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notions multi-formatted relational databases make it a powerful place to manage your relationships and your sales pipeline so let's walk through a framework that leverages those functionalities to create a sophisticated and streamlined system of contact and sales management and this system is also detailed on a post on notion vip and it's also available as a fully developed template both of which i'll link to within this video description on youtube so if you're familiar with any of my other resources or you're using my bulletproof workspace methodology you know that my foremost recommendation for any notion workspace is to centralize information in related master databases and then to create filtered views of that information within contextual dashboards so this contact management system is kind of a subset of a workspace that integrates a variety of other master databases and the essential master databases of this system are going to be a contacts database for individual people and then a brands database for the companies and non-profits and other organizations that those individuals represent so as a part of this method of integrating master databases we're also going to favor relation properties over select properties so let me explain what i mean by that if you have countries for example and you have multiple date databases where you're going to want to assign a country to the items rather than creating independent select properties within each of those databases and creating all of the countries as options within those select properties you can have one master countries database and then use relations within all of those other databases to choose a country from that master country's database and so that's going to afford a variety of advantages it'll help you to keep your information accurate and consistent it'll allow you to minimize redundant work you can create contextual dashboards both within the countries and then also within the items of other databases you can list the associated country and then you can also navigate intuitively between related databases so that's why we're going to start with a few geographic databases now if your contacts and brands don't hail from a variety of cities states and provinces and countries then these may not be directly applicable for you but the concepts will be helpful because you're going to want to apply this approach for other types of information so you can see here that we have those cities states and provinces and countries databases along with those essential databases that we'll be working with the brands and contacts databases and the way that this will work is we're going to relate each brand and contact to a city and each city is going to be related to a country and perhaps a state or province and using roll-up properties we're going to have the ability to pull in the stator province and the country from the related cities for contacts and brands so you'll see exactly how that works and why it's helpful but it's really going to keep your information clean and eliminate redundancy in your work so this is also going to allow you to create filtered views of your contacts and brands within the countries states and provinces and cities databases so this among other benefits will keep you from having to create individual select properties within your brands and context databases and within those select properties listing all of your options for countries states and provinces and cities so let's jump into this cities database and you can see that our default view here is a list of cities and it's sorted by the city's country and then the city's name so this list looks nice and it's easy to navigate and click into any city but the table makes it easy to see the city's properties and to quickly edit those properties so of course the title property here is going to be just city and then we have two relation properties remember this whole system is kind of running through cities in order to allow us to use roll-ups to minimize work and populate information automatically so each city is going to be related to a country this is a relation property that relates to the country's database so for each city you can choose a country from the country's database and if the city has a state or province this relation property is related to this state and provinces database so you can choose a state or province for the city as well now there's two properties that are hidden here and they're hidden because you won't typically use them when you're accessing the city's database directly but they're additional relations properties and of course they are the contacts and brands database so remember every contact and brand is going to be related to a city and each city is going to be related to a country and perhaps a state or province so that's going to allow you to use rollup properties within brands and contacts to pull in the country and perhaps the state or province for the related city so each city can also function as its own sort of contextual dashboard if we open up new york for example we can see a filtered view of the brands database and a filtered view of the contacts database and both of these linked databases linked to their respective original databases those essential brands and contacts database and they display their items in this nice gallery here so for the brands we just see the name of the brand and then its website which is easy to click and visit and then for contacts we see the full name of the contact the associated brand email address and phone number for quick reference so these linked databases are going to be filtered to show only those where the city property is the current city that we're viewing in this case it's new york so rather than creating these linked databases for each new city we have a template that creates them automatically so if we pull down our little drop down menu here next to the new button we see that we have a city template and if we click to edit that template we can see those linked databases brands and contacts and these link databases use self referencing filters they filter for the template itself so that when you actually implement the template when you create a new city this filter is going to be replaced with that new city so that is the city's database and because cities are kind of the hub of all all of these relationships the other geographic databases are quite a bit simpler so let's look next at countries so the default view for the countries database is going to be a list that sorts the countries alphabetically and you can see each country's flag and that's simply the page icon for each country which you can choose from the emojis which is quite simple so our table view allows us to see the properties and edit the countries quickly and easily so you can see that the only relation for countries is cities because cities is the hub of these relationships so for each country you'll select a city but in practice you'll really create a city and when you do so you'll associate it with a country and then perhaps a state so because you do that you can use a rollup property to automatically populate the state or the states all of the states for each country because it's going to pull in each state for the cities that you populate so in this configuration here you can see that we choose the city's property that's this relation