Build a CRM in Notion by Describing It

Somewhere in your company right now, your biggest deal lives in three places. It's probably in your head, some text thread, and maybe a spreadsheet that gets updated every couple of months. You know you need a CRM. You might even have one that you half use. But if it's not being maintained, and it's not something you're centered around, I'm going to show you a way we can build one just by describing it. Now listen: if you already have a CRM you're using, if you love HubSpot, if you love Salesforce and you're actually using it, that's great. Skip these videos and go straight to integration. Integrate the CRM and then see how we're using it. But in this one, we're going to build a CRM completely inside of Notion, simply by describing it. A CRM isn't really just software. It's a lot simpler than that. It's three lists that know about each other: a people list, a companies list, and a deals list. That's it. That's the whole thing. Salesforce is just those three lists wearing a tuxedo. HubSpot is those three lists with a marketing department. You might need those things, but if you don't have them, follow along. We're not going to configure a thing. We're going to tell Claude what we want the same way we'd tell a new ops hire, and let it build. We're going to be updating our Notion. In previous videos, we've seen how we got Notion set up to do our calendar triage and daily briefings. What we're going to do now is go down here to New and create a new page, because everything in Notion is either a page or a database. A page or a database is really all we use. And a database in Notion is really just a table that's linking to another table. So this page we're going to call CRM. And that's it. That's all we're going to do in Notion. We've created a new page called CRM. Then I'm going to go over and make sure I'm in Cowork, and I'm going to say a very simple prompt. Yours does not have to be word for word. There's nothing special about this prompt. "In my Notion page called CRM, which we just created, build me a simple CRM. Three databases. The first database is going to be Contacts. Second one is Companies. Third one is Deals." Then I've outlined those and put them into lists. In Contacts, we're going to have people with name, email, phone, company, and a notes field. For Companies, it'll be company name, website, industry, and which contacts work there. And Deals with a deal name, the company it's with, the dollar value, the stage, and a next step field. And connect them, so a contact links to a company and a deal links to a company. Keep it minimal. Don't add anything I didn't ask for. So I'm just asking for companies, contacts, and deals. That's the whole breakdown. You could list whatever other things you wanted after them, or you could just say, "I want a CRM with these three things, do your best to fill them in." Maybe you have different things you want to track. We're just going to build this simple CRM. The beauty is we don't need any anxiety about this, because if we don't like something about it, we just keep chatting. We say, "You know what, never mind. I don't want a dollar value stage there, I want revenue per year." We can change whatever those are and Claude can go update them for us. We're just going to describe it. It's a boring prompt, no jargon, just the way it is. So we're going to send it. And there it is. We described a CRM, and in a second we're going to have one. We're not going to have to get on a demo call with some sales rep. We don't have to put in a credit card. I'm still on the free plan for Notion. Claude is saying it wants to use Notion, and I'm going to say "Allow for this task," which I'm fine with. This is what I want it to do. It's going to go into Notion and update that CRM page to make sure it gets all the things we're looking for. While it's doing that, just think about this: we're creating software we might pay significant amounts of money for as a SaaS solution, and we just brought it into Notion. It says right here: "Built your CRM with Companies, Contacts, and Deals. Both relations are two-way, so a company page shows its contacts and deals automatically." So I can go in here under CRM, and we have Companies, we have Contacts, and we have Deals. That's pretty interesting, but let's go put a person in it and make sure this thing actually works. The way I'm going to do that is just come down here and say: "I have a contact, Maria Delgado, maria@example.com. She's the COO at Bluebonnet Freight. Create the company and add a deal: Bluebonnet warehouse contract, $40,000, stage Talking, next step is send the proposal by Friday." I know it's a contrived example, but we're going to go make sure it works. We've seen that just by talking to Claude, we're able to create a very simple CRM inside Notion. Now let's see if the thing actually works. It says it's going to do it. We're going to allow it to create pages in Notion for this task. We said yes, you can do it. Now if we go over here in our CRM, under Companies, we see Bluebonnet Freight just showed up. It looks like it's linked to a contact, Maria Delgado, and a deal, Bluebonnet Warehouse Contract. So I can click on Maria, and there she is. She's the COO at Bluebonnet. There's her email, maria@example.com. I can copy the email. I can go leave notes. These are the basics of a CRM: companies, contacts, and deals. One sentence, it added it, linked them all together, and we're already up and running. Is this as good as Salesforce? Absolutely not. There's no way. And it shouldn't really matter, because if you're already using Salesforce or HubSpot, that's great. But if you're not, and you're not at that size yet, you need a place where your pipeline lives that isn't memory. That's what we're doing here. A spreadsheet is not enterprise software, but it is the first step toward a system. So let's not think about which CRM we're going to buy. If you don't have one, you do now. And if you had one before, that's fine. Instead of following what we're doing, go into your connectors and connect to the CRM you're already using. Maybe that's HubSpot. There's HubSpot right there. There are plenty of options to go connect integrations for your CRM. If not, use this one. Here's the homework I'd give you. First, go build your CRM. You can pause, you can copy the prompt, you can change the deal stages, you can write your own prompt. If you don't know your stages, use mine, that's fine. Or go research the ones you want, or talk to Claude about it. Then add three real contacts by talking or typing, not by clicking. Not by adding them to Notion directly. Do it by talking to Claude, because eventually Claude is going to start doing this without us. And if you're watching this in a track, in the next video we're going to go find that messy contact spreadsheet you exported a couple of years ago, the one with double lines where it's hard to find each person, and get it into our CRM so we never have to look at that spreadsheet again. See you there.