Wanting to track follow up contact with potential customers - ideas?

You are looking for CRM. There are quite a few off the shelf options, and you could emulate one of them. Salesforce is well known, but there are plenty of others.

https://www.salesforce.com/form/sem/sales_salesforce-b.jsp?gclid=CIzQvoSKtNMCFYphfgodEcEB-g&d=70130000002E0YW&nc=70130000002IBXi&DCMP=KNC-Google&s_kwcid=AL!4604!3!118174245539!e!!g!!what%20is%20salesforce&ef_id=WJlGnAAABfuebEOX:20170420222607:s

You might want to check out Airtable’s template, Sales Pipeline. Sales Pipeline Template - Free to Use | Airtable

We have a number of customers that use Airtable for sales. (And we use it internally for our own sales, of course.) No disrespect to Salesforce intended (one of our cofounders previously led a product at Salesforce), but our customers have told us that one of the major benefits of using Airtable as a sales CRM is the flexibility that it gives you–with Airtable, it’s much easier to build a CRM that fits you/your company’s unique workflows, and very importantly, it’s flexible enough that you can change it on the fly as your company grows and changes.

The template that Ken linked to should be a good start! :thumbsup:

Hi Martin!

I use AirTable as a CRM and I do it by having multiple tables -

• Companies
• Tasks
• Contacts
• Deals

Here are screens of my fields for Companies, you should be able to work out the relationships I’ve built. The view you’re looking it is based on a filter called Scheduled Calls and is Filtered by date in the ‘Next Contact’ field and Grouped by Priority (a checkbox that supercedes any time) and Date.

Great suggestions all around - thank you. I had been working with something that looks like Steven Hambleton’s suggestion - and then I added a “link” column called "interactions"
with links in each field to individual Google Docs for each prospect where I can just list each interaction as I see fit, which are editable. Much thanks.

@Martin_Koop @Steven_Hambleton Do you have any suggestions on how to automatically generate a follow-up date based on either the last contact date or the current status of a project/client?

Here are a couple scenarios I could think of:

1. If I reach out to Person A today and leave him a message, I’d love to be able to make a follow-up date X # of days from today if a status was “Left Message.”

2. If I have finished a project with Client B and their project status was marked “Completed,” I’d love to have a follow-up Y # of days from now to see how things are going and to say hello.

I’m basically looking for a way for Airtable to automate generating follow-up dates based on my criteria, to prevent me having to manually put in follow-up days. I’m all ears for any insight you have. Thanks!

Hi Quinn

This isn’t something you’re going to be able to do with Airtable on it’s own but is possible with Zapier.

Set uo an Activities table to track all you client interactions and have a Zap triggered by New Rercord in View - filtered to give you those activities which you want follow ups created for - and then have the Zap create a new Activities record for the date you need.

You can even have Zapier send you reminders if you want - see the article I wrote about this on my blog:

http://software.kirknessassociates.com/blog_files/e79ad0b8405a917a32418eb5a194780d-19.html

Hope this helps.

Julian, hey and thanks so much – this is really really helpful and looks like exactly what I’m looking for. I am a Zapier user already, so this setup should be pretty straightforward. I really appreciate it! Love your site and how in-depth it is. Thanks again, brother.

OK, I’ll bite: Given the OP said,

I’m basically looking for a way for Airtable to automate generating follow-up dates based on my criteria, to prevent me having to manually put in follow-up days.

what does Zapier give him that Airtable doesn’t? I understand using a Zap gives you a much wider range of notification methods (as in: any), but if pulling a daily report showing actions due was sufficient, wouldn’t Airtable fill the bill? Or a I missing something extremely basic?

Thanks!

Hi

Yes, I think you are - Airtable has no native ability to generate the new tasks that @Quinn_Ballard is looking for (who I was responding to).

What he’s looking to do is create a new task based upon the status of another - this is easy to do in Zapier - and it would also be possible to use Zapier to provide notifications at suitable times as well.

Within Airtable itself, it would only be possible to have some calculated follow up dates in the contact’s main record - but you would either end up with loads of fields to record multiple follow-ups or you’d lose any ability to tract the history of your interactions with the contact - either would be lousy database design.

Julian

I understand now. We read his requirements differently — and we have different approaches to system design. (I understand your blog post better, now.) You’re using Zapier to create a follow-up reminder that doubles as a contact-tracking record in advance of the contact attempt. My approach would be to set a reminder date associated with the individual and have the user manually create the tracking record at the time contact was attempted. Six of one, half-dozen of the other — as long as you’re already a Zapier subscriber.

Thanks for the clarification; it was bothering me unduly. :slightly_smiling_face: