fields and checklists, and we also have just notes and conversations we can have, which is adding a few, essentially another layer. And with all of those layers, the only thing that we need to keep in mind is kind of the order of the information. If we have say in this application, we have a contact, we want to make sure that's higher in the hierarchy of SmartSuite than say, our touch points with that contact or the personal information about that contact. But it doesn't have to be an app, it doesn't have to be a record, it doesn't have to be a field. All it needs to be is high enough in the hierarchy that it accomplishes and gives us the features that we need to have. So for this particular example, to answer your question that I'm sorry, I'm giving you way too much background on, my general suggestion as a baseline is going to be to have our overall CRM as a solution. Okay, so the Overall solution in SmartSuite, using some of their templates that we'll go through in the next half, then have your two major entities, your results you're looking to measure and your units of relationship building have those typically be apps like the container, a database for each of those. And each record represents a person. So we've got many, many records for each contact, many, many records for each opportunities or deals. And there would be a separate app for each of these two databases. Again, you don't have to do it this way. It's not the only way that works. It's one of the most common ways for some of the reasons we'll break down later. Within these kind of apps and records we have broken in here, we would then use fields for the additional pieces of information. Things like what kind of contact is it, Things like how we've been interacting with this contact, things like the personal information, things like how we have what kind of opportunity is this? These are things that will Typically treat on the field level using either a description, a custom field of some kind that we are able to define or just a note taking system. We'll demonstrate each of these inside the overall SmartSuite buildout. But just like in our SmartSuite hierarchy video, I want to remind you guys this is not the right answer for everybody. You can build it up higher in the hierarchy where maybe you have something like oops, if I flip over. You could build it higher where this is a solution and then this is an app that would be a little weird, but you could do it. You could build it lower in the hierarchy where these are all records, it's all in one big app. There's no right or wrong. It's just about the data and the degree of detail that you need. Okay, so no judgment of self here guys. If you have something different built out, it's a fabulous that you're even asking these questions. Oh, some questions. This is one that I think will probably be helpful. And this is around this question. But first let's check in on the chat here. Charlie says our industry requires a lot of compliance. So we are stuck using a 40 year old serum and there's no competition in this market. Is this salesforce? I think that's a challenge that a lot of mature teams have. Right? We're inheriting legacy systems. We are in a regulated industry. We have compliance requirements. We have to work with our insurance providers that pay for our home services delivery. So we have to use Xactimate, whatever it is. But that's why having these kinds of tools in your back pocket can be a nice way to work around them. So for work management software, I see people coming into this space that we're going to be going through today from two angles. Either you don't really have a lot in place and you're looking for a bit more structure or you have some such a structured tool, you have an erp, you have something you're kind of forced to use and it struggles to adapt when you've got things that need to move quickly. And regardless of which extreme you're on, these kind of work management tools like SmartSuite that we're going to be going through today can be a really great kind of multi tool to help you plop into any workflow that doesn't have sufficient support from technology and have a more agile approach, even if it just supplements what you track in your CRM. But please, Carly, let's make sure we keep this question in mind because later on I want to talk about how to handle things when you have an outside system you have to keep using. But ways you can still use SmartSuite despite that and more importantly than just using it, still get value out of it. So Nick, I'm sorry, I know Salesforce can be really great, but sometimes I think the ERP game and the overall super structured we need to have our systems integrator dedicated as a full time person just to manage the system. I think there's going to be some interesting changes in this industry I hope in the next 10 years to make these kinds of things less of a sad face and more of a opportunity. So going over some of these quick questions here before we go into the build out because again I think this will help the build out be more meaningful. Is this question I thought might come up. How do I know if data like my company, my contact, my opportunity should be a record or a field? Because I said, you know, there's a lot of ways you could build this. That's an annoying answer. I know that. So I wanted to give you a quick rule of thumb. Feel free to screenshot this. This is helpful to you. But basically if you are stuck between record and a field, one of the easiest questions you can ask yourself is does this piece of data like a birthday, like a family member, like a whatever it is you're trying to track, does it have an action that needs to be associated with it? Okay, so I'm just going to flip over to SmartSuite briefly to show you this before we go into the full build out because I want to give you an example. Oops, there's some teasers. Let's go into this guy and let's just say we have donations that we're tracking and I will give you a full tour of this template here in about five minutes or so if I can keep my rambling to a minimum. But let's say we're trying to figure out how to do our donation CRM and we're stuck on this question of hey, does my donor need to be a task, a record, a thing that I'm connecting together so I have two of these different records I can click between? Or should my donor just be a field I have here where it says person's name and if I was smart I'd probably use the name field rather than just picking a text field. But how do I know which one I need to have a donor as a connection or a donor