125: How to Create Your Own CRM with Alex Sherwood

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If you're just working by yourself or if you're just managing your personal tasks, just use whichever tool feels most comfortable for you in the simplest format possible. There's so many sort of productivity tools and gurus and bits of software that have been created for managing just your task list and it's so hard to find one that fits you perfectly in my experience. So don't be ashamed of just using something really simple and as uncumbersome as possible for that kind of thing. I see so many complex systems that really don't need to be that complex.

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Hello hello friends. I'm so excited to be here today with Alex Sherwood, also known as a Notioneer. He is a full time Notion Certified consultant, ambassador and creator who helps Notion users structure their Systems with his 50 plus templates, guides and consulting. Alex is the resident expert for our Freetime Operations Dashboard Promo Code podcast. If you want to check it out, a done for you guide to your entire business. He helps all of our new dashboarders get up to speed. Previously he managed a Salesforce CRM for more than three years that started with nine users and scaled to more than 75. I first encountered Alex during Marie Poulain's office hours where he walked us through how to build a CRM in Notion. As soon as I saw that video I knew I needed to reach out to him. Without further ado. Welcome to the show Alex.

Thanks very much. It's good to be here watching how.

Your mind works and how you were building this intricate CRM in Notion. It just blew me away. And I consistently hear from dashboarders who work with you one on one how you're just work your magic, create all these complex Formulas solve all these problems for them. So thank you for doing the great work that you do.

Yeah, no problem at all. I guess I'm sad enough to enjoy it, so it's a pleasure.

I get asked all the time from business owners and people who know that I love tech and tools what I use for my CRM. Now I can say notion, but it was always a question that vexed me and I know perplexes so many people. So let me start with what do you think is the issue with CRM software that's out there? Let's keep notion aside for now. Why is it that people feel so unsatisfied with CRM software? And I know Salesforce is kind of the crown jewel of it all, but even that can be quite expensive and complicated.

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a few things that can trip people up when they're starting to use a CRM system for the first time, which have some parallels with Notion databases and using Notion as well. Obviously one of the things is if you're just used to using sort of flat 2D spreadsheets where you're recording all of your information in columns and rows, then having to figure out how to manage data in a sort of hierarchical data structure where you might have a company record and then several contacts linked to that company, can be a really difficult thing to wrap your head around in the beginning. And then obviously if you are just trying to translate sort of what you've been doing in a spreadsheet into your CRM and not necessarily sort of understanding that structure, then you can end up trying to replicate a spreadsheet format. And that will probably work perfectly well in the beginning. But as your company scales, you're going to end up sort of running into various issues that that's going to create. And then the other obvious thing is that a steep learning curve usually involved in learning to use any CRM and they generally aren't the most user friendly systems to use anyways. I mean, they're systems for admin work anyway. Right. And so a lot of people just don't love using their CRM, especially because you can't customize it to suit the way that you want to work that easily if you don't have much experience, you know, with that kind of technical work. And so you're kind of stuck with a tool that isn't particularly user friendly or fun to use and using it for work that you might not enjoy that much either.

What do you think are the functions that a good CRM? Let's not talk about the big complex companies. Let's say for a small business owner, maybe with a delightfully tiny team, maybe not, what do you think a good CRM helps them accomplish?

It helps you accomplish a few different things depending on your role in the business. So obviously for members of a sales team that are using the CRM system, then having a place where you can keep track of all of the work that you need to be working on on any given day and using things like opportunities or deals to keep track of the sales that you're working on to make sure that you're going to be hitting your targets at the end of the month is really important. And then for the business, having the ability to kind of keep track of what everyone is working on and obviously see how well you're progressing towards reaching your forecast for the month or the quarter is really key. And then as things progress, maybe not so much in a small business, but in a medium sized business, particularly if you have a sales operations manager or a salesforce administrator or something, someone in that sort of role, you'll often find that you start to have more and more teams use the CRM because then you can get tons of value out of the data that's being stored as part of each team's work whilst they manage relationships with the customer and that sort of thing, and then obviously having a centralized hub for all of the information that the company or a lot of the information that the company is working on is incredibly valuable.

