Create a winning sales funnel presentation for management

How to create outlook signature

hello hello thank you all so much for tuning in to this edition of notion at work i am william nutt of nut labs and we're an integrated digital strategy firm and notion consultancy typically based in new york but still quarantining down in north carolina where i am from originally and i also run the independent website notion vip where i publish tools and insights about all things notion you can access that at notion dot vip so today we're going to explore contact and sales management in notion and notion is really a powerful place to manage your relationships of all kinds and your sales pipeline and that's much thanks to its multi-formatted relational databases so we're going to walk through a framework that leverages those functionalities to create a sophisticated and streamlined system of contact and sales management in notion and that system is also detailed within a text post on notion vip which i'll link to here in the chat and you may want to reference as you implement these strategies on your own and there's also a fully developed template with this system already in place which i can't make available entirely for free but if you use the discount code notion at work all one word within the next hour or so you'll be able to get it at just half the price so i'll link to that here in the chat as well so if you've referenced any of my other resources or if you're using my bulletproof workspace methodology which i recently updated by the way so be sure to check that out you know that my foremost recommendation for any notion workspace is to centralize information within 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 broader workspace that's going to integrate a variety of those related master databases such as the bulletproof workspace so we're going to be focused on two core master databases we're going to have our contacts database for individual people and then we're going to have a brands database for the companies and the nonprofits and the other organizations that those individuals represent and as a part of this approach to centralizing information and master databases we're also going to favor relation properties over select properties so if you're unfamiliar with relation properties they allow you to connect one database to another and then you can choose from the items in the other database to populate populate the value for an item in the first database so take countries for example throughout your workspace you may have a few different databases where you want to assign a country to the items and rather than creating an independent select property within each of those databases and creating all of the countries as options within those select properties you can maintain one central master database of countries and then relate all of those other databases to that master databases of countries and then you'll be able to choose among those countries in every instance of those relation properties and this approach to maintaining master databases and using relation properties versus these independent select properties it's going to offer a range of benefits so you'll be able to keep your information accurate and consistent and you'll also reduce redundancy in your work this will allow you to create contextual dashboards as you'll see and it'll also allow you to navigate intuitively among all of your related databases so for these and other reasons that's why we are going to start with a few geographic databases so here we have all the databases we'll be looking at all of those included in the template you can see that we have our core brands and contacts databases that we'll really be focusing on for the system but here we have those three geographic databases we have a countries database a states and provinces database and a cities database and so the cities database is kind of the hub of these relationships as you'll see this all of the cities will be related to brands and contacts so the city's database is related to the contacts database and the brands database and then the cities is related also to the states and provinces database and the countries database so because everything runs through the cities it's kind of our hub database we can use roll-up properties to pull in the country and the state when we relate a contact to a city or a brand to a city and you'll see exactly how that's going to work but it's going to save you a lot of time and it's going to ensure that your information is really bulletproof for lack of a better description and it's also going to allow you to see filtered views of all of your contacts and brands within the countries and within the states and provinces and within the cities so let's jump in to the city's database you can see that our default view here is the list view and what this does is it displays the city and it displays the city's corresponding country and it sorts the list first by country and then by the name of the city so this is a nice way to view your your cities and to uh to choose one to click on but if we also have a table view here that allows us to edit the cities kind of in bulk and also to edit the individual properties so you can see the title property is city this is where of course we type in the name of the city and then we have our relation properties so this first relation property relates the city's database to the states and provinces database so for each city as applicable we can choose a state or province from that database and then similarly we also have a relation to the countries database where we can choose the country that corresponds with the city and the country's flag displays nicely with the city because that flag is the country's icon which you will see so we have two hidden properties here we have the contacts property and the brands property these are also relation properties and this is where you can relate a city to a contact and relate a city to a brand as well but typically in your workflow you'll be selecting and creating cities from contacts and brands databases rather than from this city's database so that's why these are hidden here and of course i'll show you exactly how that will work so if you open up a city it kind of serves as its own contextual dashboard here we can open up new york and we can see all of the relation properties we can see that it's related to the country of the united states this um the the state of new york and then it's related to a brand called progress labs and then a handful of contacts here these are all items that exist within other databases and part of what that allows us to do is have filtered views of those other databases so we have linked databases here they're both formatted in the gallery format and here we have a filtered list of the brands that are in the united states and a filtered list of the contacts that are in the united states you can see if we look at the filter we're in a city now so we have the brands that are in this city of new york and the contacts