as a field? If you are in this position, this is the rule of thumb. Do I need to do an action based on this information. If so, you've narrowed it down to two options, checklist, field or record. And once you have narrowed it down to that, and if the answer is no, it's a field. But once you've answered that, ask yourself if you need to have all of the features that records have. Do you need to have other fields within this thing? Do you need to have things like have it show up in my work area with its like big title in there? Do you want to make sure it's easy to see from the overview? Do you need to be able to report on it in certain ways? And those kinds of requirements will help you decide between a checklist and a record. Scrolling on down Two more questions how should I add this? Actually let's handle these ones after we go through the build out because I want to make sure I show you guys what this is and I think these questions might be easier to apply. So Carly, don't let me lose track of this because you know me and my rabbit holes, but we're going to go inside of SmartSuite today and I just want to show you what a CRM build out looks like and how to build it for yourself. So today what we are going to be doing is a CRM with the use case of a nonprofit. And this is one that actually wasn't the original plan when I started planning this live stream. How long ago? But I've seen some comments from many of you saying hey, you know I'm a nonprofit exec, I'm doing fundraising which is essentially sales. Hate to break it to you, how do I apply this to my non traditional service? Here we go. You guys won the battle of what our example will be for today. But regardless of your industry, this should be relevant to build out this donor relationship area or any CRM. Whether it's a traditional CRM or one for this particular use case. We're going to start our journey by using ProcessDriven SmartSuite affiliate link and going into the homepage of SmartSuite, locating the add a new solution button and starting with a template. I've said it so many times but I can't say it enough. SmartSuite's solution templates are really nice. They are better than what you've seen in most tools where you come in, you load the templates and they make no sense for the real world applications. And that's why I actually recommend you do start with templates in SmartSuite if you're looking to get started searching the word CRM or the abbreviation CRM. Here you'll see there are a ton of ton of examples ready to go and ready for you to preview. Particularly the for freelancers one is a fantastic one. For folks who are looking for an all in one simple SmartSuite template, you do not have to be just a freelancer to utilize this. This is one that I think they're selling themselves a bit short by the title honestly, because it has a lot of good stuff. So whatever CRM example you'd like to pull from, just know the same basic principles apply. And for today to follow along with this one we will be looking at the Donor Relationship Management, a DRM if you will because just have to make things complicated. Once you load that template by clicking Use Template, you will see it load inside your account and whether you chose the legal CRM or the partner CRM or the venture capital CRM or the donor CRM, the steps are going to be very similar here. So you can still follow along. When we load this template into our account, we are going to see the solution of whatever it is that we chose and we can rename this to our preferences, adjust those permissions as we always do and make sure that we've got the nice icons and colors to suit our preferences. Below that we have our apps, and we have already talked about these in the theoretical sense over on the whiteboard, but these apps are our databases, our collections of information where we can define fields and records to kind of track information around a certain theme. In this default template, when we have it loaded in, we have a lot more than just the two sections that we had talked about before. So if we go back on up here, we talked about just having two apps, opportunities and context. But because SmartSuite templates, I think they're made by overachievers in high school, the honor roll students as you call them, and there's a few other options here as well. For the purposes of today, I'm actually going to suggest we ignore some of these additional views. For now we are just going to focus in on donations and donors. So I'm just going to go in and rename these with a little symbol using the emoji keyboard, if you guys haven't played with this yet. And let's add some emojis to the ones that we're going to focus on so we can keep our attention there. Person. Oh, that's. We don't want a wrestler, maybe just a smiley face. There we go. So these are going to be the two focus areas. These Additional ones. If this was your own flow, you could either delete them or continue the same process we're going through today to expand them as well. Inside this area, the donation spot is what would be the equivalent to our opportunities. So if you are someone that is selling cars, this would be the car sales. If you are someone that is selling legal services, this would be something like your contracts. Yeah, you get the idea. Translate the term to whatever applies to your use case. But today we're focusing on donations because that's the measurable result or opportunity that as a nonprofit development manager, I'm going to be focused on to the right. We have donors. What are donors? Ha ha. These are our contacts. And this is the units of people, because everything comes down to people. But we could determine it in different units. This is the units of people that we are most worried about in this particular DRM setup. So between these two things, what do we have going on? Well, let's just do a quick tour. Inside the donors area, we have Dan Cooper. Dan is an example we can use to look at what a typical donor record looks like. And this is a great example of how the CRM templates baked into SmartSuite includes so many things you wouldn't even think to add. But what we have in here is a name field, a phone number, email title, basic stuff you'd expect. But all of this is really just telling us the professional context of the contact. Back to the old whiteboard example. This is the professional information. Then we have things like the personal information, the photo of the person, the. The LinkedIn, which could go either way. Maybe we have a note about their family members. Anything like that we could