here and for that related database for each of the items that you select you want to pull in the stator province and then we just want to show the original so this is just going to list all of the states and provinces associated with the selected cities so just as we saw in our city we can open up a country and view it as sort of its own contextual dashboard so here you can see that we have all of our selected cities that are related and then all of the states that are pulled in for those cities and then if we scroll down we can see the brands and the contacts that are within this particular country so these are galleries and the brands gallery displays the name of the brand the city where it's located because these are all in the united states we know because we're in the united states item and then we also have the website for the brand as well so this contacts links database is going to to display all of the contacts within the united states and it will display the full name of each contact within this gallery view along with the contact city the associated brand and then the contact email address and phone number for quick reference so just as we saw with the cities our countries can be quickly populated with a template so if we open up the countries template we can see that we have the brands database and the context database these are linked databases linking to the brands in context database pre-formatted and filtered using the self-referencing filter so that when a country is created using this template the filter will automatically use that new country to filter the brands and contacts so our states and provinces are going to work exactly the same way as countries and if you have a lot of contacts or brands within a single country then it can be helpful to create views for that particular country in this case we have us states this is a list and it's filtered to show only the states or provinces where the country is the united states and it's sorted alphabetically but as always we have our full table that makes viewing the properties and editing the properties easy and efficient so our title property is the state or province and then we relate each state or province to a city because that's a hub of all of these relationships and then with this rollup property when we choose a city we can automatically pull in the country for that city so for states or provinces that have multiple cities it's going to pull in the country for each of those which is always going to be the same notion doesn't currently offer an option to display only the the unique items we have to display all of them but the purpose of this is to allow us to create filters and views and so listing the country multiple times is not going to disrupt that and of course just like our cities and countries opening up any of these states or provinces will show their contacts and brands and they can be quickly created using the state or province template so those are our geographic databases and remember even if these specifically don't apply to your work or to your workspace the concepts of employing these related databases and turning them in to contextual dashboards certainly will apply that's evident throughout the bulletproof workspace methodology that you can find on notion vip and i'll link to that within the youtube video description here as well so let's move on to our essential databases starting with brands and remember brands are going to be all of the companies and the nonprofits and the other organizations that you reference throughout your workspace and particularly those that are associated with your individual contacts so as you'll see brands have a variety of categories you can include clients partners vendors prospects and your own brand or your own team and then what you see here is that we have a gallery for each of those categories and these galleries are going to display the name of the brand if you're working with kind of a global collection of brands you can display the related country which nicely includes that country's flag as the icon and then it might be helpful to display the website as well for quick access or just for aesthetics but if we jump down to our full table view we can see all of the properties associated with the brand so that title property is just going to be brand and then this multi-select is where we identify the category or categories of each brand so as i mentioned we can include clients existing clients we can include the name of the team that's using this workspace in this case we have this dummy company loggerhead labs we have partners prospects and vendors as well of course you can customize these categories for the nature of your workspace and this is a multi-select so you can apply more than one to any given brand and then we have a url property for each brand's website a phone property for the phone number and then we have our geographic properties so remember cities are the hub of these relationships so you only have to choose a city from the city's database and then these rollup properties are going to pull in the country for that city as well as the state or province as applicable so looking at the configuration here we choose the city relation and then from that cities database we want to pull in the country property and just display the original country so then we have a text property for the postal code and you might think this should be a number but it should actually be a text property because you're not performing any calculations on the postal code you're just using it in conjunction with other pieces of text and sometimes numbers that start with zero can display funky in number properties so it's best just to leave the postal code as a text property and then you have a text property for the street address as well so for those brands that are categorized as prospects you can apply a value to this sales stage property so here we just have a conventional set of options for the sales stage this is just kind of a conventional sales cycle that starts with the initial inquiry and concludes with contact and you also or contract and then you also have a lost option for any lost prospects but of course i never use that and neither do you hopefully now we don't have a one option here because a one prospect is no longer going to be a prospect it's going to become a client so what this allows you to do is utilize your sales pipeline this is a board formatted view of the database and all of the items are grouped by their sales stage and this view is going to be filtered to show only the brands that are within the prospect category so you can easily drag these prospects from one stage to the other and it will update the value within that particular item so these cards display the name of the brand the country and the website just as we've seen in other views so just as we saw in our geographic databases these country items serve as contextual dashboards so if we open one we see all of the properties for the brand and then we see a couple of linked databases so this linked view of contacts is familiar by now we're seeing only the contacts that are associated with this particular brand and it displays the full name the website and the phone number and then we have a meetings and conversations linked database so you may maintain a database of meetings and conversations or meetings and events that's a big part of the bulletproof methodology and