What about for a company of one, what do you think is the most beneficial?

Just keeping yourself organized on a day to day basis then and preferably if you can set up automations to help manage that process as well. Things like syncing meetings into your system so that whenever you have a meeting you can just open up the meeting page and you're ready to go and start recording your notes or sending out invoices to customers when you've marked a deal as one can be a huge time saver. And obviously it's also really useful to have that sort of repository of everything that you're working on as well.

Well, thanks to you, you said the magic word automation. Thanks to you I have connected Google Calendar to a Notion database with Zapier and the other day I got on the phone and really quickly I realized I wanted to take notes and so I searched the person's name, there they were in the GCAL sync database and I took all my notes for the call. I later then moved it into the CRM and I was so delighted it actually worked. Like, I don't move every meeting. A lot of the meetings that go on my calendar don't really need a home in Notion. But in that moment it came in so handy. So thank you for teaching me that.

No worries. It's great to hear.

I would love for you to share with us how have you set up your personal CRM? Because you've been on your own now for how long? A year and a half, since the.

Beginning of last year.

Okay, so beginning of 2021. Okay, so tell us, walk us through your CRM and what automations you have set up. Like a day in the life of Alex and his CRM. And we can of course say that it's in Notion.

Yes. Yeah, it is. And it's probably the place where I do spend the most of my time in Notion, aside from when I'm working on client projects, obviously. So I've basically set the CRM up. It's based on my advanced CRM template, which I was one of the first templates I created when I sort of discovered Notion, and that was built on my experience working with Salesforce for a few years before. So I wanted to see whether or not I could replicate Salesforce's structure in Notion using Notion's relational databases. And so I have an opportunities database which is where I keep track of my sales. I have an accounts database which would be the companies I'm working with and contacts linked to that so that I can record the contact details of the people that I'm speaking to. And then I have a communication database as well where I keep track of my meeting notes in the same way that you do. Again, I have Google Calendar feeding into that, creating a page for me every time I have a meeting that gives me a really nice sort of schedule view as well. And then as I kind of touched on before I started building out my CRM further. So on top of that I've kind of added a database for keeping track of the projects and then also tasks, so that once I have got an agreement to work on a project with a client, I just create a project page and then make a list of all of the different tasks that I need to be completing for that project and keep track of everything there. And then obviously, because I'm using master databases for that, I can see all of my tasks and both the tasks I need to complete for clients whilst I'm working on projects and also the tasks that I need to work on whilst I'm managing the rest of my business. So those are kind of the main components. And then in terms of automation, the other thing that I have in the CRM is a sort of line items database which is connected to my products database. And that just lets me essentially generate invoices for my opportunities. So when I've closed an opportunity and I'm ready to start working on a project, all I do is list the various services that I'm providing for that customer in my line items database. Selecting products from my products database, put the quantity in there. So it might be, you know, 10 hours or something like that. And Notion does all of the calculations for me and then feeds that information into a Stripe invoice. So I can just change the opportunity status to ready to invoice and that sends an invoice to my customer and I'm ready to go.

Okay, this is so wild. I've never heard about automation on this end of things. When you say you have a line items database, is that essentially your billing? Like every time you are working on the clock for a client you add it or you creating a deliverable. Is it called your line items database or is it called invoicing, how do you call it?

Yeah, it's my line items database. So the structure is basically you have opportunities which your sales products at the bottom of the hierarchy, which would be the different services I offer to my clients and then line items let me select a product and input a quantity for that product. So if it was my hourly rate, it would just be 10 multiplied by my hourly rate and then that is linked to my opportunity so that it calculates the total price of that particular or that combination of different services. So I would have a different line item for each different service and then it totals off and calculates the price for the invoice.

So when it calculates the price and then you mark the status, ready to invoice, is it Zapier that's connecting Notion to Stripe?