that are in new york city as well so where in those other databases the city property is populated with the city of new york we display those items for both the brands and the contacts you can see for the brands database we have the name of the brand with the website that's easy to click and then for the contacts we display the full name we display the brand that's related to the contact and then we display the contact's email address and phone number so again these are linked databases they're kind of mere they're kind of windows into the other databases and they're filtered and formatted to split to display just as we want them within this city so rather than adding these elements for each new city that you create we can automatically populate them with the template so if you use this arrow next to the new button here you see that we have a template called city that's that we've created and if you edit that template you can see the linked databases that we've added for both the brands and the contacts database and we have what's called a self-referencing filter so this filter is referencing this template the template is called city so when you implement this template when you create a new city using this template that new city will replace this placeholder here and the brands and contacts databases will be filtered automatically for that new city so the city because it's kind of the hub of all of these relationships it has more of these relation properties than the others the states and provinces and the countries are a little bit simpler so let's take a look at those first let's look at the countries so the default view for the countries database is going to be a list just a simple list of the countries and sorted alphabetically and then we have that table view that's a little bit easier to edit and to view all of the properties so you can see this is where the only relation for countries is a relation to cities and because the country is related to its cities then any other database that's related to that city is going to be able to pull in this country and that's why we can populate the country automatically for each contact in each brand because both of the databases are related to the same city and the same with the state so the states will be related to the city so for every city that's related to this country we can pull in the state using this rollup property if we look at the configuration here we can see that we've chosen for the relation the city's property so for each of the cities that are added here we want to pull in its stator province and we just want to show the original one so that's why for the united states for example we see multiple states because we have multiple cities it's pulling in the state for each of these cities and just as we saw with the city if we open up a country we have this contextual dashboard so here you can see that we have all of the brands that are in the united states and we have all of the contacts from the contacts database that are in the united states they're filtered to show only the items where the country is the united states and of course just as we saw with this city we can pre-populate this information with the country template that uses a self-referencing filter so jumping back over to our list of databases here we can take a quick look at the states and provinces database so this begins with a list and it begins with a filtered list so if you're using a country where your where your contacts and your brands fall within a variety of states and provinces within a single country then it might be helpful to create a filtered view of states and provinces for that country so here we have a view specifically for u.s states it's a list and it's filtered to show only the states that are in the united states where its country is the united states and of course it's sorted alphabetically but we can also view a full table that includes all states and provinces in this kind of sample database and its only relation is cities because remember everything's running through cities and then when we relate a state or providence to a city we have the ability to pull in the countries that are related to those cities so that is going to be the same country for each of the cities and right now notion doesn't offer a way to to show just the unique values you need to show each of the countries for each of the cities they're always going to be the same but the purpose of this is to allow us to to create filtered views so even though it's got the same country listed multiple times it does not impact our ability to to do that and of course the states and provinces open up and they display their unique contacts and brands but we don't need to look at another example of that because we are focused on contacts and brands but you can see here that we have that template in place for states and provinces as well so let's move into the contacts and brains of course these are the essential elements of our system here and we'll start with brands so the first view of our brands database is going to be a gallery of brands that fall into the clients category and these we have a gallery for each of our different brand categories for the most part and the gallery displays the name of the brand it pulls in the country and displays it with this nice icon um and i think i may have got forgotten to mention if we pop back over to our countries database the way that you add these flags here is you choose the flag as the icon for the page of the country so these icons are just emojis and so you can um you know you can search for the name of the country find its flag and use it as the icon and so anywhere the country is referenced you'll see that nice country flag so going back into our brands database we have that nice icon associated with the country that's associated with the brand and then once again we just have that website that we can easily click onto so we have these galleries for each each category of brand so um but let's look at the full brands table that has all of our brands and here we can see all the different properties that we have for the brand so the title property is going to be called brand and then we have a multi-select property to identify the categories for each brand so we have a few different options here we have uh each brand can be a client here we have a loggerhead labs which is kind of the dummy company i use for these demonstrations so that would be your own team a client or a brand can be a partner it can be a prospect or it can be a vendor and of course you can customize these categories to suit the nature of your workspace so then we have a url property for the brand's website which we've displayed throughout the gallery views as we've seen we have a phone property for the brand's phone number and then we have our geographic properties so we only choose the city from the city's database and once again because the city is kind of the intersection of all of these relationships when we choose a city within the brands database we're able to pull in