Hi, my name is Gareth Pronovost and I help people unlock the full potential of airtable. I
have a small consulting firm called gap consulting and
That business started about a year ago and about six months into that journey
I started releasing these YouTube tutorials on air table and it really started to take off from there
And so basically what I do is I just help people
Visualize the different things that are possible in air table by building them here in YouTube videos
And that's what brings me to you all here today
so in this video we're going to be doing a quick breakdown on how to build a
CRM for personal use inside of air table. I'm going to be going through this step-by-step and the part that makes air table so
useful is that you can
Really? I mean, it's so modular that you can make changes wherever you see fit
So if you follow along on this video and build this for yourself, and then you say hey
Maybe I don't need that or maybe I want something else instead totally possible very easy to do so
With without further ado, let's jump on into this and take a look
alright, so when you first log in to air table, and I should point out that this
This is a free account that I am sharing with you here
You'll see a screen very similar to this when you are ready to create a new space
It's called a base and that is short for database
so inside here
We're just going to click add a base
and you'll see that we can start with a template and if we select to start with a template it's going to take us to
our
Table universe which has just a list of all these different templates that other people have built and shared but for this case
We're actually going to start from scratch. You see that you also have an option of course of importing a spreadsheet
So if you already have some sort of data that you've been tracking in a spreadsheet you could actually start from there
But I'm going to start from scratch for this example
Hahnemann is just call this the example
CRM and you'll see that you can also pick
You know a logo or something to kind of identify this space. So, let's see
I know that there's a people logo find that one and you can change the color. It's all very custom
So now we've got this built. Let's go ahead and jump into it and take a look at how that is set up
so when we go inside you'll see that we have one table here table is like a tab in Excel and
And then we have these three
Fields and fields are columns. So real quick rewind here. There are some air table. There is some air table terminology you need to know
Field is a column
record is a row and a table is essentially a tab and
All of the tables can be linked together so that they share information between them and I will show you
An awesome use case for that in this video
So let's go ahead and rename this table and we're going to call this our contacts
and
So what different pieces of data are we going to collect on every contact? Well?
I'm gonna make this very generic and of course as I mentioned you can customize this for yourself
However you need but we're going to have a full name here
I'll just keep it name and I'm going to get rid of these notes and attachments fields and
A very common use case would be to have a first name and a last name
You get that setup right here and
We can actually build it so that name is you know
The full name and that this is going to be a formula that adds the first and last name together
So, let's see how we would do that
What I'm doing here is selecting the type of data that lives in this field
so you see that the you have a list of different types of data that can be selected and
we're going to go ahead and select the formula and
for this one we're going to use a concatenate formula and
Inside these parentheses is where we're going to tell it what different pieces of data we want to string together in this case
we're going to string together the first name and then we separate each field by a comma and
then I'm going to put a space and I need to surround it in these quotations so that it recognizes that that's a space and
Then we're going to put the last name
So that's very similar syntax to what you would write in Excel except you don't need an equal sign in front of it
You just begin typing the formula
And so that's it. That's how you would write these formulas and let's make it let's do a quick test run
Let's say we had Wyatt Earp in here
If we enter that name
And we give our table a moment to think it will populate perfect
Now we need to start
Thinking about the different things that we want to collect the different data points that we collect for all of our different contacts
very standard one would be email and
You see that the default field type is a single line text. Well now we are going to actually select this two email and a
quick sidenote
You'll notice that there are many many different types of field types here that we're not visible when I was showing you the formula earlier
So really quickly, let me select that email, but then I'm gonna jump into this other one
We're gonna look at the different field types here
this is a much shorter list and this is because this first field is called the primary field and
There are a limited number of different types of fields that you can have here
Because it's the primary field. This is what I will derive all of the connections that we build into this table
And so it needs to be a unique name in in as many cases as possible
So just bear that in mind when you're setting up the architecture for your own space
You can see that I'm also very easily resizing these columns or fields
and so I'm trying to keep it nice and tidy and
So here's where you know, we might have a different
Email information
All right, and so what other fields might we have well we might need a phone number
And
You again?
