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hey this is Dan Lehman from automationhelpers.com and today we're going to talk about how to build an awesome CRM on top of airtable now this video is going to be a little bit different than some others you might find out there we're not going to take you step by step and show hey here's how to create your very first context table and here's how we add a custom field for the first time there's lots of other videos we'll have other videos out there to show you more step-by-step directions on how to get started with airtable instead we really want to focus on how can you enable your sales team to have a great experience to close deals Faster by using airtable and so that's what we'll get into today is how can we really focus on that best of breed experience inside of airtable so to get started we're going to talk a little bit about the overall architecture of our CRM now I started with a template you can actually find this within the airtable universe and within their template section you can actually just click the button which is going to spin up your your own copy of this template and it's not to say you need to start that way oftentimes they start from scratch because you can really tailor it to your own personal needs I think just for the purposes of getting some good demo data in there it makes sense to start with this template now when I talk about the architecture of the CRM largely I'm getting it whether you think of yourself as a B2B business to business or b2c business to Consumer organization a lot of my background is on the B2B side selling enterprise software and so if that's the case oftentimes you're talking about opportunities or deals that might span over 6 months 12 months even more sometimes and because of that you need to track all the interactions there's a variety of stakeholders within a given organization and you want to be able to track that account or organization record itself now that's not necessarily the same as if you are just selling to individual consumers if you're selling a course to individuals who are going to purchase it you're not going to need all of that extra information so in this example you're going to see some things that look a little bit more B2B oriented but that's not to say that you can't utilize a lot of the same principles on the B to C side so as we take a look through the template you'll notice that we have accounts which are the organizations we have contacts we have opportunities which are the deals interactions where we're tracking different events different meetings discoveries that took place and then I've added a couple of additional tables that we'll talk about in a moment as well but let's start towards the beginning of the sales cycle um just talk about the flow of leads as leads come into the system and so one of the ways that we can help aid in that process is by creating a form that we set up so I created a contact submissions area and this is really basic I'm just showing this kind of for the purposes of an example here and I designed a quick little contact form and this is something where we're just capturing a name email address and asking hey how can we help you now you don't have to utilize air tables forms there's lots of other great Alternatives like jotform out there that you might want to use instead but this is a way that we can quickly be able to capture information in the system this is something that you could use by publishing this form out on your website as a contact submission form you might send it as part of an email marketing campaign where they click a link and then fill out a form that's another way to be able to capture that data but just in general there's a million different ways that we as a sales team want to be able to capture lead information from prospects who are interested in the products that we have so again very simple in nature of course we could make it a little bit more enticing I think from a sales standpoint but just to show you an example now this is pretty standard I mean it's great that this comes with forms that we can utilize but we went a step further to be able to say you know when someone contacts us if you are a B2B organization you're going to want to know more about them and you want to see hey are we already doing business with them so for example if there's an account that I've been working for six months already and then suddenly someone else from that team reaches out I don't want a different sales rep to go start answering questions for that person I want them to be associated with the same account record that we have so I just want to show you an example of what we've done to help ease that process a little bit and I created an Automation and again if you're not too familiar with airtable so airtable's got kind of the main database and different views to look at at those records but we also have a really powerful automation Suite where we can automate a lot of back end processes to update records send notifications and we'll show you a few examples in this video so this particular one that I called was to create a contact and account from a form submission and so what we're doing and I'm not going to get into all of the logic but the idea here is we want to solve for that problem where we're already working with an account how do we associate that contact record to a new account and so in this case what we're doing is when a contact form is submitted then we're going to go ahead and try to see if we can find an existing account record based off of their email domain so if I hop over for a second back into that grid View so we're asking the user for their name their email and how we can help but what we're doing is I actually have a formula field here and what this formula field is doing is it is chopping off the domain part of their email address so of course I have just some dummy data in here if Elon Musk were to contact us so we're chopping off the Elon and the at symbol and we're ending up with the email domain of tesla.com and the reason that we're doing that is because that automation then is cross-referencing to see hey do we already have an account that exists so we do we have Tesla and apple is the other example that I utilized so if I go back into that