automatically the state and the country for that city using these rollup properties so then we have a couple of text properties one for the postal code and one for the street address and you might think that the postal code should be a number property but it's really treated as text you don't perform calculations on a postal code and if you try to make it a number it can act a little funky in instances where the the code begins with the zero so it's best to use the text property for a postal code and then the street address is straightforward and then we have a select property for the sales stage so when your brand falls into the prospect category when it's a prospect you can assign it a position in your sales pipeline now a conventional crm might have a third essential master database so it would have a contacts database or a people database like we have it will have a companies or a brand's database like we have and then it might have a opportunities or a deals database but i found in my work with clients and other users and in my own work that the brand's database can really function as the sales funnel as well and it likely will for you but if you do have multiple instances of your sales cycle within your brands or within your clients if you pitch them and go through the entire cycle for various projects you might want to have an independent deals or opportunities database but in the vast majority of implementations it works perfectly fine to use your brand's database as your sales pipeline so when you do that it gives gives you the opportunity to have a sales pipeline view so this is a board just like a kanban board and it's filtered to show only the brands who are in the prospect category and then it groups them by their position in the sales cycle so you can easily drag them through the sales cycle as you advance them and that is going to update that property automatically when as you drag them so that's how your brand's database can function as both just your database of brands for for referencing however you want to as well as your sales pipeline now as with all of our other databases your your brands can function as their own independent contextual dashboards so you can see here within the contents of a brand's page we have once again a filtered view of the context database and this is filtered of course to show the contacts that are related to this particular brand now you also see that we have a filtered view of a meetings and conversations database and of course we're not focused on meeting management that's in some other resources and part of the bulletproof workspace but i've included it here just to demonstrate that for prospects you might want to relate them to certain meetings to certain conversations that you have with them and then you'll have the ability to reference those meetings in conversations as you nurture them through the sales pipeline so we'll see the other end of this connection here but this is a database of meetings and conversations and it's filtered to show only the meetings and conversations where the prospects selected for that meeting in conversation is this company which is progress labs so of course these are templates we have a prospect template that includes those two linked databases meetings and conversations as well as contacts and then we have just a brand template that might not be a prospect and that's going to exclude the meetings and conversations linked database because if you've seen my other resources and you've utilized the bulletproof workspace then you know that when a brand becomes a client then it can also become a bucket and that's where you'll have an elaborate contextual dashboard for not just tracking the contacts and the meetings associated with that client but also the projects and the tasks and a variety of other useful databases so that is the brand's database and of course we have all these different views for accessing them in a way that's not um quite as overwhelming as this table view but this table view makes them easy to edit in bulk so that takes us to our context database and the initial view of the contacts database just like we saw in the brands database it's a gallery of our clients so client is a of course a category of our contacts and we have various galleries for all of our contacts for all of our contact categories and then we also of course have a full table so the title property is just going to be the full name of the contact and rather than redundantly populating the category for the contact what we can do is use a rollup property to pull in the category from the brand because the contact category is going to be the same as the brands category so we have a relation to the brand's database where we choose the contacts brand typically it'll be its employer so we can choose that and then this rollup property pulls in the category for that brand which allows us to create these other filtered views so when we configure this rollup we choose the brand property the relation property and then for that database for that related database what we want to do is pull in the categories in those cases it'll just be one category it may be a few because it is a multi-select property and then of course we just want to show the original value quick sip of coffee um and so then we have text properties where you can separate the first name and the last name and in some cases if you're familiar with formulas you can do that programmatically but uh it'll probably be easiest for most users just to do it manually so it's good to have a separate first name property if you're using like a mail merge tool where you have kind of a generic message that you're sending to an audience and you want to populate their their name um you want to personalize the message with their first name as an introduction and then i like to use the last name property for sorting i like to sort these galleries by last name so with the last name separated here you're able to do that we talked about the brand property we have a text property for the job title which may be helpful and you may want to display that within your gallery views we have an email property for the email address of the contact which of course you've seen in our gallery views we have two phone number properties one for the mobile one for work the mobile is displayed in our galleries and then we have two urls one for the linkedin profile the other is for the twitter profile and then we have those geographic properties again so the city property is a relation property this is where you choose the city for the contact and when you do that because the city is the hub our rollup properties automatically pull in that city's state or province and that city's country and then we have our text versions of our postal code and street address properties again and then the contacts database includes a date property for the birthday which you can populate with the context birthday and make it a reminder if you want so that you can send well wishes or a gift if the contact is particularly lucky or valuable