A free client relation management system tutorial
We recognise that when you are starting out, or trying to cut expenses, it can be difficult to find a CRM software that is affordable and does all the things you need it to do. If you are just starting out this is a fantastic place to start. Notion is a free online software that allows you to create anything you want.
This tutorial will be in depth, and walk you through the basics of Notion, as well as the template and how tow work it. Once you learn the basics of Notion- you can tweak you template to be whatever you need it to be specific to you.
Getting started with Notion
1. In order to get started, you’ll need to visit Notion and download the free software. Once you have downloaded the app for desktop you can create an account. Don’t worry, its free. Everything in this tutorial is free.
2. Now that you have Notion and an account let me walk you through the software and explain the basics.
- In this short video tutorial, you’ll learn:
How notion is structured
– Pages
– Databases
– Blocks
3. Great, you get the jist of Notion and how it flows together. Let’s copy over your template in to your workspace now.
Click here and then click the ‘duplicate’ icon in the top right hand corner.
Congrats! You’ve copied the template in to your own Notion workspace and you own it. If anything every goes awry and you change something and can’t figure out how to get it back, you can always delete your template and re-copy it into your workspace again- but this would be a clean install and you’d lose your clients and databases. This is a last ditch effort. Reach out to the team before going to that effort.
4. Let’s take a quick walkthrough of your template and show you the pages and databases. This way, it’s easier to follow when we start inputting information.
THE DATABASES
There are 5 data bases in your CRM:
1. Contacts
2. Tasks
3. Projects
4. Invoices
5. Notes
Contacts- This is where your clients and enquries will live. It is where anyone who has had contact with you will live. Past and present clients. You can organise how you view these contacts by viewing all of them, current clients and archived clients.
Tasks- any of your tasks that you need to complete will live here. You can relate these tasks to any client or any project or just leave them as a task in the task view. These are actionable things to do that can be ticked off. As you tick things off your to do list, it will be moved to the archived task list.
Projects- your clients will live in projects. Thinking of it as a hierarchy projects are at the top and clients can fit in multiple projects or only one project- it depends on how you want to build out your CRM.
Projects
-Clients associate to projects
— tasks associate to clients or projects
— notes associate to clients or projects
Invoices- Invoices is where you will create your client invoices and associate them to the project. You can also associate them to the client- but it makes sense to have it follow the project and not the client. The template allows for both. If you don’t want to see invoices in client view, you can simply hide that property, or delete it. That way it only shows on the project side.
Notes- Your notes data base is a place to store information. Perhaps you have an idea you’d like to come back to later, or want to store your passwords in one easy to find location (You could also create a wiki, but we won’t be covering that in this tutorial) Notes can be associated to Clients OR Projects. You likely won’t need to assicate notes to tasks unless you need it as a resource which is possible but not super common.
THE FORM
What makes Notion so powerful is their integrated functionality. They offer a calendar (that we won’t get into in this tutorial) and form builder.
If you are trying to save a penny, this is a great way to have everything integrated all in one place.
Notion supports forms and in your template we have a member questionnaire built right in to the template. So you can send this questionnaire to any client or potential client. When they answer that form it will create a new line in the database.
Note* there is currently no way to send the form to a client and have it update an existing line in the client database- it will always create a new line- try not to have duplicates by entering them into the database first but rather sending the questionnaire to the client/potential client first or even adding it as a button to your socials/link in bio.
Overview of the whole template and tweaking the template
If you have any questions please feel free to ask in our facebook group here:
