Personal CRM
Show Notes
CRM tools
- Keep In Touch source code (Ulysse's original Personal CRM project)
- AirTable (Personal CRM template)
- Notion (Personal CRM template)
- Todoist
- Growth Podcast: Your Past & Future Self episode
Music
- Intro music: Vlog Music Cafe Type Hip-Hop Instrumental Chill Lo-Fi Beat by Oliwia Orłowska
- Outro music: Game Over [Super Mario World Lofi/hiphop remix] by Neighborhood Vandal
Transcript
Ulysse: Hey, this is the Growth Podcast with your hosts, Ben and Brendon. This episode, we'll be talking about Personal CRM or: the software that launched a thousand friendships. I remember I was scrolling through my phone when I lived in Charleston over 10 years ago, I was there for an internship, and I remember just scrolling through my phone and looking at my contacts and being like, hmm, who can I reach out to? Whenever I felt a resonance with someone, I would just dial the number and call them. And I think I got a lot of pleasure out of the nostalgia of just talking to people that I knew, but I slowly began to realize that people really enjoyed getting phone calls from people they know.
Brendon: Oh, cool.
Ulysse: And so I think that's where my idea for the Personal CRM started.
Brendon: As for our listeners who aren't as familiar with CRM, so CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and it's typically used to refer to a class of software used by businesses to keep track of all the different potential customers or current customers that they're actively engaging with. Which is important if you need to track when to contact people to try to get them to, say, sign a deal or monitoring communications with the long time multi-year client to make sure they're getting the attention and services that they require. And I think, Ben, when you're saying a Personal CRM, that's the concept of having some personal system or software to track everyone in your life and make sure that you're able to keep in touch with all of them. Because sometimes over our lifetimes, we encounter thousands of people and we might lose a lot of connections that we might not want to lose. So a Personal CRM can be one way for people to develop additional quality relationships as they progress in life.
Ulysse: Right. The way I like to think about it is, Personal CRM or Personal Customer Relationship Management is a systematic way of having organic and lovely interactions with people you know. You can use it for utility, if you need to network with people and you can do things for them and they can do things for you. Or you can use it to just keep in touch with your distant family members or friends, people you've known throughout your life. So it started with just going through my phone and then being the programmer that I was, I decided to write some code to automate the process. And so it was very simple. It was just like, I had some text file that kept track of who I wanted to contact, how often I wanted to contact them, usually in days, and then when the last time I contacted them was. And then there were a few ways of interacting with this "database," which is basically just a text file figuring out who I should contact next.
Ulysse: And then when I contacted them, I would tell this program that I contacted them and then it would update the date that I last contacted them. Yeah, it was super simple. That was the second version of my Personal CRM. The third one was, I used this software called Airtable, which is a way of managing data. So you can have different entities like people and businesses and then you can connect them in different ways and aggregate the data or sort it or whatever, and it just helps you organize your data. So this was already basically in this format already where I had each person and their contact date and the frequency. And so it was pretty easy to move it into that. And then later I moved into Notion, which is a note-taking software, but it also has a lot of cool automated features like tables and stuff like that.
Brendon: Cool. How do you feel the system has benefited you?
Ulysse: Just like in our episode on the past and future self, I feel like a lot of this is just pleasure from nostalgia. So just talking to people I know is really warm and fuzzy. And also I found that contacting people from my past, sometimes you discover new things that you had never expected. Like, they'll introduce you to some new activity that you wouldn't have expected or sometimes people change over time and then they become even more fun to be around. I've definitely found that reconnecting and keeping contact with people is a super easy way to keep providing joy in your life.
Brendon: So you mentioned getting back in touch with say old friends or acquaintances, you're using this, the original list that you had and also these subsequent systems for almost reaching back out to friends, particularly those that you hadn't talked to in a while. So I'm just curious, how many people have you had in your various Personal CRMs?
Ulysse: Yeah. I think I've talked to some other people who do something like this and they have hundreds of thousands of people-
Brendon: Holly, molly.
Ulysse: ... but they use it more for a business/personal database. But for me, I think I have about 200 people in my list and I would guess probably more than half are people that I don't talk to frequently, but are people that I still think are interesting to talk to. Some of them, like I said before, are distant family members who maybe I sometimes forget about because we don't see each other very often, but I want to make sure that we still have a semi-close relationship as family members. Or people who have known you since you were a child, I think they're a different kind of relationship than people who met you as an adult.
Brendon: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Wow. That's great. I mean, that makes my Personal CRM look very small by comparison. I think I have, across friends and family, maybe 15 to 20 individuals. But-
Ulysse: Oh yeah.
Brendon: ... actually I just used the Personal CRM mostly, not so much for reaching out to long lost contacts, but more for remembering to stay in regular contact with friends. For example, remembering to contact my grandparents every few weeks. Or with some friends, maybe you meet them at some point in life but they're living in a different place or it's not one of the friends that I have regular Google Calendar meetups with. So I don't just automatically talk with them every week or few weeks.
Ulysse: All right.
Brendon: Then they go into my Personal CRM. I actually just use my Todoist app for my Personal CRM. So I used Todoist and I just have a social project and then under that I have a friend's project, I have a family project, for example. And I just put people as their own individual tasks with the recurring due date of how often I want to stay in touch with them. For example, for Pete, every year or something. So then every once in a while that person will just pop up on the tasks I have for the week. And then if I reach out to them, I'll check the task off and it'll just recur at some point in the future. Or I'll just adjust the date if I'm a little busy that week.
