Building a ‘Personal CRM’ with Airtable
You know too many people but not enough about them.
Of course I know, Lillian! She’s a project manager at Google… or was it Facebook? Hmm. She has two — maybe three — beautiful children. Oh, she also introduced me to Bob (or maybe it was Ben) at Evernote. Wow, I don’t know Lillian at all.
Two years into my professional career, I realized that I met way too many people to remember. I quickly began to forget important information about each person, and I saw it becoming a problem for the future.
After evaluating different ways of tracking and updating information about people in my life (Excel, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, etc.), I decided on Airtable. It’s flexible, mobile-friendly, and it will become valuable as I manage other parts of my life with more tables.
If a relational database, Microsoft Excel, the “Cloud,” and a free-spirited hippie somehow had a baby, it would be Airtable (this will make sense soon).
How I designed my People table
The first column in a table should be a unique identifier. All subsequent columns will represent fields describing each unique identifier. For my personal CRM (I call it my “People” table), the unique identifier / record is each person’s full name.
Next, I decided which information I wanted to include for each person. It had to be enough information to be useful, but not so much that the process of maintaining the table would be cumbersome. After some initial debate, I decided on the following fields:
Met how? — how did we meet? School, work, party, etc.
Met through — here, I linked unique identifiers from the same table that show the person who introduced us and any important mutual friends. Luckily, this is a relational database. If I see “Jeff” as the person that introduced me Sarah, I can click on “Jeff” next to Sarah’s name and see all of his information as well. It would look like the below:
City met, phone number, email, occupation, employer, gender.
LKD — I linked each person’s LinkedIn profile because my occupation and employee data will be outdated soon.
Notes — here, I remind myself of information that is unique to that person. Do they have interesting hobbies? Are they looking for a job? Did I promise to buy them a drink? Whatever.
Skill — if this person is exceptional or horrendous (either technically or socially), I note it here. So if you need an amazing designer, I can simply refer to the table and filter the Occupation and Skill fields.
Date entered — Airtable automatically tracks when each record was created.
Dude… why not just use Excel?
Let’s pause for a second. Though this sounds like Excel, it’s actually quite different. Apart from also being a relational database, the type of information each field/column is designed to carry is useful and functional.
For example, maybe I want to attach files that are relevant to each person (a resume, picture, etc.), it’s easy.
As for my Notes field, it’s designed to handle long text. Once I click into the cell, the resulting pop-up makes it easy to read text that contains multiple paragraphs.
There are many gems that make this a much better option than Excel, but that’s not the main point of this post so I’ll discuss these minimally (however, I’ll discuss the benefits of creating new tables and how to integrate them with the People table below).
Ok, back to business.
The initial creation of the table and making updates
Let’s face it — if you want to build a personal CRM, the greatest investment will be upfront. Over the course of three months, I slowly entered data from my iPhone contacts into my CRM. I won’t lie, the process was long, but it wasn’t all that bad because I entered the information piece-meal.
Now, whenever I meet new people, I create a record at the end of each day on my laptop or on my phone (it’s surprisingly functional on mobile). I spend maybe two minutes per new record — not bad at all.
How does the Airtable personal CRM become more valauble over time?
Now that I already have a personal CRM, let’s say that I wanted to create a new table that includes numerous companies that have business development potential.
One of the fields in this new table could include people that you know at each company. In this particular field, you have the ability to link the names to your personal CRM, which is incredibly useful.
In the “Apple” record, for example, I can simply click on “Michael Scott” and have everything I need to know about him in a pop-up on the screen without ever leaving the Biz Dev table.
Now, if I want to reach out to Michael, I have important information about him at my fingertips.
As you become an Airtable power user (I am not there yet), you will begin to realize even more possibilities. The tool is meant to be flexible, as discussed by their founder Howie Liu on ThisWeekInStartups with jason.
How can Airtable improve?
As you can probably tell, this process is manual and is ripe for automation. Airtable can be linked to numerous outside services (BaseCamp, Box, Instagram, etc.); however, many of these integrations are completed through outside providers, such as Zapier.
Some work integrations work well, others not so much (I’m not saying anyone is at fault for this — it’s hard to accomplish). Personally, I would like Airtable to bring some key integrations in-house to provide a better experience.
I tinkered with automating the creation of a new record when I input people’s information into my mobile contacts. Ideally, each time I enter someone’s name, employer, phone number, and notes into my phone, it would auto-populate as a new record in my CRM. The product isn’t there yet, but I think it will be sooner rather than later.
This is by no means a full-proof guide of how you should built your personal CRM. Think of it as inspiration, but you should built a table that best suits your needs. Have any suggestions for my table? I’d love to hear it!
