What's up all your sales, marketing pros on growth teams, all around the world. I want to talk about funnels, pipeline, CRM, how we do our work and how we track it.
there's a bunch of apps out there that say, you know what, I'm going to help you with that. Salesforce is probably the most recognizable one, but we have some up-and-comers like Pipedrive, and HubSpot that have,
come into the mix. And almost everything looks about the same. You have your pipeline.
Kanban is all their rage now, but they used to be account list and more spreadsheet style. So Pipedrive, Salesforce, HubSpot all looking kind of like this, but. If you're just getting started or you don't want to purchase a CRM, you're probably tracking your companies and contacts and bit of a pipeline, something kind of like this in an Excel spreadsheet or in a Google Sheet.
All of it looks about the same. And, over here at Coda, we say enough of this sheet. We're tired of tracking things in Google sheets and spreadsheets and the apps that we use, like Salesforce and HubSpot. They're super rigid and hard to spin up and costly and timely.
And we're just trying to prototype a process. Or my entire sales team is myself. let's put something light and fun. So what this looks like in Coda,
Let's hop over to create a first Coda doc for us, go to your URL browser and type in coda.nu. And you know, at that, does that creates a new cut of doc for us to start coming through quick and fast and easy.
So we got a blank doc. Let's create our first contacts table. It's going to feel a bit like a spreadsheet now. Where we're going to name the contacts. And we can put in our contact names and our phone numbers and our email addresses all of the things that we have housed in spreadsheets or our CRM.
And by the way, we can pull in a CSV. We don't have to build this from scratch, but, to build things from scratch. So going through phone number and we're filling out, I'm just going to fast forward a little bit as I. I go through and fill out all of this information to make it feel a bit more real. All right.
Here got the companies putting a few more. Now that status and your sheet is going to probably be texts, but in Coda you can bake your docs become as powerful as apps. And what I mean by that is that. Status now shows up in another table
What I'm doing is I have this table is connected automatically to the contacts table. I'm going to do the same for my companies. Create them in what we call a lookup or a new table. I can then connect the two together. If I add new companies or show up there on the select list, no weird view, VLookups, no hacks, and definitely not needing to spin up entire CRM to do this.
Let me just put some metadata on this company information that you can see here and we'll move on to the next part.
Now that I've gotten my companies and contacts. I'm going to drag and pull those tables into their own pages. So now we have three pages in our Coda doc, and I'm going to create a new one for us.
This is going to be where we're housing, our entire sales opportunity pipeline. I'm got to name this page. according to pick an icon a bit later, it's going to lead a blank now opportunities table. The opportunity name is always a little funky. We can talked a bit more about this later, but I just want to have a name column.
And a few other things that I normally like to put a close date: that's a date column so that I can see everything coming through, and when it's going to land. And then the last thing that I want to do similar to before is throw on the, the status.
We can see a few of the new phases that I'll put through, go and change this over to rainbow looks a lot better, and I love the color . It just makes it a lot more fun and less like a boring spreadsheet. Pick your favorite colors. You can even throw in emojis if you want on this. Sum up those amounts. So I understand everything in the pipeline. I would probably do a way to pipeline if I was going to the next phase, but I'm going to keep this nice and blank simple.
Now, what I want to do is start creating some different data viz for this. So you saw back there that HubSpot and Salesforce and Pipedrive, all the rage is the card view. So what I'm doing is I'm recreating that I'm grouping all of my opportunities on the top, by the phase and the pipeline. And I want to show empty groups. When you're just getting started close won close lost, probably not going to have anything in there. And if I were move things from negotiation and a closed one, and there's nothing in negotiation, I want to keep that group open for me to fill out. I've got to throw on a new opportunity here. When I put on a new opportunity and the, the card of the Kanban view, it's going to show up in the table above these two views are automatically connected.
So any updates I'm making this, shifting in a close one, you can see that it just moved to close one up top. Same with the TK TK. So everything is connected, and it all flows through in a really nice manner. So now that we have all the data together, what I want to do is start creating views for myself.
So oftentimes you have like a rep or an opportunity owner. I want to put myself on it. I'm the only one in the doc. If you were to start inviting other people into the doc, you can do it through Google contacts, Slack, or other people within your Google workspace. So that's what I'll do now. Going to pull in Khoi, who's a coworker of mine.
Now I'm going to create my own John's opportunity view, which will allow me to come into this doc and not have to look at all the other opportunities. I just get to focus on mine and I'm going to create a new filter. Pull it down to just an owner myself. I could have also done current user so that anyone, when they logged in would just see their own pipeline. John looks at, and I see, Khoi logs in, then he sees his ongoing shift to move things around. This isn't impacting the other views that we're seeing there in sales opportunity.
It's only impacting John's view right here, because I'm going to create my own unique view and the way that I like to see it while not having to impact others, I don't have to copy and paste. I don't have to ask a sales admin and end to put everything together. All right. And the last thing I want to do is just hide stuff that doesn't really matter.
Going throw that status into the admin section. So now that we have companies and contacts, I'm going to make the company's view a little bit cooler. Or you can think of it kind of like a card view in any way that you want. So I often see a company has a H one it's nice and big and bold, and then there's all these sub tables down below for the contacts and that opportunities that you can see here.
So when you open it up, those lookups now show up as little sub tables and each of these rows I can have conversations on. So if, and when you start inviting others into this doc, All right. And the last thing that I want to do is just pull in some imagery.
So I'm going to copy and paste some images from Google images, pulling the logos. Start putting some color and some imagery in here to make it a lot more fun.
So that's the quick and dirty of how to create a basic sales pipeline, CRM companies, contacts, whether it's for sales, marketing, or whatnot, and a Coda doc, it's going to feel a bit more robust than a Sheet. You're not going to get trapped into the text or A1 B2 prison. It's going to be much lighter weight to prototype new processes than spinning up. A completely custom CRM like Pipedrive, Salesforce, or HubSpot.
So if you want to learn more about how I think about CRMs, how I've actually built our internal CRM here at Coda. There's a really awesome webinar that I did with our resident, a Coda expert and educational specialists, Maria.
And we spent about an hour talking to this, invited a whole bunch of people from the Coda community like Marissa and Benjamin to ask questions and talk about how we all think about building CRMs. The link is in the show notes and super excited for all to try a Coda for this use case. Thanks everyone.
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