automation essentially what we're doing is we're saying you know if we're able to match the email domain from the submission record with the email domain of the account record okay then we're going to go ahead on to the next step we're also looking to see if there's other contacts that exist with that email address and so essentially what we're saying is if there isn't already a matching account let's go ahead and create a new account record so if there's no account then create that account record so if I came in and said you know hi I'm from Zoom we don't have a zoom record that Zoom record is now going to be created and we're also going to create that contact record to say hey this is Dan Lehman from zoom and then we also have logic to say if there is a matching an account record so if I'm already if we already have a zoom account record or an Apple account record for that contact but that contact doesn't exist in the system yet then we're going to go ahead and just create that contact record and Associate that with them and so if I go and I open up my Apple account record we're able to see that we have two separate contacts that are associated with that record and that's oftentimes what happens with larger more complex organizations is that you have multiple contact records and so what this automation is an example of is being able to automate that process to identify those right accounts because again your sales reps aren't going to want to have other people stepping on their toes especially when they're working so hard to close those deals so that's just an example of how we can use an Automation in the lead tracking process now I want to talk a little bit more about deal management hey we have opportunities in the pipeline awesome where do we go next well if I click on my opportunities record view you see we've got lots of color coding we've got the different statuses so we can see our pipeline a pretty visual view to begin with anyways but you know oftentimes especially sales managers are going to be able to want to see this in a much more visual view of let's actually be able to see their status to be able to to progress through the pipeline and so here we have a different View which is utilizing a kanban which is a sales Pipeline and so this is where we can see the same exact data it's not a different set of data it's the same thing we're seeing here as the as are all opportunities but we're not limited to seeing things just in this record view instead we get the ability to view it more visually and as we're doing a sales review for that week for the quarter we're able to move along deals through the progression and when we do that it's actually updating that status automatically and of course we can still click in and be able to view all the details of our opportunity records so we're not just restricted to something that feels like a database we can use whatever makes the most sense and we have lots of other kinds of views that we can utilize calendars are really popular for sales teams being able to see that see the timeline Gantt charts are a little bit more for the project management side but you get the idea that we've got quite a few capabilities within the platform next I want to take a look at calendar integration and you'll notice that the that default template if you spun up a copy for yourself has a table for interactions right now this is grouped by the account but you can see we have things like Discovery and demos pricing discussions and of course you can configure this how you would like yourself but one of the things this doesn't really do is you know do you want your sales people wasting a lot of time manually having to create all of their account interactions I mean it can be helpful in terms of due diligence but sales people don't love that right they they want it to be automated and easy so this is a perfect example where we can utilize synced calendars or synced tables in general so this is one of those tables that I added for synced calendars and what we're able to do is you can actually click to drop down if you were going to add a new table and you see a variety of options to be able to sync data from it could be another air table base but in this case I'm pulling from Google Calendar and I authenticated with my Google Calendar you notice you can also do Outlook so regardless of which you prefer for your organization then there's other tools as well that you can sync to pull that data and so what this is doing is I once I've authenticated and it has my Google Calendar it's going to take a certain time range and be able to pull any events that I have and pull that to keep that in sync with the table now I do want to be clear this is a One Direction sync so that means that when I have new calendar invites and they can be deleted and updated and things like that but now it's going to push them over into airtable this is not going the other direction so you're not creating an event inside of airtable and then having that push that out to your Google calendar there is some other syncing options we can talk about but for this it's just a unidirectional sync into the system but it gives you the ability this is a fairly recent development where you can sync multiple calendars so you could have your sales teams calendars all be synced in here then you could have it show up as a a calendar view to be able to see your sales team now this is where you might be saying well damn what's the point of this like we all have Google Calendar we can see each other's calendars no big deal right but where this is really important is when it comes to doing your deal reviews and seeing how often you're contacting and what those types of contacts you're having with the individuals the stakeholders the decision makers the Champions at your companies that you're working with and so what I've done here is again utilizing the power of calculated Fields with our formulas and automations we're able to get a little bit deeper here to associate this with the correct contact so what I'm doing is I've got uh let's open this up our formula where essentially I'm looking at this attendees field and in the attendees field there can be multiple attendees and I'm just separating that out so that when we get to the automation step and we're