when you do you can relate that meetings and conversations database to your brand's database in this case it applies to your prospects so if you hold a sales call you can relate it to the brand that it's associated with and then within the brand you can see a list of the conversations that you've had throughout the sales cycle for quick reference so we'll look at the meetings and conversations database and see how you would relate it to a brand so just as we saw in our geographic database databases we have templates for brands now these templates are going to be mostly familiar but the prospect template is going to include that linked database for meetings and conversations whereas just the general brand template is not and the reason for that is if you're familiar with the bulletproof methodology you know that when a brand becomes a client it likely also becomes a bucket and within your buckets pages you will include all of your linked meetings and events and among a variety of other linked databases so again we're focused on contacts here but you can learn more about that in the bulletproof coverage which i'll link to so that is the brands database and we can move on here to the contacts database and your contacts database are is going to include the same categories but those categories are going to be automatically populated so let's look at the full table view of context and these properties are going to be similar to what you would see in a conventional crm so we have the full name as the title property and then the category is automatically populated it's a rollup property and what it does is it pulls in the category of the selected brand so you have this relation property that relates to the brand's database and you can choose any of the items from that brand's database and then this rollup property will pull in the category for the selected brand and that allows you to keep your information consistent and reduce redundancy so then you have text properties for the first name and the last name of the contact the first name is useful for if you're using mail merge tools and you want to apply the first name to kind of a boilerplate message and then last name is good for sorting i like to sort contacts by their last names so then we have a text property for the job title if you want to include that an email property for the email address two phone properties one for the mobile phone one for work two url properties one for the linkedin profile the other for the twitter profile and then we have the geographic properties so once again cities are kind of the hub of these relationships so you only have to choose a city for each brand and then the country and the state or province will be automatically populated based on the city that you choose this will pull in or roll up the countries and states and provinces for the selected cities so then we have those text properties for the postal code and street address and then we have a date property for each contact's birthday you can you can set a reminder for sending well wishes or even a gift and then we have a files and media property for the contacts headshot and this is kind of a fun feature if you'll go to the contact's linkedin profile or if they send you a headshot you can add it here and when you display a gallery view of the contacts you can choose the headshot as the page cover now of course you're not or the card preview i should say and you're not going to want to do this for all of your contacts of course but for those that you engage with frequently you may so we have a view here of the loggerhead labs team this is the team that this kind of demo workspace is built around and you can see here that for the card preview we've selected that headshot property and so it displays the uploaded image as the card preview for the gallery which displays really nicely so any team that you're working with regularly you want to add sort of a sense of connection to the team you want to add a face to all those emails that you're exchanging this is a great way to do it and so this gallery also displays the full name of the contact the email address and the phone number for quick reference so just as we saw in all of our other databases these contacts database items contain information within them now the kind of information that you want to store within your contacts will really depend on the nature of your workspace so the template here is really kind of open-ended we have this contact template and all it is is just kind of a heading for notes with a placeholder toggle so this is where you can apply contact specific notes about their preferences or their family relationships or anything that you want to remember for reference later you can add here for each new contact but for the most part you'll probably want to keep your notes within the brand or if you're taking the bulletproof approach within the bucket so those are our essential databases contacts and brands so let's quickly take a look at kind of some sample databases that you may want to relate to contacts and brands as well now if you follow the bulletproof approach then you're going to have many other master databases in your workspaces and many of those databases you'll want to connect or relate to contacts and brands so here's just kind of some trimmed down examples we talked about the meetings and conversations database how you can include meetings and conversations within brands as you're nurturing them through the sales cycle but conversely within your meetings and conversations you can include a filtered view of all of the contacts that are associated with that meeting or conversation so you can see that this meetings and conversations database is related to the contacts database and we've called that relation here in attendees for this particular property because it's going to pertain to those who attended the meeting or conversation so we selected these contacts from the contacts database and they display nicely within this linked view of that contacts database with those same properties we've seen in other linked views of the contacts database so if you keep a meetings and events or a meetings in conversations database this inner page is going to contain a lot more information but for the sake of demonstrating the relation to context i've only included that linked database so you very likely include a project database among your master databases as well and i won't get into the details of this example those are all in other materials we're focused on contacts here but if you open up a project you can see once again a list of contacts who are related to this particular project in this case we've called that relation property the team because this would be the team of contacts that are involved with this particular project so you can really sense the power of this approach of consolidating all of your information within related master databases and then creating filtered views of that information within these sorts of contextual dashboards so that is this system for managing relationships and your sales pipeline using the power of notion and again we'll include a link to the post on notion vip within the youtube video description along with a link to the fully developed template and if you run into any roadblocks as you implement these strategies on your own you can find me on twitter at williamnut and i'll look forward to seeing what you build with it you