and then the last property here is the is a files and media property for the contacts headshot and of course you're not going to want to populate the headshot for every single one of your contacts but for those you engage with regularly you might want to particularly your own team members because what you can do then is when you have these gallery views you can use the headshot as the card preview and it makes for a really nice viewing experience it makes it a little bit more personable and you're able to put a face to all those comments and emails that you're exchanging so this sample has a gallery for the loggerhead labs team you can see here that the card preview selected is that headshot property and so it pulls in the headshot that uploaded photo to populate the card preview so for the team members we also display the full name the email address and then the phone number as well so those are our essential databases of the system the contacts and brands databases now i mentioned i have a few other kind of dummy databases because in your workspaces particularly if you're following the bulletproof approach you're going to have a variety of other master databases and they're all interrelated and um and a lot of them are going to be related to your to your brands and to your contacts because you're going to want to show filtered information within within these related databases so we saw within our brains database for the prospects we saw a filtered list of the meetings and conversations so this is just a very stripped down view of meetings and conversations of course if you have an actual meetings in conversations database it's going to contain a lot more information and and i cover that in some other resources but if you open up one of these meetings or conversations you can see that it includes a list of the contacts that are related to it so this has a relation to the contacts database and we called it attendees because within this property you can select from your contacts who will be attending the meeting or conversation and then display them within the page contents this could be helpful for you it can be helpful for them if they have headshots you can use them as the card previews and it'll make for a really nice sort of framing of a nice conversation so the other sample database i have here is the projects database and almost every notion workspace is going to have some variation of a project's database and it's oftentimes helpful to relate it to contacts and brands in the case of the bulletproof framework it's related to buckets which are your clients in many cases so if we open up a project page you can see that once again we have a filtered list of our contacts database this time it's filtered to show only the contacts that are on the project team so this project team property is a relation property and it's related to the contacts database and you can populate it with the contacts who are working on the project and those contacts are going to display nicely within this gallery so these sample databases the meetings and events and the projects database i don't have it configured here because this is just a demo but in the templates for your projects and for your meetings you would include those filtered lists of contacts with a self-referencing filter and that's going to give you the ability to display all of the related contexts within your meetings and conversations and within your projects so that with the sample databases our geographic databases then of course those essential brands and context databases that is this system of managing contacts and relationships of all kinds really including your sales prospects within within this system that utilizes notions advanced functionalities particularly its related master databases that can be formatted in so many different nice ways so in uh in the follow up email i'm going to include a link to the post and to the recording of this webcast and to the template for you to reference as you implement these strategies on your own and if you hit any roadblocks anywhere you can find me on twitter i'd love to to help you through it and um and with that i will um be happy to answer any questions that you may have uh if you don't mind using the ask a question feature if you're viewing in crowdcast i will um i will respond to any questions that you may have there and if you see a question that you like you can upvote it so um let me open up um that feature here and the template you showed for the city can you explain the relating to itself part please so let me go back to that um and the city oh okay the the self-referencing filter is what you're asking about i will be happy to demonstrate that because that's a really important part of this and an important part of all of your um all of your databases because it's a powerful tool that's actually relatively new so if we go into our cities template so let's just create a new template say we haven't created our city template yet we'll just call this city number two and so what we're going to want to do is we have that within each city we're going to include a linked view of the brands that are in the city and a linked view of the contacts that are in the city so let's just do the brands we will insert a block that is a linked database and when we do that we'll have the opportunity to search for our brands database now i obviously have a lot of brands databases um within my workspace because i've given a lot of tutorials about that so um let me just try to find the one all right i'll just choose uh i think this might be the right one but i'm going to be careful so i'll just choose this implementation of the brands database because all we really care about now is the filter so we can add a view and make it a nice gallery just add a view choose gallery name it and click create but what's most important here is the filter so when we add a filter what we can do is where the brand's country property so we choose the property the country property within that brand's database and it's a rollup property because the way we have this configured that country automatically populates when you choose the city so when the country property for the brand equals okay i chose the wrong brands database i've got so many sorry i wasn't prepared for this particular demonstration but what you would see here with if you chose the related brands database and this is not the related brains database but if the database that you are creating this linked view of is related to the database for which you're creating a template i hope that makes sense then the top item for you to choose from here is going to be the template that you're creating so when you choose the template then it serves as a placeholder for this filter and then when you create a new country with that template then that placeholder template item becomes that country that you're creating so i'm going to delete this this sample database and or i'm just going to delete this whole new sample template and go back into our city template that i had previously