Airtable Expert Creates Personal CRM From Scratch

[@toolfinderhq]

*Will you be using Airtable as your CRM solution?* Let us know below. Have any specific questions for Gareth, pop them below, he'll be along shortly to answer some of those - and do make sure to go and subscribe to his channel for plenty more Airtable features. Francesco :-)

[@samithabandara2972]

We have started using it Gareth. But just figuring it out :)

[@georgebohan3103]

How did the Interactions field show up on the Contacts table?

[@JaclynRicchio]

You just saved me $30/month, $300-400/year. This video was so easy to follow. And now my CRM has only the fields I want as a 1 person business and not all the complicated data fields that a larger business would have. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I expect this new organized way of recording interactions will bring in a lot of new business. Thank you!!

[@toolfinderhq]

Gareth is flipping amazing, do make sure to follow him Jacyln. Francesco :-)

[@ArtKrishnamurti]

Been using Notion for personal organization and company documentation. Love it. But I really needed a CRM and Project Management tool so I started using Asana for the latter (which is decent). But today, after seeing this video, I dove into Airtable. O-M-G. My stack is now going to be Airtable, Notion and Google Suite. Simple and powerful! Clients can still create projects/tasks in Asana and I'll use Zapier to dump them into Airtable. All lead gen get's dumped into Airtable. I'd like it if Gareth went into more advanced use cases for Airtable.

[@amineunshakable1295]

You are quiet gifted at teaching tbh, I just looked for AirTable tutorials and somehow I jumped in due to your headline and glad I did. I really wish everyone could learn from you “how to teach & break down their courses” the way you do. If got to score I would put 30/10 better than any fxxx gurus out there

[@madisonlytle1258]

As a left and right brained illustrator with zero experience in excel, this means the world to me. It makes perfect sense. I struggle so often with needing a system for organizing things, but I never learned the tools to achieve it. I guess they were too busy teaching us Photoshop :P Thank you!!

[@Angela-mq3nw]

Thanks Gareth. This is very timely. Been looking up on what CRM to use in building my clients' client database. Looks promising!

[@rtgiordano]

Quite helpful, thank you Gareth!

[@newtonmota598]

Airtable it's in my roll of tools that I use when I need to help friends and clients. I highly recommend its use. That said, Francesco, thanks for inviting Gareth to show us how to quickly create a personal CRM.

[@toolfinderhq]

Gareth was the genius on this one, all credit to him. Francesco :-) Thanks for the comment Newton, always good to hear how you use tools in your everyday.

[@maksimmarinchenko3331]

Some time ago I appreciated the Airtable, but I couldn't find a use for it. Surprisingly, I've started using it for CRM recently. I didn't make a relatable DB as I don't really need managing multiple actions on each contact. So I have everything in one table and it's perfect! And I love the kanban view for stages of contact. Can't wait for kanban view to appear in iOS version of the Airtable.

[@toolfinderhq]

:-) Good to hear, the comments will help people with putting it into action :-) Thanks!

[@samithabandara2972]

Hey Gareth. Thank you so much for the video. God Bless you

[@sanzharedu]

Airtable is a fancy excel with more visuals)

[@moesadr3342]

Awsome video, I have a quick question as whether it is possible in the Free Airtable, I can make some tabs/tables hidden form certian individuals? Lets say I am dealing with 5 employees and I would like each person only be able to review and work on a certain table/tab and hid the rest. How this can be done?

[@romanruzin9495]

Great lesson! Enjoy to listen your lessons. Thank you!

[@pamellamitchell2380]

Wonderful, Thank you.

[@nafez]

This is excellent!

[@mridhu21]

Very informative, Gareth!

[@cerebralaudio5587]

I appreciate Gareth giving us a quick glimpse into Airtable with a rough implementation of a real world problem. Personally, I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of Notion, Airtable and Coda with a bit more robust version of this type of example. My feeling a this moment is that Notion is a bit behind both Coda and Airtable in terms of it's ability to implement this type of solution... But I would love to see if Coda and / or Airtable go a bit further in terms of providing a more flexible workflow and interface for working with this type of information (working with tables as presented in this video is fairly rough when you are using a relational structure like this, and would get more untenable if you have more relationships unless there is some kind of workflow UX).

[@mgb2022]

Gareth, very informative vids. Is there any way to build in an alarm for the next contact date? Maybe coupling with another app...

[@GarethPronovost]

Hey Michael - absolutely! You can connect with Zapier and send text messages or email reminders through that!

[@PeterJohnston42]

How does the phone number field work in the UK?

[@PeterJohnston42]

Hi Gareth. Sounds excellent, especially with a good front end tool. Can you tell me more on pricing - I'm in the UK.

[@nancyfournier8412]

Brilliant. Very good tutorial. THX. A lot less complicated than the CRM template. You just missed Wynonna, though :)

[@joviegomez3067]

is there anyway to add different currencies from different countries?

[@majhoolmaroof2065]

THANK YOU.. THANK YOU.. THANK YOU.. amazing teacher..!

[@plasticdrummerify]

Is there a way to create notifications or reminders in airtable, for example to remind me to give a contact a call in one week?

[@toolfinderhq]

I'm not entirely sure, this is something I should have looked for Kyle, I'm going to find out for myself. We have a Airtable tour coming soon, so maybe we can ask if it is a feature whether they use it. Cheers!!

[@GarethPronovost]

Hey Kyle - in your account you can set up to receive notifications either in email or push notifications to your phone (if you installed the app). These notifications will be sent if anyone @mentions you in a comment, or if a record you are 'watching' is altered. Otherwise, you can integrate with Zapier to send text or email reminders. There's also a direct integration with Slack if you use that!