syncing a calendar essentially all we're able to do is when a record is updated or we can run it on when it's created we're going to see if we can find a record find a contact record that matches that email address and then if it does now we're going to actually associate that synced calendar event with the contact record and this is something that we could do at an account level if we wanted to do as well so it's you know you've got some options on how you want to configure it but this becomes immensely helpful because now instead of just this like interactions table that updates itself now if I go to my contacts table little Steve here when I open this up now this presentation that was on my Google Calendar because it was associated with his email address that's automatically going to be synced into the system automation is going to run and it's going to put it against his record so now we're actually able to see kind of a better picture into that story of what exactly is going on here for each contact record or again do a similar thing for the account records that you have I'm back in my opportunities here we're going to talk about how to be able to create a proposal or be able to create a quote that we want to be able to send out to our customers very common use case for crms so I'm on an opportunity and let's say I want to go ahead and send this to my customer I can simply go ahead and click a button to generate quote and then when I am over back on my automations I've got an automation that's running here and this is going to show that we're creating this quote it's really pretty simple here I basically have a condition and then when I when that condition happens we've got the ability to say let's go ahead and create that record and we're going to be able to plug in kind of like mail merge if you're thinking about a email marketing automation system we can plug in those values to be able to then generate that document and this utilizes an integration with Google Docs the great part is this is included with some of the plans available for airtable so you don't have to rely on a third-party integration system for this particular use case and then over in my quotes folder that I told it to write to is where it's going to be able to take those records and again I made a super simple example here we can do a whole video dedicated to this where we can actually get into line items so if you had different products and services you're selling it can actually run through and push those out as well so lots of options when it comes to it but it's pretty impressive how slick it is how quick it is to be able to send out those quotes and proposals as well and now let's talk about you know we've kind of gone through the sales cycle so far we probably want to talk a little bit more about what Sales Management can do especially when it comes to forecasting and so back in our data you know if we have opportunities we're probably going to want to have our sales reps make a commit for the quarter and so I just added a field here uh called commit and so you can check to say yes this is in commit for the quarter again because we can see the activities of what's changed we can see if things fall in and out of commit but what this gives us the ability to do is airtable has recently been working and investing a ton into this interfaces feature it used to be that airtable was pretty much confined to just a couple of these database views and there's a little bit lacking on some of the visual appeal but now with interfaces you can create entire dashboards reports things that are really helpful to be able to have that more visual data and so if I'm a sales manager and I now want to see okay what's our commit for the quarter now I can see here's the committed Revenue how much do we have closed one Revenue so far for this quarter how many committed opportunities do we have what are our various stages within the pipeline where are sales reps at and again I just made a really simple copy of a dashboard so that you can get a flavor of what you might be able to do but know that this is now becoming more and more powerful it's not just dashboards you can create entire interfaces for you know proposals and and updating records and displaying things more visually to customers so there's a lot of great options with interfaces but I especially think it's been solving a big problem when it comes to the Sales Management side of things and so I'm really excited to see them invest more into this area of the product and now finally where would we be if we didn't take the opportunity to celebrate our wins so I created one more automation which is going to be a win wire so we're excited we've closed out a deal let me go ahead and open up an opportunity let's say this Ace tube inquiry and we're currently in qualification but somehow we magically got past proposal evaluation negotiation and we are at closed one so we are updating that record and what that is doing is ta-da there's my slack notification sound and you'll notice that hey when wire alert congrats to Ari Ramirez Medina for closing the ace tube inquiry and here's the amount of ARR that we have pretty cool we again we're able to tap into other Integrations that we have so let's take a look just really briefly at that last automation so our wind wire automation so when we enter a view of closed one with our opportunity now we're able to use this slack integration I gotta tell you I just love the amount of Integrations that we have available to us and similar to how we did for generating our quote we're able to use kind of those merge tags or s to be able to put information in to dynamically populate that record to then send that win wire out I'd love to hear from you what you're looking for in a CRM where we're able to hit on some of the big things that make a CRM important to you I'm always interested to hear more creative ideas to see if I can figure out and cook up some interesting solutions to your challenges so feel free to comment down below with other things you're looking for in a CRM of course if you're looking for any assistance in setting up your CRM feel free to head on over to our website at automationhelpers.com happy to reach out and we'll connect there to be able to help you out with your CRM needs thanks