created and so this linked brains database is the right one it is this brand that's related to the to the city's database using the relation property and so therefore within the filter where the city is the city template that we're creating the city will be replaced so i misspoke when i was looking for the country we're juggling a lot of geographic elements here where the city is equal to the city template so this item here is just the city template this is not an actual city it's the template that we're editing when you create a new city it's going to replace this placeholder with the city that you're creating and then display only the brands and contacts where the city associated with them is the city that you're creating so let me just show you one other little demonstration we can create a new city using this template and we'll call it sample city so we have our brands and contacts filtered databases pre-populated here of course we have no brains or contacts that are within the sample city yet so they're empty but if we go in to our brands database and if we add a brand and we'll call it sample brand we have this relation property for the city and if we click on that we can choose sample city so then if we go back to our cities database and if we open up sample city we can see that sample brand now displays within sample city because we've chosen that city within the brand i hope that makes sense to you but these self-referencing filters are absolutely um essential to utilizing the most powerful features of notion so you can see now the filter is filtered for cities that are sample city remember it was produced from that placeholder template that self-referencing filter within the template and when we created this sample city it replaced that placeholder with sample city so i hope that that makes sense and i'm going to go ahead and delete sample brand and i'm going to delete sample city as well so let's look at another question here how can i set up notion easy and quick for a team of five persons that the persons will use it so do you know how to inspire them um so that uh is a good kind of getting started question uh what i would recommend is visit um some of the uh fundamental tutorials from notion itself as well as some of the most recognized um kind of notion experts there's a variety of very basic templates that you can get started with notions youtube channel itself is really kind of offers like really kind of bite size fundamental tutorials um that you can get an idea of um you know how to set up project management it's really kind of the most basic examples of these different capabilities of notion and you can pick and choose the one that are maybe most relevant to you um but i would try to think long term about your workspace i would get familiar with the different features and i would um and i would you know define your goals for your workspace and exactly what you want to do because um as danny and tim and some of the other notion experts here in the chat know a workspace is always evolving and if you get down a certain path um where um where you realize you're kind of doing it doing it not wrong but not necessarily in uh in the best way towards your goals then it can be uh it can be a full weekend of kind of reconfiguring everything so i would invest the time up front to learn the fundamentals through notions youtube channel and then reference the materials from other um notion pros because they're really strong danny and tim here are a few that i mentioned uh in the chat they both produce a lot of good content and then um some of the the other better known um professionals are marie poulin which you may have seen and uh and august bradley uh is just an all-star right now on youtube and then if you visit um notion vip i've got a lot of resources uh videos posts and templates there as well and i actually just recently um introduced an updated version of my what i call my bulletproof um workspace methodology that has a kind of a fully developed starter template for notion that implements this primary recommendation i have which is kind of centralizing information within master databases that's going to make it really durable so that you can't really venture too far down a path if you're if you're storing everything in databases because that makes it really easy to kind of make reconfigurations if you keep your uh your information architecture if you will um really structured and stable any changes you want to make to to the way that you access that information won't impact the underlying functionality of it um so thank you danny listed um a few of those notion experts that are producing um really great content and um i think k um k danny will you will you name um kay um maybe link to his content as well because he's pretty prominent in the community as well um so moving on we have another question here can certain contacts be private to certain members so that is a great question that brings up a uh that brings up kind of a recurring concern that a lot of uh notion users have and that is that um when you share a linked view of a database uh or just a view of a database you have to grant access to the entire database the the person you share it with the people that you share with are going to have the ability to um to access the entire database they're not only going to be limited to that view however what you can do and this is kind of a pain but what i do in some circumstances for the clients that i work with is you don't share the entire database with the people that are receiving it but you uh but you display the individual contacts one by one using notion share feature at the top right uh of the contact page and um that will allow the people that you share it with only to view those listings within within wherever they're referenced um so that's a pain probably unrealistic for um for most situations but it is work around one workaround at the moment and notion knows that that really is uh a priority so um pretty soon we're hoping to see the ability to share kind of locked uh views of databases where uh where the recipient doesn't have access to the full top level database so we're getting back up to the end of our session here thank you so much for those great questions they really were important i hope the explanations made sense i know that that concept of a self-referencing filter it can be a little bit tough to grasp the best way to wrap your head around that is to apply it yourself figure out how you what you want to implement and then work your way through it um you can reference my explanation and then a few different pros have published youtube videos specifically about that so check them out um i will uh include some follow-up resources within the email this webcast will be available for rewatching on youtube um you can find me and danny and tim and everybody else on twitter um and on youtube and you know all all the channels and um i'll look forward to seeing how you implement uh this system and uh thank you so much for tuning in tuning in i'll see you on the web