How to Build a 100X Personal CRM
A step-by-step guide to managing your professional relationships, a free webinar and Venture Loft launches in NYC!
I just returned home to New York after three weeks on the road in San Francisco, Los Angeles …and Bucharest. My team and I hosted over a dozen events in three cities including a full-day conference with the founders of Foursquare, Venmo, DocSend, and Chief speaking, and I spoke in front of a thousand people at an opera house in a foreign country. It was wild.
I met close to a hundred people in the past three weeks, and that got me thinking about a tool I rely on heavily: My personal CRM.
My personal CRM system is by far the MOST important tool I use.
I use it to remember all the people I meet, make introductions between relevant people, and stay on top of my professional relationships.
Without my CRM tool, my business, my professional network, and (probably) my personal life would be in shambles.
On top of that, I’ve used my CRM to help hundreds of people land jobs, build a 7-figure events business, and help dozens of entrepreneurs raise capital for their companies.
Earlier in my career, I used Apple’s notes app to keep track of all the people I met. It worked for a while and it’d look something like this:
But after growing that list to over 30 people, it became impossible to track, and I knew that if I was going to continue to build my network, I’d need a sustainable system to track and manage all the people I’d meet.
Psst… In case you didn’t know - CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a fancy way of describing a tool that tracks your professional relationships' status and contact information.
A CRM Will 10X Your Ability to Build & Grow Relationships
It is impossible to mentally keep track of all your relationships throughout your career without a robust system unless you’re a Mike Ross-level prodigy.
At any point, you might have 10-20 people in mind. A CRM lets you stay on top of hundreds - if not thousands - of relationships.
The best part: you just need to build your CRM once, before you can use it for the rest of your career. Worth the investment!
Other benefits of a personal CRM:
To remember important details about people
To know who to contact for specific purposes
To identify exactly who to make an introduction to
To find the right people to invite to events and gatherings
To help people raise capital by making the right introduction
To help people find jobs by connecting them to the right person
& much more…
My Master CRM System
I recently revamped my Master CRM System completely in Notion.
After trying a bunch of tools like GSheets, Airtable, and Clay, I landed on Notion because it’s incredibly intuitive, and allows me to easily customize the design, features, and integrate 3rd part apps like Zapier.
How to use each column:
Read this section to understand how to use each column in my CRM.
People Identifiers (Name, Role, Company Name, LinkedIn, Email Address, Location, Company Website) help with storing personal contact information about someone.
Category (Mentee, Mentor, Advocate, Network, Vendor, Client, Partner) helps by contextualizing your professional relationship.
Relationship Level (New, Friendly, Strong, and finally, Advocate) clarifies the strength of your relationship.
Action (Build Urgently, Build, Maintain) clarifies action items related to your professional relationship (e.g. do you want to focus on building the relationship or maintaining it?_
Last Interaction and Follow-up Frequency (FuF) helps remind you of the last time you connected with someone - and the next time you should follow up.
The secret to maintaining an effective CRM is to update it regularly.
I use 5 different processes to update my CRM:
Adding New People: Sharon (my assistant) goes into my calendar every day to add everyone from my meetings to the CRM. I also add people I meet at events and make sure that every single person I’ve ever encountered is entered into the CRM.
Categorizing People: Every two weeks, I go through to categorize new people (see above: Category, Relationship Level, Action). I do this to make sure every single interaction and relationship has some sort of action tied to it.
Enriching + Refreshing People Data: I also make sure each person’s profile is enriched with data on their company (e.g. company size, estimated revenue, estimated headcount), and notes from our interactions.
Updating Interactions: Every time I meet with someone, I add meeting notes on our interaction to their profile.
Taking Action: The last thing I do is to follow up with the person (e.g. schedule another meeting, send an email, introduce them to someone, etc.)
📌 Get 6 FREE months of Notion!
I love Notion’s platform so much that I convinced them to give you a unique offer:
My community gets Notion FREE for up to 6 months, to build + scale your company with one powerful tool.
(Select “Andrew Yeung” in the drop-down partner list, and enter code ”NotionXAY”)
Advanced Mode
If you’d like to get even deeper into the CRM rabbit hole, - explore my other templates for founders, investors, “aspirational” people, event attendees, vendors, and an expert network.
✅ See It in Action
On November 12th at 1:00 pm EST, I’m hosting a virtual event: How to Build a 100x Personal CRM to walk you through how I manage my personal + professional relationships, make introductions, and oversee 40,000+ contacts in my CRM.
I’ll also answer your questions, share more advice, and give you actionable tips to get started building a CRM.
It’s completely free and registrants will get access to the event recording and slides.
📌 Andrew’s Bookmarks
My favorite things from the internet.
Writing Examples – A database of writing examples from prominent writers and authors like Charles Dickens, George Orwell, and Jerry Seinfeld - with individual use cases (e.g. How to Write a Memorable Speech). An absolute goldmine for anyone looking to get writing inspiration.
bolt – Another clever full-stack prompt coding platform that allows you to build anything with AI. You can even build an Uber or Airbnb clone. Opportunities here are endless.
The Pros And Cons of Going Sober in Your Career – I recently went on Morning Brew’s new podcast: Per My Last Email to talk about going sober, and how it’s affected my career. Hint: There are some downsides too…
💼 Job Board
Sharing roles at friendly companies I’m familiar with.
👉 Btw, if you want to be part of our partner talent network, next play, and get curated job opportunities in your inbox, please sign up here.
Product Marketing Manager, Carry
Operator, Carry
City Launcher, POSH
Generalist Role, Paradigm
Have a job to share? Please reply to this email.
💃 Community Perks
🍽️ FREE FOOD! InKind is the ultimate dining app for foodies. Get up to 30% back when you dine at top restaurants and $50 off your bill every month… plus we both get $25 when you sign up… Sign up here.
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🇺🇸 Looking for a US immigration lawyer? Reply here for an introduction to the lawyer I worked with for my O1A visa.
What other perks should I include? Let me know.