You see I think the point here is just to show you that you can really easily
Customize the type of data that lives here if you are
In based in the US this phone number in this phone number field works really well
and
Otherwise
It might be a little difficult to get it to set up
I've worked with clients in the past that are not us-based and their formula their phone never always comes in a little funky. So
Just bear that in mind. This is set up to have you know a ten digit phone number
And so you can just add all these different things into this database anything that you want
you could add notes you could add, you know a status maybe like a lead status like
You know hot cold something like that. All of this is very easily customizable inside of air table
What we're actually going to do is build another table that we're going to connect
Into the contacts and that table is going to be our interactions
So this is how in a CRM this is the basic functionality
We need to store the data of individuals and organizations. And then we also need to store the the
Information about how we have interacted with those individuals. And so that's what we're going to have here
so we're going to create a new table and
We're going to name this table interactions and
You see that the table starts off with the same three
Fields that the last one did we're going to get rid of all of these
And
I'm just going to call this the interaction ID and
I'm going to keep it a single
I'm going to keep it single line text for now, and I'm going to change that in a moment and
We're going to have a type of interaction. And for this one. We actually use the single select option and
The single select option is like a drop-down essentially. So let's take a look at what that might look like
Different types of interactions we could have would be email
in-person
phone and
you can you know add add new task types as you see fit here and
then over here we're going to have the any notes from this and this would be a long text field and
Of course most importantly we need to record who we have that interaction with and when the interaction is
so this is going to be where we start linking tables and
You'll see that you have an option to link to another record
And we can choose are we linking to a record inside the
Interactions table or are we linking to a record in a different table in this case the contacts table and that's what we want
so we're going to select that and we're going to save and
We're going to add one more thing and that will be the date of interaction
All right, so let's see and lastly, of course I want to
Make this a unique interaction ID. And so I'm going to write a quick formula for this
And you'll see that when we first write this of course
This is going to flash as an error because we don't have the data in the fields
so let's go ahead and throw some data in these fields and set up an example just
To test this all out and
It looks great so I'm going to get rid of these
so effectively what we have here is you know, this is
recording the interaction and it's getting the the name of both the type the contact and the date and the nice thing about that is
It is
going to be
Easy to see when we jump back into contacts
so
let's see what the reciprocal of this relationship is because now we built this relationship between the interactions in the
Contacts and so not only does the contact live on the interactions table
But the interactions now live on the contacts table and the reason that we want to give that a unique
Primary field remember the primary field is the far left column
the reason we want that to be such a unique name is because
Now we can very easily see what this interaction is by that name
and
That's it. So as you
You know build this out for yourself, of course
as I've said multiple times already you will want to
change
This and customize it for your own personal needs
however, in this case
This is just a really simple basic layout for how you would build both contacts and then also
interrelate them with interactions
So before we sign off here, I'm just going to show you how you would enter new data into this
of course the advanced use case would be using an zapier automation so that this information was being taken from some part of your
business and and entered into this database automatically
But if we're not that advanced we can do this manually
So we start off by clicking that plus to add a new record and of course, we don't need to type the full name
That's going to be assumed automatically
Let's go ahead with a doc holliday
And we have to give our table a moment to catch up and there it's filled out the name for us any
information that we put in here
will be recorded for Doc and
So now jumping back into our interactions if we had an interaction with Doc that we wanted to record
we would click the plus down here adding a new record and
We would add the date for that. Let's suppose that was today
And of course we need to select who we had the contact with and you'll see that
whereas before we just saw Wyatt Earp now, we see Doc Holliday here and
Whatever type of interaction that was maybe that was on the phone and any notes that we wanted to take we could just start typing
and
There we are. And if we jump back into our contacts, we will see that we had this last contact here
last piece that I want to leave you with is how you could add multiple contacts or multiple interactions and then
Pull back information that showed you when you had your last contact
So let's build an old one for Doc Holliday as well here
Let's suppose that we had spoken to Doc Holliday in early December as
Well, so we have two interactions for Doc. We have one on the 11th and one on the 30th
So jumping forward in two contacts, we would see now both of those interactions are recorded
What we want to do is bring in a new field that is going to show us the most recent interaction
date
And this is called a rollup field and
What it's going to do it's going to look at all of those interactions on the interaction table and we want it to tell us
Which one is the latest date so we look at the interactions table?
We want to look at the date and we want to know what the light the latest one is, which is a max values function
Once we've done that you'll see that we don't see that
12:11
Recording. We only see the date for the most recent
interaction that we recorded with Doc Holliday and with quieter
so this is pertaining directly to these interactions here and it's doing the math basically and finding out which of these is
The is the interaction that is the most recent
So I will leave you with that if you have any further questions or want to learn air table in greater detail
I welcome you to swing by my youtube channel and visit my website
I put out a lot of content at new content every week to help people really unlock the full potential of this software
So I hope to see you there and and thanks for your time
You