It's actually Make. So when I first got started with Notion, I began by using Zapier because it's the more user friendly tool, or at least I thought it was. And then over time I sort of slowly switched over to using make, which used to be called Integromat. Just because for example, Zapier doesn't let you link pages from different databases together. And also if you need to start building logic into your automations, then MAKE makes it much easier to manage those different sort of paths that your automation needs to go on depending on different scenarios. So basically it's a much more powerful tool than zapier. In my experience. And it's a little bit more technical to learn, but it's definitely worth it.

So do you ever have the temptation once you see that make is more powerful? Have you moved a lot of your zaps over to make just so they're all in one place? Or do you mostly then lean on make when you have something more complicated to do?

Yeah, it's mostly the latter. You know, my zaps that I had set up in Zapier still work and still do the job perfectly well. So it's only been the things that I was trying to do in Zapier that I couldn't do that I then set up in make and obviously anything going forwards now because I know how much easier it is to modify scenarios in make as well.

You said there's maybe a higher learning curve for people to figure make out.

It's a bit like, you know, using notion versus using a spreadsheet. It's definitely not as intuitive. It's a tool that exposes more of the technical complexity that's involved in sort of setting up your automations to you. But the flip side of that is because it's exposing that complexity, you also have the ability to configure it at a sort of greater level of detail. So ultimately it's easier to use even though it's harder to learn.

I want to ask you what other makes you have? I don't know how they call their individual units, but first, do you ever get worried that there will be some kind of mistake or anything? I don't know. I've been nervous to automate anything having to do with invoicing because I just get paranoid if something goes wrong and then it automatically triggers the stripe which automatically emails the client. Do you check in on that process or you feel pretty confident that by the time you change is it a select in Notion, you change the select, then you already feel good, you know, it's good to go.

I have a link database view which displays the line items that are linked to each of my opportunities inside the opportunities page. So I can basically see exactly what the customer will see when that invoice is generated in stripe and obviously sent to them. If you were nervous about that, then you could still set the automation to generate the invoice for you based on your line items or whatever your database is in notion and then just create it as a draft so that you can then go into Stripe and click Send once you've reviewed the invoice manually. So yeah, maybe that'd be a good option.

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One thing going back to the CRM that I realized I have databases that are automated for anyone who downloads one of my toolkits like the Freetime Toolkit, the Author toolkit, or purchases one of my products. I use Kajabi for the backend. I'll put all this in the show notes, but I realized that I don't want to have to go into Kajabi, do an export and then see who is part of every product that I offer, free or paid. And so I have them exported. Then I realized I have all these duplicates because if someone has downloaded the FreeTime toolkit, the author toolkit, they joined BFF and they got the dashboard. Now they're in four places. And so I could see how a CRM could at least unify the data for someone like that that's gonna be in multiple places. Because I did realize there's no one source of truth where I can make notes. Even if it's a big milestone that person has coming up, their birthday, you know, they're getting married or they just had a baby. Like stuff like that. Not to be creepy, it's not notes about who they are or something like that. But that's where I find a CRM helpful is that our minds are not that great at remembering all those little details for all the people that we might want to acknowledge. Or just even for me, remembering how many kids someone has like at scale I can remember in one off conversations, but then across my entire extended network. No, I don't always remember that. So I want to ask you. You and I work together. We work together through free time. You do one on one onboarding for anyone who buys the dashboard. We also co host a monthly freetime dashboard office hours. You and I sometimes have a one off meeting and right now we're recording a podcast. So outside of the GCAL export to your notion database for meetings, you probably have many meeting instances that I've been a part of. Do you also then Have a Jetty Blake card somewhere in a master CRM, of course. Okay, tell us about that. So what's your process when you realize you're going to have more than one interaction with someone? When do they get a card? In the main CRM, everyone gets a card.

