Building Your Personal CRM

Here's a happy story:

• You send a cold email
• It works
• Something awesome happens

That's all great, but what comes next?

How to Follow Up

Game of Thrones Season 8 had an ending so bad it nearly killed the entire franchise. Don’t be Season 8: if someone gave you help, follow up with them and tell them the outcome!

From there, follow-up email maintains the same principle as the first cold email: provide value however possible. Treat the first few pieces of follow-up like cold emails until you’ve built a relationship.

Don't follow up just to follow up. Fewer, better pieces of outreach keep people excited to see you in their inbox. Follow-up is a long-term game—think weeks or months—not days in most cases.

All of this follow-up is a lot to keep track of. Fortunately, there are great tools to help.

Your CRM

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management—the software salespeople use to track leads and conversions. That's not what we're doing. But we can take inspiration from these sophisticated tools to build our own lightweight system.

Your CRM needs to do two things:

1. Record information about people: contact information, notes, and a record of your communication.
2. Remind you at an appropriate interval to follow up.

There are dozens of tools competing to be your CRM. What you choose comes down to personal preference; pick the system that makes sense to you.

Some options:

• Adapt a general-purpose tool like Notion or Airtable.
• Use a dedicated personal CRM tool like Folk CRM or clay.earth.
• Use your existing reminders app or todo manager and make follow-up a project within your system.

Don't get stuck in analysis: just pick something that looks pretty good. If you can't decide, get started with this free personal CRM template for Notion.

Operating Your System

The best system in the world won't replace putting in the time and energy to maintain your connections.

Opportunities for follow-up arise naturally from staying current with the communities and topics that helped you find the original cold email opportunity.

Keep in touch with someone by:

• Following (and engaging with) their public social media
• Subscribing to their or their employer's newsletter
• Sending congratulations on launches and public milestones
• Sharing your own work on subjects they care about

Be sure to track this activity in your CRM for a complete record of your follow-up efforts.

Best,

Philip