add into this record as well. If this was my donor database, CRM, going back to my days being a development assistant and a nonprofit, I would want to break this out a little bit more. And that's where the beauty of SmartSuite's data just flexibility comes in. I'm going to take the time just in a moment here, and rather than seeing everything all together in this big section, I'm going to add some additional sections to this. So I'm going to go inside and I'm going to find, let's say the introduced by and right above that, I'm going to add a new section called Personal info. We're going to call this Professional info or basic info, something like that. And I'm just going to rearrange some of my fields so that way I can track what we've got going on at different priority levels. And keep this stuff easy to see at a glance. What I'm doing here is just dragging the fields using the selector in the left corner. I'm sorry, my face is probably in the way for some of this. I'm just going to drag these on up. Notice I'm going to put donations made up at the very top, total donations at the top. The name is already going to be in there, so I'll skip that LinkedIn. I'll leave. I'll do notes here. I'll do personal notes. And something that sometimes comes up at this point are things like tracking family members. So maybe I want to know, you know, who's Dan Cooper's people? I've got two options for that. I could maybe add a default template into my personal notes area where I have prompts to self to include those pieces of unstructured info like family details, communication preferences, things that I don't need to necessarily have as fields that I want to just have more freestyle. I could put those here, whatever that might be, add those in so that all new records have that. And I could also break things down into more structured ways if I needed to. So again, back to that question of how I organize data. Maybe I need to have a subitem just to have a. Whoops, if I can spell right subitem. The hyphen always gets me. Guys, we add these sub items and track family members that way. The reason we do sub items instead of say a checklist is because we don't have action steps related to these family members. We just want to have a detailed record for John Doe and the other people that are related to Mr. Cooper. So this is how we could start to break this record out and have a little bit more detail. By having these sections, I can force them to be collapsed by default and just keep it a little bit less overwhelming when I open this up from the beginning. So you see now if I save this and I go back into Mr. Dan's account, I see donations up at the top, which is the need to know info for my particular use case. And then I have expanding sections that load super quickly to be able to see the additional pieces. Other details you might want to add here could be things like what causes they care about, their, their. The date they became a donor. Those kinds of fields would be amazing additions to this. But that's where your own process and values as a development officer will help kind of guide this. I see there's some questions in the chat. I just want to check in on that. John asks can you comment on taking a bigger picture construct of the table that tracks people? Particularly when a person can hold multiple roles, Donor and or volunteer and or vendor. Ooh, good point. So when it comes to having a people database, we kind of have two choices. And for nonprofits for example, there's often a lot of overlap between a donor and a volunteer. I mean our best volunteers were also donors and our best donors often volunteered or at least attended events or were involved in multiple ways. They might have been, you know, event venue hosts. They might have been also in multiple tiers of the donor system. When that happens, I think there's a real argument for centralization. If you are a smaller nonprofit or if you are only managing your certain stuff in house and everything else is going to the corporate office of your nonprofit, then I would argue, John, that could be a great case for bringing everything under one roof. Right now in this mock up example, we are not practicing that indeed, we just have a donor relationship management. But because I love to go down rabbit holes and John, I think you have a great question. I do want to show you guys just briefly the church CRM. Now I know we're not talking about churches today, but guys, this is where I'm talking that SmartSuites templates could just be really inspiring. They don't get hung up on the titles, it's the content that's remarkable. But in this church CRM example you can see they actually do this fairly well by having a tracker of giving members small group activities and they have one central contacts directory. Okay, why is this interesting? Well, because by having a contacts directory rather than a donor's directory, they can include all sorts of contacts. Whether they are a visitor, whether they are a donor, whether they are a pastor, whether they are a whatever. This changes our setup just slightly to be a bit more general and allows us to adapt to these kind of multi role realities that are really true inside these small community run organizations or just more fluid organizations. If we wanted to do that here, I would change this contacts, keep that general term. And to define the relationship here I would add a new field. Easiest way to do that in my book would probably be to add a field right here. Add and we'll do a multi select field and we will call this contact type here where we would have donor, employee, employee, volunteer. I mean I don't know about you guys, but there's a lot of non profits where there's someone's all of these things, board member and so on. We'll leave this as a checkbox and we will require entry in this field and we will choose to make it, let's just say colored. There we go. So here we go. We can now add all of the things that this person is in whatever format. And this is how we can adapt to John's pivot here, which I think is a cool way to go about it. Anyone who has, you know, a client CRM, a sales CRM where you also have people who are affiliates among it, this would be a great adaptation to make to this template. Okay, moving on off of the contacts area, let's move over to our opportunities, which in this case are donations. In this area we have a few fields already added in. We've got the donation name status relationships happening, linking back our overall donor and the information associated with that donor. How this