Actually, I'm not stingy with my cards. So when I'm first creating a proposal for somebody, if it was going to be a potential client, I would just give them that status and add them to the database. And obviously that's useful for things like tracking my conversion rate as well when I'm speaking to people that project may or may not materialize. But yeah, you know, everyone gets added straight into my main contacts database with different statuses. So I can filter that database. And that way I know that there's only one place that I ever need to go to to find the details about anyone that I'm working with. And for someone like you, if I was going to be working on or with several people that we both have relationships with or something like that, I can also tag you as a referral source or whatever that relationship is. So that gives me a really good way to kind of see obviously everything that I'm working on for you or with you and sort of just keep track of the total value of those projects and all of that kind of thing.

I love the idea of creating a referral source. I have a line that's open text called how we met or how we first connected. But it didn't occur to me to make a relation where I could just pull in another name, another card that with for listeners. If you're not using notion, a relation at least allows you to click and link to that person instead of just having raw text that could then become duplicated and redundant.

That's the beauty of relations, right? Where you can just link to that one contact record. And where I work with you in several different ways, I'm still just linking to that one record. And then if I do want to see everything that I've worked on with you, or including my meetings that I'm having and things that we're doing like this together, I just open your page and I can see all of the clients that you've referred me to, all of the meetings that we've had, and everything in one place, basically from those.

Different databases, after you do have a meeting with me, let's say, whether it's office hours or this podcast in the GCAL database, I would imagine that you also have a relation in your CRM where You pull in all those meetings, is that right?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, So I can see that.

So then if you go to my card in your CRM, you actually see a field that says, I don't know how, you'll tell me how you call it meetings. And then you can see, oh, we've met 10 times. You could click on any one of them for notes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Does it ever annoy you to have to click into 10 different meetings? For me personally, I might rather have all the notes just in toggles or something below your card, but I could see how it's less work sometimes maybe to have all those 10 separate instances.

Yeah, I mean, the toggles would be a great solution if all you were doing was trying to keep track of those notes, sort of in a single contacts page. But the thing is, where I'm feeding my meetings into my communication database using that automation, I'm already creating those pages automatically there. So it's then easier to just link those to the contact page and have a dedicated page for each meeting. It's definitely clunkier working with different databases and just databases in Notion in general and having to open each of those pages. Side Peak is one of Notion's new features that's been really helpful. I don't know if you've found this too, but it allows you to kind of see that list of meetings that you're having on the left hand side of the page and then open the details or the meeting notes from that meeting on the right and you can just click through that list then without having to open each page, close it and go back to the list and find the next meeting that you wanted to check on. So Notion is definitely making some improvements to help with that sort of thing as well.

I'm a big fan of side Peak View. I get so excited. Like any functionality, they roll out, I get so happy. Like Emoji Reactions because every time they do it kind of puts one more tick in the column of why I love it even beyond Slack, because sometimes with Slack, oh, Emoji Reactions was such a helpful way to communicate. And so I'm really happy now that little things like that do make it easier and do reduce friction.

Yeah. And they've got a new head of product and I think he's probably focusing more on this side of things now. So, yeah, I think we're going to keep on seeing more and more improvements.

You mentioned that you're not stingy with setting up cards in your CRM for anyone and everyone you cross paths with that Overwhelms me, but I could see the benefits. So do you ever get overwhelmed? Do you ever feel that your CRM has too much going on, too many people, and it's getting in the way because there's so much in there? Or are you happy that there's no person falls through the cracks?

I know what you mean. And people also often ask, will my database get really slow if I'm adding tons of records to it and that kind of thing? Basically, the solution there is just to set up different filtered views of your database, and then you're obviously working with a much smaller subset of information from that database. So if I just want to find a particular person, obviously I know who I'm looking for. So it's very easy for me to just search for that person's name in the search bar. And the fact that there's however many hundreds of contacts in that database as well is pretty much irrelevant at that point, because I can find that person instantly. So I definitely don't try and look at the whole database at the same time, because that would be overwhelming.

One thing I found helpful is that I create a reminder field with a date calendar. So you select a date from the calendar. I call it reminder. And then in notion, if you choose a date, you can set a reminder. And so I created a view that says reminders this month or reminders this week. So then I can click on that and see, oh, here are all those different milestones that I was mentioning I wanted to track. Here's who's coming up this week. That's been one thing that's been really helpful for me. Do you have any views like that that have been particularly helpful for you? Your go tos.