[@LadyJly]

4:22 my formula doesn't work. I copied it exactly and it says "sorry there was a problem saving this field. Invalid formula. Please your formula text." argh

[@mikedemko9338]

me too ! A corrected formula would be really useful.

[@LadyJly]

@@mikedemko9338 are you using an ipad ? I am using an iPad pro and air table is not compatible when it comes to coding boo

[@mikedemko9338]

@@LadyJly no desktop.

[@emmawalton3872]

Would love to know how to write the interaction ID formula in the video, it was too fast and even with pausing I seem to have made a few errors, hence my formula isn't working :)

[@dagaloni]

CONCATENATE(Type," - ",Contact, " - ", DATETIME_FORMAT(Date,'M/D/YY')) Please keep in mind that "Type", "Contact" and "Date" are the names of your fields (columns). Hope this helps!

[@turtlco6824]

Thank you! This was very helpful!

[@kumbhaastrologycourses]

I have a question. Do you use personal CRM? For example, you have many contacts in different channels. And you need Smart Search helps you find the right person or a group of people in seconds. All contacts from different channels are collected in one place: Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don't forget to wish your friends and partners a happy birthday. Do you use that personal CRM? And why?

[@majhoolmaroof2065]

Question: Could we create a form for intake.. meaning an area where the user does not use the spread sheet area and just add cases?

[@GoldsteinandBashnerEastMeadow]

Thanks for the lesson, really good

[@MrMpinsley]

Thanks for the demo. What if you wanted to see the information a bit more visually. Thinking about it like a piece of paper, having the contact information at the top, then under the contact information, the ability to create a new interaction...and also see the prior two interactions. Is that possible?

[@toolfinderhq]

Not as much inside of Airtable but they do have the Blocks feature allowing you to formulate the data into graphs and models that might help you. Planning more content on Airtable Mark so that should help 👏🏼

[@ericpayments8009]

Mark you ever find anything to what you were thinking

[@kurt23C]

Hi I saw the video, thanks for the info, but I have a question. How do you think software like this can help a group of people communicate better?

[@mikegriffiths9005]

This was very helpful thank you. Could you please show me how you would go about creating a IF statement for a new column called "Follow-up" where the function would look at the "Most Recent Interaction " and returns " Due for a check in" if TODAY is more than or equal to 30 days since the "Most Recent Interaction" date, otherwise return "Good for now". Does that make sense? Something like IF(TODAY MINUS "Most Recent Interaction" >=30,"Due for a check in","Good for now"

[@365Cincinnati]

If you're still looking for a solution: IF(DATETIME_DIFF(TODAY(), {Most Recent Interaction}, 'days') >= 30, "Needs Check In!", "Looks Good"). You can change the 30 number to whatever your cut off is.

[@kuanhau4323]

Good video, explains experientially how the CRM works. Keep up the good work. We need customers to send through an email with a photo of the paper receipt that they took on their smartphone. So add a new line into interactions, or maybe a separate base and have an attachments field. Is this possible via airtable itself, or only via Zapier recipe with gmail?

[@jasonkeyz7579]

How do you keep data safe within Airtable. That is, how do you prevent a team member / employee from simply exporting your entire table (base)?

[@GarethPronovost]

Hey Jason - great question. Unfortunately, you can't prevent this. But that really isn't anything new, right? If you had your employees working in spreadsheets, they'd be able to create copies of your data there as well...

[@jasonkeyz7579]

Gareth Pronovost completely agree but I guess that’s why I think using airtable for a CRM, beyond a “personal CRM” is not a good idea :)

[@pierredeman66]

Nice video. I was wondering, can you use Airtable also Offline or only Online (on a mobile device)? If you can use it Offline, how do you need to set it up? Many thanks for your reply and help/tips

[@GarethPronovost]

Hey Pierre - you need to be online in order to access it, unfortunately.

[@blccosta]

Is there a robust method to backup different bases automatically?

[@toolfinderhq]

I'll have to nudge Gareth on this one. Francesco :-)

[@GarethPronovost]

@@toolfinderhq Oops! Got the nudge a bit late, sorry! Check out this option: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pKqymZZsi66Gr9U - it requires some additional software, but allows you to backup to a CSV file on a schedule you determine!

[@hightechforms]

Is Airtable truly and powerfully relational? For example, there will be multiple people in my contacts list who have the same name. Obviously, those won't be unique. How do I differentiate? Why doesn't each record just simply have a unique ID, not based on any given fields? Can I assign an auto-incrementing number instead of composing the unique ID with given fields? What if I want to track multiple phone numbers per user? e.g., they might have one for mobile and work, as well as home, and fax. If we're going to make a good CRM, it has to be this flexible.

[@MwtcultureisSHE]

Yes you can assign an auto incrementing number as a field. Airtable has this as an option in addition to auto generate unique ID. If you have multiple numbers per user, just create individual mobile, home, work fields etc.

[@tibornagy1835]

I still don't understand, what is the difference between this and Excel.

[@productiveyou7069]

Oooh cool. Sort of like quick base?

[@toolfinderhq]

Very similar. :-)

[@alex-talk]

How can one really use airtable as a CRM if there is no way to summarize and track overall productivity? There's no way to easily see, for example, how many records someone updated in a certain timeframe

[@MwtcultureisSHE]

Airtable has “apps” for this very thing, you should check it out. Their automation options are very useful as well if you would like your data to trigger actions

[@DonMoody]

Can you have e-commerce with this?

[@GarethPronovost]

Hey Don, you sure can! You can integrate it with Zapier and get data sent directly from your e-commerce platform. In the past we've built solutions that used WooCommerce and Shopify, but new integrations are being made available daily.

[@Ludvio]

you're the mfkin G