works is we basically click into this field and we are able to change the donor based on the existing donors back on our donors or in this case now called contacts app. So if I go over here, I click on Diego, Diego gave this gift. We can select Diego right here. If you do do this, I would suggest altering their gift name or in your case, it might be the opportunity name field to dynamically pull in just to avoid any confusion by having these things change. So for that I would choose auto generated. Say yes, I understand. And we're going to make sure that that donor name right there and the donor type which I think we have designated somewhere designation. Here it is, we have that defined in the title. What I'm doing here is making this dynamically generated. So the title of the record always reflects the contents without a bunch of manual data entry. Okay, so. Oh, it's not actually updating now. I might have not clicked save, but you get the idea. There we go. We'll have that refresh once we move out of here and we see it refresh. Now that I saved my work, we can look at some of the other fields. Here we have a lookup that's saying, hey, based on the donor, what company do they work for? We have relationship to owner. So how does this person, who is in charge of this relationship, donation amount, date of donation, thank you sent, and a few other details. Things like thank you sent and other fields are reflecting our process when it comes to this prospect. So like we talked about at the beginning, this particular or all CRMs in general are there to facilitate the experience of our person, our contact. So if we're trying to get somebody through these five stages or just through three of these stages or through seven stages, we want to have These stages and levels somehow written into our CRM setup. Otherwise it probably is going to be hard to keep track of this. That's where these fields come in. And in this case, what we have going on here is we've got these different fields for each stage. Things like the thank you sent is part of our process. And we also have somewhere in here, there we go, a status to track the different types of people we have here. If we were trying to keep this more general around our sales opportunities, this could be something like potential opportunity pending opportunity one lost. Right now we've got donation terms, but again it's the same concept, it's the same strategy, just with a different application. So that is our donations area. We've got designation and then we've got receipts down at the bottom. But there's not too much more to say on that. Now I want to check in on the chat real quick before we move on and we start talking about ways to address the other pieces of this. Now that we have this information, how do we use this, how do we translate this to action and how do we apply this to things like contracts, which I know were a hot topic before we started. But before I do that, again, any questions in the chat here to make sure that we don't overwhelm anybody here Checking in, Rick asks what is the best way to add an internal team member to a record without it being the assigned to so it doesn't clutter up my work list. Hmm. Now Rick, I think this is another situation where there's a few ways my default answer, my go to I would say is going to be by having them in a people field that is not necessarily going to have it show up in my work. So in a lot of tools, those of us who have worked in tools where a more a little task based like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, those kinds of things, we're used to having one assignee, right. And when it comes to work, yeah, we want to have singular ownership because that's what translates to better outcomes generally speaking. But with SmartSuite we are not restricted in that same way. So we could add multiple assigned to fields and in this case we don't necessarily have to have it display in my work. Actually one of the requests right now, I think I might have submitted it honestly on a spot. SmartSuite's feature request board. Just don't mind me shamelessly plugging my own feature requests, but I'd love to see this field be called people and not assigned to to reflect that because I think when we see a sign to, we think, oh, my gosh, it has to be the owner or the assignee. It's not the case. So what I might call this is team members or introduced or known people. In other words, people who know this contact who have some kind of relationship with this contact, but are not necessarily the owner or responsible party. So in that case, I might choose something a little bit more compact, like Avatar only allow multiple entries. Maybe I want to restrict this to only include certain team members in this. Like, maybe I only want to look at internal team members and I'm going to choose not to display in my work add field. So in this case, maybe I'm in charge of the relationship with Diego here, but maybe myself and Melissa both know Diego and could speak to him if I was out of the office. Melissa's been introduced at some point down the line. So if we need to call Diego up, but I'm on vacation, Melissa could handle that and that wouldn't be weird. In terms of making sure Melissa has visibility into this, we could use views to make that happen. So we could have a view rather than just all donations or all donors. We can have a view called actually whether this is on the donation or the contact side. It could be on either one. It probably would make more sense on the contact side. Sorry for the confusion, but let's create a view called contacts and we could have this view grouped by that field, showing who is in charge of what person, who knows which each person. So relationship owner, we can have that as our grouping there. You can also have some fun swim lanes going on here too. So that's how I would go about this here. And I see there was another question that came in the chat here. That is contracts. Okay, perfect. So I. You guys have been really good today about keeping me somewhat on track, although I always managed to veer off. Let's talk about contracts, because that's where I went ahead next. Contracts is an addition to this view that I actually made on my own in about five minutes just to demonstrate how easy it is to demonstrate how we could expand this particular flow for contracts. The reason I wanted to include this here is because in the original, in the original livestream, told you guys we'd be doing some stuff on contracts, but when we skewed towards donors, I realized that's not going to