One view that I really like is set up to show me how long it's been again, because I'm feeding those meetings into my communication database and linking them to contacts. I can then create a view which shows me how long it's been since I've spoken to a particular contact and maybe flag certain people that I want to contact every month or every six months or whatever. So I can just create a formula that gives me how long it's been since I've spoken to somebody. And then I have a view which shows me, here's everyone that you're kind of overdue to get back in touch with at this point. So I can work my way through that list really easily.

Yeah. To that end, I have a select that I call Kadence. So when I add someone to the CRM, I call Mine K I t keep in touch. Yeah, because CRM started to annoy me so much, but I set a cadence like, oh, this would be a good person to follow up with annually or monthly things like that. So that then I can also filter. But I love that you have a formula of how long it's been. That's a good one. A lot of business owners, when they ask me about what CRM software I recommend, of course I would recommend Notion now and I have tried a few. But going back to what you said closer to the beginning is that it really depends on your goals and what you would find most helpful and what you want to track in the business. Do you want to track clients? Do to you want. Do you want to be like Alex and track every meeting that goes on your calendar? So how could you help a business owner assess what they want to get out of a CRM? Those are conceptual questions that no matter what software they end up with, they need to make the software work for them. And I think Sometimes the reason CRMs get so overwhelming is the amount of data, it is the amount of fields that you want to track about each person or client or potential client. And it just can get quickly overwhelming. And that's why I think again, I know Salesforce is kind of the runaway hit at the enterprise level, but there's all kinds of smaller tools and again now throwing Notion into the mix with a little bit of judging and coaching with Alex to customize it precisely. But before they even set up the software, what are the crucial questions that they need to understand about how they want to use their CRM?

It really is just a question of sort of focusing on the outputs that you want to get from the CRM. So the nice thing about using a tool like Notion, obviously is it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. Whereas with a pre built CRM software, you would have a long list of fields in front of you and feel like you have to complete those every time you create a new record. With Notion, you don't. You can just create the fields for the information you want to keep track of. So then I would basically just focus on obviously what processes do you need to be able to manage? What pieces of information do you need to record about those processes in order to make that process as simple as possible? And then if you do have particular reports that are going to be really important for your business, which, I mean a simple example would obviously be how much you're earning each month or how much you're forecast to earn in the next month. You just need to set up your CRM system so that you can record the data that you're going to need to keep track of in order to do that calculation. Really is just a question of sort of starting with your end goal in mind and then only adding the fields and the information to your CRM that you need in order to get to that end goal rather than trying to keep track of absolutely everything you could possibly think of that you might need to keep track of in your CRM.

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Speaking of reports, it seems like another obvious report might be how many potential client conversations you had and then how many became clients. Now. Currently, when I first got started with Notion, I didn't know about Relations, so I set up a potential corporate client set tracker, AKA Pipeline for licensing, and I also have a separate database for potential coaching clients, whether on the pivot side or the free time side. And that just tracks where they are in the process. And then once they become an active client, that's actually a separate database that shows what coach they're working with and different types of information. Do you think I'm setting this up incorrectly? That actually it should all be part of one big mega CRM? And then when I'm looking at potential corporate clients and where they are in the pipeline, it's actually just pulling in a very filtered view of that CRM?

Probably yes. So the only thing there is if you're keeping track of very different sets of information, even though it's a sales process that you're managing for your corporate clients and also for the other clients that you work with. If that information that you were keeping track of for each of those groups was very different, then it might be worth using separate databases for that. Just to keep your page layouts clean, make sorting, filtering and grouping more straightforward and obviously your overall system more straightforward as well. And then you know, if you did need to do reporting on here's how much I'm earning from both of those groups, you would still be able to do that by linking those pages to report pages, maybe in a dashboard. So it does depend on your use case.

