Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Building a thorough, straightforward CRM system to keep up with contacts

Working with professional contacts requires a lot of hands-on work. In this week’s tip, henry.alpert shows how to make a straightforward CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, making excellent use of Smart Lists and subtasks to keep one’s contacts and actions organized and streamlined.

Remember The Milk is a great to-do app, but one thing that’s been always missing for me is that it doesn’t have an integrated way to keep track of professional contacts. I tried out separate programs to manage contacts, but because my contact-related tasks weren’t integrated into my primary to-do app, items would fall through the cracks. Good thing RTM is flexible, so I developed an efficient way to use it as a CRM. Here’s how I do it:

1. Create a new list called “People” or “Contacts”

“Contacts” is already used in RTM for sharing tasks with colleagues, but it can work here too for this new list. I’m using “People.”

2. Each person is a task in “People”

I create a task for each person and then put the company in parentheses. For example, “John Doe (Top Design)” and “Mary Rochester (Acme Consulting).” Set the People list to be arranged by task name, and you’ll see all your contacts in alphabetical order.

3. Each to-do item for that contact is a subtask

Suppose I want to remind myself to follow up on Tuesday with John at Top Design. As a subtask under that contact, I put “Follow up – John Doe (Top Design),” and I set the date and add any tags. Note how I copy and paste the contact name and company at the end of the subtask. It’s so that when the subtask populates in a Smart List later, I know whom the task is about. If I just had “Follow up,” it wouldn’t be clear.

4. Add phone, email and other information as another subtask

I have another subtask under each contact called “-Info-”. This subtask is undated. It’s where I put the person’s phone, cell, email, title, and other information I might want to know. I actually keep a blank template for this information at the top of the People list as a task, and whenever I have a new contact to add, I duplicate “-Info-”, drag it into the contact to become a subtask, and then fill it out.

5. Use a Smart List for your contact-related tasks

I keep a Smart List called “Master List” in which I pull in tasks from other lists. One of the search parameters is (list:People AND dueBefore:tomorrow). That way, any subtask under a contact that’s due today or overdue will show up in my Master List.

6. Use the notes field

Every time I have an interaction with the contact, receive an important email or call, or whatever, I add a note about what happened under that contact’s name. That way I have a history. You can also look at your completed subtasks associated with that contact to see the history of interaction with the contact.

Thanks for sharing this tip, henry.alpert! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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