be part of the main story, but I wanted to still include it to honor that original promise. So let's just say we're in situations where we've got an in between an additional piece of data, beyond just contacts and opportunities that are important for us to track. In this case, let's say we have things like paperwork associated with each deal. Paperwork, contract. This is going to be very common for service business examples. Right? And I'm sorry, that's super tiny, but you can hopefully see it now. Each opportunity or deal, in order for that sponsorship to be closed, for that a car to be sold, for that lawn to be mode, we need to have a contract in place because we are professionals and we want to make sure there's clear expectations. If that's a piece of information we need to have associated with our opportunity or deal, we have the same options we had before. We could add that as an additional field. What that would look like is coming into, say, our donations. And we'd add a field, as you see on this particular thing, saying receipt or contract. This would allow us to have an additional kind of checkbox to make sure we're fulfilling our promise, fulfilling our process, and have these pieces in place. What does that look like? Well, that could just be. We have a contract generated over in our sales tool. Maybe we use PandaDocs. We've got our contract there. We just upload it here for safekeeping. So all of our information is centralized. Or maybe we're overachievers and we want to use SmartSuite's new document designer and create our own documents here. I wanted to show you guys this because this is brand new. Came out I think this week, maybe a few days ago, currently in alpha release. But by the time many of you guys are implementing this, it'll probably be out of beta. This is SmartSuite's document designer. And when I say that SmartSuite has a really cool suite of features focused on service businesses, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. What this is is a way for us to create PDFs and other file types inside of SmartSuite directly using a drag and drop editor. So, for example, I could have something like a big old rectangle here for some reason, just celebrating the donation receipt title with a transparent center. And we can then use this PDF generator to export and print files that can either get saved and attached to that particular SmartSuite record or just emailed out and sent you. In this case, the donor. I know for nonprofits particularly, I did this far too many times of having to write out these manual donation receipts that don't sync with any of the data you have on hand. That's kind of frustrating. And so this document Designer allows us to have auto filled information based on a set template. In this case, I have things like text and rectangles that make this document formatted. Our text is pretty much consistent every time. But then we have these fields like designation, donor name, amount of donation that are dynamic and those are added by clicking on fields here. Choosing the magical field, including related fields and roll up fields that I'd like to have included like the company name of the donor and adding those onto this document. When I'm done designing my document, I can click preview and I can toggle between all of the records inside this particular flow and have the document automatically generated. So this is great for receipts, for contracts, for proofs, for anything else that you want to. You're manually right now taking information from SmartSuite, creating that Google Doc, mailing it off, all that stuff that is just asking for typos. This is how that could work. When we have say Cole's receipt here, we could export this or print this as a PDF. That looks beautiful. We could brand this all up and then we could save the exported file and attach it back to the record. As of right now, because this is an alpha feature, this isn't yet automated. Like it's not automatically adding to the record. But this is an alpha feature, guys. And it's really, it's surprisingly functional even where it's at right now. From my understanding, just based on my piece here, we are going to be seeing a lot more development in this feature just over the next few months. And I'm hoping by next quarter this is going to be fully functional. That's my own personal hopes here. But check out SmartSuite's community for more updates. And I guess this is actually a great time to point this out. You guys are not participants in the SmartSuite community, but you are as interested as I am about what's coming next. Subscribe to this channel, of course, but also check out the SmartSuite community for kind of a digest when you see new releases like this pop out. Anywho, so that is contracts. That's how we can add it here. So back to the question of do we need to have a contracts area? Well, you might not, right? Maybe what I just showed you of the document designer and attaching it here, that could be enough. And for most smaller offers, smaller services, this will be enough. But let's say you've got a more involved contracts process. You don't want to just send copies of things. You need them to be signed, you need them to be verified what have you. Well, we can just like before with our example here, we can choose to take this up the hierarchy one level and rather than making it just a field, let's make it its own app. And that's what I'm showing by the addition I have to this template which I created. It's not part of the core template, guys, sorry to tease you like that, but it's just something I simply created by clicking Add and writing contracts. If I zoom in again so we can more easily see this. What I have going on here is very simple title of contract, two signature fields, contract date and notes. That's it. No other fields here. Very simple form. If I want to change my page settings to just make this even more simple, I could just make it a one column layout so it's even more petite. There we go. Saving that. The reason we would do this and make this its own record is so that we can more easily have contracts generated dynamically. There's a lot of different ways we could go about this, but in this case I'm assuming a more just say a more simple approach to contracts where we have fixed terms that never change and we just need people to sign off on them. This would be great if you had say a waiver that you needed all volunteers to sign. You had a receipt of com or confirmation of receipt. You needed to have time stamped every time someone took the new volunteer