Okay, tell us now, what other makes are we missing? I mean I'm sure there are even some zaps, some really simple automations that are low hanging fruit that let's say you're going to work one on one with a client other than the GCAL export, what's another must have zap and then do you have any other must have makes that you've created?

I'm mostly using my zaps for things like reporting. So I like to pull data out of Stripe as well into a Google Sheet so that I can do a little bit more detailed analysis in my Google Sheets than I can using Stripe's reporting tools without having to pay for Sigma, which is their paid reporting service. And then with Mate, I automatically create my projects once I've signed a deal with a client. So that's a nice time saver. Obviously it copies all of the relevant information from the deal that I would also want to see on the project and sets that up all for me nicely. It's kind of helpful to have a specific naming convention for my opportunities so that I can recognize them easily. And rather than having to remember exactly how to type that out and make sure I get the format right every time. I just use an automation where I record the close date and the client's name and basically a brief description of the project. And then I have a make automation that combines all of that information together and gives me a nice looking title for my opportunities and projects.

Very interesting. So it's pulling and you can do that in Zapier.

You could do that in Zapier. Yeah.

I was surprised to hear Google Sheets still in the mix when you mentioned exporting Stripe to Sheets. If you are looking at time tracking or I don't know, I'm thinking of tools like Harvest if that comes in, if you've completely replicated what Harvest could have done. Because I think One of the big benefits of Notion is I was able to cancel so many software services. What are you doing with the data that you pull from Stripe into Google Sheets?

So the reason it's feeding into Google Sheets rather than a Notion database is a. I wanted to be able to create charts with that data. And to be fair, there are some Notion integrations now that let you create some basic charts with your data in a Notion database. But you still have a little bit more power there in Google Sheets. And also I use a service called Glide, which is a no code tool that you can use to build basically mobile apps and now web apps as well. And so you can have sort of a very powerful way to view data from your Google Sheet in different formats and easy access to it from your phone. It was nice to have my data in Google Sheets for that many listeners.

Will not be familiar with the no code movement you mentioned a couple times, even when we were preparing, you don't need to know how to code. You don't need to know coding to achieve much of this. That said, having experience writing code is incredibly helpful. I could say I've never done back end development, I just taught myself front end HTML and css. But the logic of how to make things work, how to make things show up on a website the way you want them, the look and the functionality, it is helpful when applied to tools like Zapier and Make. And it sounds like Glide, but there's this whole movement now called no code and no code software, Notion being one of them where you can set up very complex databases that people used to need to know. I don't know, Python, SQL, C, like all these crazy coding languages that you don't anymore. So that's my little snippet about no code. But can you also share what does no code mean? And if we haven't lost them completely by now, the people who are listening who are saying, ugh, my brain just doesn't work this way. And I can even say that looking at how you work, Alex, like, oh my gosh, no magic. You work with formulas. Truly my mind does not work that way. But there is so much that people can learn with no code. So just go ahead and riff on that wherever you want to take it.

I've had a little bit experience working as a developer because when I was working with Salesforce, I taught myself to write some code. And it is as difficult as learning another language and incredibly frustrating in the beginning. But as you say, it does teach you some of the fundamental principles that you will then end up using with automation tools and any piece of software basically that you end up using in the future. So that's really valuable. You definitely don't need to sort of learn those skills by learning to be a developer, though. And just like everyone else, or just like most developers as well, I usually end up googling how to handle a particular thing. I'm writing a formula in Notion for the first time. There's always going to be a guide online which explains how to write that formula in Excel, which you can then just translate into Notions format. The whole point of no code is you can build incredibly sophisticated systems now without writing any code. Right. Thanks to these amazing tools that we have, which are designed for people like you and me to use without any specific technical knowledge. It's a skill that's worth embracing because as time goes on, these tools are only going to get better and better. You will find it incredibly valuable.

What you just said one time I was googling people, I think underestimate the power, exactly as you said, of searching, like, how do I do xyz, whether searching the help center of the software or just searching on Google. And I solve a lot of problems that way. One day I found this perfect solution. I scroll down to the bottom and. And the page said, by the way, if you haven't, check out Jenny Blake's FreeTime operations dashboard. That's because it was you and this was your page, your formula tutorial. I was so tickled. That was cool. Yeah, small world. Small world. But also you create such helpful stuff. So then again, it's not surprising if.

