Use Notion as Customer Relationship Management System

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System is a tracking dashboard that aims to manage the way your business interacts with customers and potential customers and improve relationships with your customers. This becomes a single source of truth for account managers and everyone else working on the account to have an overview of what has happened, what customer requests are pending and how best to plan the engagements ahead.

If you have used SalesForce before, then you should be already familiar with the system of logging phone calls and emails. Today, we will explore how we can use Notion, a flexible productivity tool with many useful ready-built elements, as a Customer Relationship Management System for your business. We will explore how to use different Notion components to build your own CRM, including Notion Properties, Views, Databases, filtering and sorting rules.

Let’s get started with a basic Notion CRM system and gradually add more advanced components. We will be walking through a free TaskRobin CRM Template to show you how you can utilise this free template to quickly get started with using Notion as your CRM system.

You can get a free copy of TaskRobin Notion CRM Template here

Save emails in Notion Database

The idea of the Notion CRM system is really simple. We will make use of Notion databases to store some raw data points, similar to how you would use Excel or Google Sheets. Then we will use a customer dashboard to display the relevant data to each customer on a separate Notion page.

Let’s start with logging email communications so that your entire team can easily track what is the latest interaction you’ve had with your customer.

We have a Notion database to store all the raw email data that we have. We will record all the important email information, such as subject, sender, cc, date, message, attachments etc. And also two additional toggles for managing the tracked emails, namely the “Status” and “Email Tags” field.

There are two ways to save your emails to this Notion database. The first way is the good old copy-and-paste. You can copy and paste all the crucial information from your email inbox manually, but this is time consuming and doesn’t help you with getting attachment files into Notion.

Alternatively, you can use TaskRobin to automatically save emails to Notion. You can forward your emails to a private robot TaskRobin inbox and all emails will be automatically uploaded to Notion. All the email database fields will automatically be filled for you and your attachments will also be uploaded to Notion. If you turn on the auto forward option in your email provider, you can automatically save all your emails to your Notion database.

Creating a CRM Dashboard

Now that you have your emails in Notion, we want to create customer pages as dashboards to display the latest interactions and track what is the status of the customer.

In the main CRM Portal Notion page, you can scroll to the “Contacts and Dashboard” section and click the “+ Add New Contact” button to create a new page for a new contact or customer that you have. There are walkthrough guides highlighted in yellow text in the newly created Notion page to help you setup this page.

Firstly, there is a customer details section that allows you to enter some basic information and quick remarks about this customer. Then, there are 4 sections presenting the logged emails in our Notion CRM email database.

The first section, called “High Priority Email Tasks”, focuses on displaying emails that have been tagged with “Urgent” and “Todo”. You can either tag the emails in the email database manually, or add a #tag when saving it with TaskRobin and the #tag will be applied to your Notion email database entry.

Next, in the “Latest Emails” section, you can see the most recently saved email communications with this customer based on the “Received On” column in the email database. This gives you a quick view of the latest activities with this account.

Then, in the “Follow Up Required” section, we display the email tasks that is pending a reply or an action from your team. This display section is filtered based on the “Status” column in the email database and will display relevant entries with the “To Follow Up” status value.

Lastly, we have a “Calendar View” to help you quickly visualise the interaction velocity your team has with your customer. This is helpful when you are doing a checkpoint on the account and wondering if it is time to follow up on certain items.

Create and auto fill tags in your custom properties

If you need to automatically apply a tag to all your saved emails, then TaskRobin’s auto fill rules can preset and fill in those properties with the values you defined whenever a new email is saved.

You can create an auto fill rule on one of your select or multi-select properties with a tag value such as “New” or “Todo”, and all emails that you save via TaskRobin will create Notion items in your database with those tags applied automatically.

Subsequently, you can create additional sort and filter rules in your Notion Views to tailor the CRM template to your actual workflow.

Hopefully this template and this article can give you a jumpstart on creating and customising your very own Notion CRM System. A CRM system is a crucial part of any successful business and you should consider creating one with minimal costs with Notion and TaskRobin as soon as possible.

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