training. Things like that would be great for this new contract piece. This is a form in SmartSuite that I've set up just using a few fields. Today's date, your signature and then a set text box. You might be thinking what a text box. But it doesn't say that over here. Don't be fooled. HTML block is just scary words for add whatever the heck you want. I think they should just call it that, don't you think? Add whatever you heck you want block. Once you add this block in, it looks like you can just type plain things, but you can also do slash and add a bunch of formatting and call outs to add as much pizzazz as needed. When you have that contract in there, you have something like this that can then be filled out by anybody. So let's just say 8, 14, 20 for some reason, 2000 signatures and submit it here. This will generate new contract records or in this case new confirmations of receipt inside our database. Why might we want this? Well, because we might want to have things just more features baked into it. We don't want to have all those extra fields cluttering up our main donations area. One other thing about this piece is just know that these fields can be, you know, explained in different ways. So just right today's date, we've got all the features that you would expect to see in terms of forms. We've got the question that's being asked, the title help text describing how to fill this out. And we have the field itself. This feeds into the fields that we created back on the record. So if I go back to this record, you'll see where that data just pulls in, fills in these fields. In the back end of the system we can set things like default values and date formatting. I just want to call this out for anyone who doesn't have the weird American date system. I don't understand why we do it in the order we do. Makes no sense. So if you have a logical way of managing your dates, just know not only you can change the formatting here to suit your preferences. And like, if you're working in multiple regions, make sure it's spelled out. You can also in your workspace settings, change this so that you have a logical date order. So rather than day month or rather than month day year, which makes no sense, we could do day month, year or year month, day. You can adjust that as needed in the workspace settings. So checking in on the chat, this is kind of our contracts flow how we feel it. Could we integrate it into a signing ability? Yes, we certainly could. So Candy. Well, I guess two ways. Let me add this, what I'm showing you right here does use a signature field assigning ability inside of SmartSuite. All we're doing here is adding a field signature and voila, we have it there as SmartSuite is adding permissions and conditional logic. Right now it's not supported in the same way for these fields that we can have them hidden or not hidden. That's still coming. But we can even lock down these fields if we wanted to, where only certain folks can see them as we as this evolves more. But yes, you can have these signatures here. Just know that when it comes to the contract form, this at this point is going to be generating a new entry how it's currently set up. If you're looking to use an outside signature tool, you could also do that and we can talk about that more if that's more your interest. Abby. Hey, good to see you. Abby asks, can that be added to the contract part so we can send it off and then have them sign and send it back? Good question. So right now, right now I would say yes. Ish. So what we would be looking at at that point is first of all, spelling contracts. That looks strange. What that would look like is having a automation in place. Abby. So let's just see. Let's say we have our contract here and there's certain fields we want to fill out. Let's say we want to have a dynamic terms field that we type every time from scratch. So we would write our terms or our deliverables or whatever here. If we wanted to have this emailed out to the client, it could look something like to do, do example, open up this record as it goes, maybe. There we go, fill in the fields that are dynamic and then we could email this out to the client. Share by email. When we share by email, we can include the cert, the specific email address and we can include the actual record information or just an attachment, a PDF of the record. As it stands, we want to be careful about our formatting here because this may not look as polished as what a proposal program might look like. Once we send that out, we can either have the link here saying link to sign, which takes them to that form, or we can kind of, we can do it in a few different ways. But what would then happen is they would fill in that form with the signature saying yes, I agree on the attached proof, blah, blah blah blah. We would end up with duplicate records, whoops, save changes. And we would just want to merge them together using an automation. This one's a little bit complex and honestly, if I think about it a little bit more, I might have a more succinct solution for you, Abby. But what I would think to do just off the bat is when a form is submitted, then let's find a record that matches whatever the information is that we're looking up based on and then update the records. So if they submit the form saying yes, I sign off, let's match it to the contract we have pending and let's update both things so that they're kind of connected. This find or lookup function is really rare to see in work management software and it is kind of the superpower I think we need to employ at this point. From my understanding of how to get this going, once we have this and we have this all synced, maybe we want to add an action of say, utilizing that document designer and sending a signed copy. But right now Document Designer is not currently quite there where it's supported on Automations. That'll probably be post, I mean probably post beta. Just my own guessing here but that would be the natural extension, I would say at this point this kind of flow would be a little bit more on the advanced side for SmartSuite in say three to six months, this will probably be so much easier. But right now I think it's a little bit cutting edge to go for the two way signature execution. Based on my knowledge, we may have a better workaround for you. And if we do, we'll be sure to publish a short on the channel or a video kind of walking that through. But that's my gut reaction, Abby. I hope that's helpful. I see there's some other questions here in the chat too. Jeremiah asks, how would you go about