I have any superpower. It's just being good at Googling stuff.

Yes, I often say the same thing. And that's how you learn. If you're willing to just stick it out, do some Googling. And it's a lot of trial and error too. I recently really cracked a case on something, but it took me four or five hours. You can almost see it as a puzzle. I interviewed A.J. jacobs. I'll put the link in the show notes on the Pivot podcast about puzzles. He wrote a book called the Puzzler. It can be really fun, actually, if you think of all of this CRM and beyond as a puzzle. I actually find it quite engaging. I get in the zone. I get really committed to solving it. It feels so, so satisfying when you do break through and make headway. And it is like a treasure hunt. There's all these resources out there. It's challenging. You have just enough skill, hopefully to try to meet that challenge. But Then it's so rewarding, especially when that goes toward automating something that then your life is easier ever after.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Couldn't put it better myself.

Well, this is so fun to just deep dive into Notion again. Maybe it's like nerds only are listening still at this point. What did I miss? Let's say, specifically as it relates to a CRM, someone's listening. They feel slightly hopeful but still overwhelmed, still a little wary. What would you say, beyond thinking through those questions you mentioned, what could be one small next step they could take?

As is the case with most software solutions and certainly Notion as well, definitely don't try and use all of the CRM functionality or functionality that you find in a template in the beginning. Obviously if you're using Notion, the nice thing about Notion is you can start by basically working with documents and sort of progress from there to using databases and things. But even if you are using a software package, maybe do just start by using the Contacts database to keep track of the contact details of everyone that you need to speak to, and then progress from there to using companies and opportunities.

Are there any other fields that are helpful to have in a CRM or helpful or quirky? Something that we wouldn't think of, you know, so it could be first met, how we met, referral source, last call, last meeting, whatever. That's kind of the obvious stuff. I also do write down if I know their spouse, mailing address, kids, upcoming milestones. But do you have any kind of quirky or unique fields that you've added that we might not think of?

Not I can think of off the top of my head, to be honest. I tend to keep it mostly business.

Yeah, well, listeners can call in, then call it. That's like as if we had old school radio. You can leave a voice memo@itsfreetime.com Ask Alex. This is so fun. I always ask before we close out, if you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

If you're just working by yourself or if you're just managing your personal tasks, just use whichever tool feels most comfortable for you in the simplest format possible. There's so many sort of productivity tools and gurus and bits of software that have been created for managing just your task list, and it's so hard to find one that fits you perfectly in my experience. So don't be ashamed of just using something really simple and as uncompersome as possible for that kind of thing. I see so many complex systems that really don't need to be that complex.

That is the next level of systems. First you got to build them in a complex way because you're learning and you don't really know better. Then they get simpler over time. Not all more complicated.

Yes. Yeah, it's like the meme right of that chart that sort of goes up in an arc and then comes back down again and on both sides. You're just using Apple Notes to record your task list or whatever.

That's so funny. Okay, if you find that meme, send it to me. I'll put it in the show notes. Alex, this is so fun. I'm going to link to all your good stuff. Alex also sells, for very reasonable price, a advanced CRM template. So if you do want to get started with just a CRM in notion, he has already built it for you. So I'll put that in the show notes. And if you want to join us and fellow free timers with the full on done for you Dashboard, we would love to have you. You get two one on ones with Alex. You can go to itsfreetime.com dashboard use promo code Podcast Alex, is there anywhere else you would like to send people to learn more and keep in touch?

Just anotioneer.com is obviously a great place to go to find notion templates and all of my guides and content that I'm creating. So I'll see you there.

Amazing. And maybe you too will encounter Alex as you do a random Google search on how to do something. Thank you so much Alex. And thank you for being our dashboard hero, helping everyone work out all the really complicated stuff.

No worries. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, and big thanks everybody for listening.

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