getting data from two different apps, contacts and companies at the same time? One form for both, one form for each or automation getting the data from. So if I understand correctly, which I might not be, Jeremiah, just. Just bop me on the back of the virtual head if I'm misunderstanding here. When it comes to using different apps, as long as we have them networked together, we can pretty much access them in all meaningful functionality. So let's just say we're over here, right? We've got contacts and we've got companies. This is a relationship that exists between the contacts app and the company's app. So if I go under basic info or is it personal info? Somewhere in here we have. There we go, the company relationship. So Dan works for ramjack. That's a hard company name to say. Once we have that linking in place, SmartSuite actually allows us to access this kind of like nested information by using formulas, using forms, using all sorts of different things, including the lookup function. This is full featured once we have this relationship in place. So let's say we're over here on the donation side. We have a donation from Paul and we're saying, okay, Paul donated. I'm just going to delete this for now. Paul donated and we want to know what company Paul works for. Smartsuite. Smart enough to actually look at Paul, find that information and tell us the result. That's what we're seeing here. How do we do that? Well, we can create a field called a roll up field, basically saying, hey, go carve that information that I had in there and summarize it. In this example, we're using a lookup field, which is kind of the same thing, but it's showing us just on one data point. So let's actually stay consistent with that look up. And here we can say, okay, Paul is who we're focused on. I Want you to look at that Paul field, the donor field, and based on the donor, look up and tell me the company they work for, add that field and then we can have that show up right here. So I hope that answers your question. I might, like I said, I might have misinterpreted Jeremiah and if so, just bought me and say, no, no, I meant this or meant this application, but that should settle that one. Can you please show me where to change the date settings, please? Yes, of course. So your settings for your account are going to be found up in this top corner here, where you can actually adjust all that happens inside your account, including time zones and date preferences and which region and language you want to work in. SmartSuite is actually offered in a bunch of different languages in the interface and in like the actual layout of things, updates and so on. So that's where you can find those settings in the top corner. But if you want a deep dive, which, hey, if you're talking about settings, it deserves a deep dive. Go to our first video in this YouTube live stream series. It's from two weeks ago on the day, and you can see a detailed breakdown of each setting, including where to find your date settings. Moving on, I see a question from Candy here saying, sorry, Candy Condi. I might be getting that wrong. Please apologize. Please apologize. I apologize. There we go. If I. It'd be great if we could integrate with an E signing service. Yes, it would. And you know what? You can. So that actually brings me to our next point in the live stream because y' all have been fantab fantastic at just telling me, you know, get your stuff, focus. So let me move on a little bit to some of the questions I have here. How should I add data into SmartSuite? Right. How do I get my contracts into SmartSuite? How does that work? How do I like what if I Want to use PandaDocs and have it talk to SmartSuite? Well, you've got four major options, including, I'm sure, some ones I'm missing. Oops. First of all, you could move your words around for no reason. Second of all, you could choose to just have the essentials in SmartSuite. So let's say you do have a document signing service. Use it, love it, make it work. You've got HubSpot in place. I forget who said they had that earlier. Let's say you've got the amazing CRM. Well, keep that and inside your SmartSuite account when it comes to information here, just store the stuff that's not stored anywhere else. Just store what you actually need to and anything that is already stored in another place. Like for example maybe your donations. All of this entire app for you. You have a donation management software. You don't need this, so just delete it and instead of having this entire app in place, just use links. So in the terms of Dan Cooper here we would just have a field called Donor Donation Profile and this would be a link to our donation management system where we would have. Maybe we'll have multiple even we could have multiple links here where we link out to Dan Cooper's specific profile on our donor management system. Same thing applies here to the question of contracts Candy where if you have a contract management system and it works and you want to keep everything inside say your Dubsado account, cool, do it. Just link to that profile inside a SmartSuite so you can trust SmartSuite as your source of truth, but no need to do double data entry. The second thing is what if you want to do something different? Maybe you like your document signing software but you want to have that information pull into SmartSuite. In that case you're going to be looking at integrations. SmartSuite is building a ton of built in integrations and automations. It's really cool. It's under the automations area and you can see the different built in ones that are coming right now. Integrations a little sad. Actions way more exciting and there are just more and more coming. I can't keep up with the number of integrations that are being built in and there seems to be some stuff coming soon that will make it blow up even faster. So if you have a tool that is already directly integrated, you can choose that here such as say HubSpot and this is how you could connect say when a HubSpot deal is closed or a contract is signed or an appointment is booked. Create something in SmartSuite. Our goal here is just to have a line in the sand where information is transferred and then it's not double data entry. If however you have say PandaDocs and there's not a trigger yet for when PandaDoc is submitted. In that case we'd want to look at a third party automation tool of some kind. The two common ones are Zapier and Make. Automate IO is also out there. There's a lot of different ones available. But go to Zapier or Make. I know there's hard names to search sometimes and you can set up an automation that says every time a cognito forms contract is Signed, create a new contract inside of SmartSuite. Absolutely no problem. I would say about a 10 minute one time setup and then you get the best of both worlds. Moving on to the other options you have available. You also have the import option. So if you are like the nonprofit I used to work at, you have your donations in spreadsheets and tracking your donors in a bunch, A bunch of spreadsheets. If you are in that position and you just want to get things imported, click the import button instead. You don't even need to worry about all this fancy setup of this or that. Just import. There's a CSV, import Excel, import Contacts, import from say Google Contacts or your Apple Contacts and so on and just get that data in here. That's your third option. Third, I can show the right number. And finally, if you don't have anything tracked, don't feel bad, okay? And just start adding it. I. We all start from somewhere, right? Maybe you've never tracked a single donor. Maybe you've never tracked a client you've had for your lawn care business. Maybe you have never tracked one drywall client you had. You never tracked somebody who has gotten haircuts from you or not. But you do have something. I'm sure. You have an invoice that was paid. You have your calendar that shows you where you were working. You have a sticky note. Start putting that into SmartSuite and in those cases your journey is a little bit more manual. But all you have to do is just start adding these records for the relevant details. That's your fourth option. And I was going to make a really exciting point about invoices and contracts here, but you guys, I mean you kind of stuck stole that from me by asking such great questions and we dove into that earlier. So I'm going to wrap up here and I want to just check in on the chat one more time, see if there's any other burning questions before we kind of conclude this lovely little live stream. Virtual exchange center is asking. Oh, sorry, looks the Tom is asking, is SmartSuite better for solopreneurs than ClickUp? I love the question. I would go to our ClickUp versus SmartSuite video and watch that for a detailed comparison. I think solopreneurs is a hard category because it puts a very, it's a very broad stroke right? There are solopreneurs who are making 10 million a year and have 200 contractors. There are solopreneurs that are side hustling after their two jobs that they're balancing. There are solopreneurs who you know are making 5 million a year just doing life coaching and that's their reality. I think the budget, the business model and your needs around technology are going to be a better indicator than your business size for that reason. So I would go to that video and watch it. Both ClickUp and SmartSuite are fabulous tools. They are both doing really cool things, but they're being developed with different priorities and for a different avatar in mind. So you're going to be able to accomplish great things in either of them as long as you have strong systems and processes. But the better choice for you is going to come down to what features you need, what features will you use and what tool makes you happy that you'd actually want to go in and work on. Sometimes that's even the biggest piece. So there's not a right answer here. Bob, Bob, you're making me so jealous right now. It's snowing outside and you're on a cruise ship. Well, thank you for letting me vicariously live through you. And Virtual Exchange center says, is there an integration with wix that you know of? Not directly, but I would bet if you go to some of those examples from earlier like Zapier or Make, you can most likely get something connected, particularly if you're using things like say WIX appointments or so on. I would look at the integration options. Jeremiah asks, is there an automation to leave a comment on a record rather than update a record? Yeah, it's updating a record and leaving a comment are kind of the same thing in SmartSuite's universe. And there's also this kind of middle ground of sending a notification. So the short answer is yes, but the long answer is actually there's a lot of options for how to do it. And comment is a much broader term in SmartSuite. You have a lot more modular then maybe where you're coming from. So yes and then some. All right, sweet. Looks like I handled the worst of the questions or the best of the questions. We'll see which way we go. I'll just wrap up and say if you are someone who needs a little bit more support on your process journey, right. This isn't a presentation. Despite talking about software. This isn't about software. Right. What we're here for is to help you build a process for client relationship management that makes results for your organization, whatever that organization is. So if you need any support on that journey, that's kind of what we do here. That's why we do these live streams. Besides, just because of the help of SmartSuite, our wonderful sponsor for today. But if you need any help, check out the description because not only can you find our affiliate link, you can also find ways to work with ProcessDriven on your system building journey. And Abby, you're so sweet. Who doesn't want us on our team? Thank you. Yeah, if you need any help, that's what we're here for. And we've worked with, what, 1700 teams now at this point. Oh, my gosh. On building out their work management software. And there are common trends and themes. And even as software keeps changing, the best practices and conventions can really save you a lot of time. So just let us know if you need any help on that front. However, I still got some more free stuff coming your way, so do not miss it. Next week we will be back for another live stream in the series. We can probably grab the link and put it in the chat there where we're going to be going deep on dashboards inside of SmartSuite. We did a little bit of this earlier, but guys, we are going to go geeky. Chart views, dashboards, reporting. You want to see any of that stuff? We'll be building on this example today and probably push it many steps further by building some dashboards in SmartSuite next week. Whatever tool you use, whatever process you're managing, whatever industry you're in, I hope this livestream was helpful and gave you some tools and inspiration to, you know, ultimately accomplish our goal, which is enjoying the process. All right, thank you guys so much for joining me. And until next week, I'll see you then.