Ulysse: Something I was thinking about was, I think some people might try to use Google Calendar or something like that to do this. But I think there's an important distinction between having a list versus having a specific date scheduled in some ways. Or I guess in your case, it's easy for you to defer talking to someone until later. I guess I'm just thinking that there've been times in my life where I didn't really want to talk to anybody for days. I've been in a slump or maybe I've just been really busy. And so I think some important feature or attribute of my system to myself is that I don't penalize myself. I don't make myself feel bad if I don't reach out to people. I just look at the list again and then I just grab the person on top of the list.
Ulysse: I think it's like looking at Twitter versus looking at your RSS feeds. Because I know some people, they feel overwhelmed, and by some people, I mean myself, when they don't read all of the items on their RSS feed. But then if you're looking at something like Twitter or Facebook or something, you're just scrolling through a snapshot of that time and you don't worry too much about. It's not a to-do list or it's not something that you have to complete, it's just something that's available when you want it. And I think this mentality is really important for this kind of project. No one's going to notice if you don't reach out to them every two weeks. In fact, they might notice if you do it, on clockwork, reach out to them every two weeks. Some people it's, I talk to them once a year.
Brendon: Right.
Ulysse: And then I've noticed that, oh, I don't want to talk to them the same day, send an email on the same day.
Brendon: Exactly.
Ulysse: Because you can see the previous email in the thread and it's like, this was 365 days ago. What the hell? So yeah.
Brendon: That's so funny.
Ulysse: What were you going to say?
Brendon: Oh no, I was going to say, maybe they need an approximate date feature for Personal CRM software. Have about a two months, give or take, a few days or something. That'd be pretty funny actually.
Ulysse: Well, that's actually what I had in the code that I wrote. It would give it a little bit of random jigger, plus or minus 20%.
Brendon: Oh wow. That's incredible.
Ulysse: I think. And then it would sort them all by the most overdue-
Brendon: Wow.
Ulysse: ... person.
Brendon: It's brilliant.
Ulysse: But it's way less work to just use a software solution that already exists, like Airtable or Notion or Excel, even. That's one of the big reasons why I moved over to using an existing hosted solution like Airtable originally. Because it was just like, I don't want to have to deal with maintaining the software.
Brendon: Yeah. And I think earlier you mentioned, I think one of the benefits of this Personal CRM system, the time or the reminder or the nudge aspect of it, where you're getting back in touch with people. I think you also, I'm not sure, did you mention the benefit is like improving the relationship with someone?
Ulysse: No. Yeah, no, I didn't mention that, but that's a really good point though. I don't have a good sense of what all the factors are that go into having a positive impression of someone in your life, but I feel like one of them is, is there someone who thinks about me? Is there someone who reaches out to me, who makes me feel special? I feel like there's a lot of small heuristics you can use, you can depend on, to remember if someone's good or bad in your life. Like I said, it's like a systematic way of being a really nice guy, a really nice person.
Brendon: Right.
Ulysse: It's like, you could have these organic interactions, but you're actually just spending on software to remind you. And I think that's the beauty of the modern world in a lot of ways, how this software can help us have really amazing organic interactions.
Brendon: Yeah, exactly. I think a really good Personal CRM would have a couple of additional elements. And I don't think either of us are doing this. But for one thing, what I'd really want to do is like ... and I think this is something I can do by checking Facebook regularly. But just sending a message to friends on their birthday, I think that can be thoughtful. Also, things like giving a gift out of the blue. Those things are different than getting back in touch with the person, but they're still small actions you could take to improve that relationship.
Ulysse: That actually reminds me of a new recurring task I recently added to my schedule, which was to send compliments to my landlord-
Brendon: What?
Ulysse: ... on a regular basis. Because I feel like if you want them to like you, then if you can show your appreciation to them, I feel like they'll view you as someone who is on their side and not as that annoying tenant who always is asking for things. I'm experimenting with this idea, but so far, so good. I feel like my landlord has really appreciated it. I was going to say also, there's so much room for improvement on this. Because I know Microsoft has one that hooks into all of their Windows domain enterprise software, and I'm sure other companies have them for customers.
Brendon: Yeah.
Ulysse: If someone was dedicated enough, they could probably write one that hooks into Gmail and Facebook and SMS. And can do all the work for you and then remind you using notifications instead of using your to-do list or using whatever I'm using.
Brendon: Yeah. I think a lot of things the CRMs regularly do could really enhance this. For example, going through existing communications, channels that people have, you can even see how often you regularly connect with someone. One feature of CRM is you can take notes about the person. So details about them, your next talk. You can say, hey.
Ulysse: Oh, I do that. I do that. Yeah.
Brendon: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And that's not part of your Personal CRM system, right? Is that just part of your note system or is it related to the CRM?
Ulysse: So for some of my closest friends, like you, we have a dedicated, shared conversation queue of topics. Right?
Brendon: Right.
Ulysse: But I do, like for my brother ... Don't tell my brother. But I've been keeping track of, whenever I hear him talk about something he wants, then I write it down as a potential birthday-
Brendon: Oh, yeah. I do that for friends as well.
Ulysse: So yeah. It has so many purposes like that. Or if you forget and that you want to remember, I don't know, your friends, partner or spouse's name, you can add that and so you don't-
Brendon: Right.
Ulysse: ... you can bring up context. Again, from one perspective, it feels very cold and calculated. But actually, if you're the recipient of someone's affection like this, it feels really good. When I reach out to people, I don't just say, hey, how are you doing? I'm like, hey, this is what's going on in my life. And I try to tailor it to this person that I like or love. And there's no automated message, it's all something I type out on the fly. Because the whole point is to have interactions, and if I'm just having robot write it, then it's like, what am I really getting out of it?
Brendon: Yeah. That reminds me, I did receive a holiday card, a virtual holiday card from a former coworker recently and I thought that was really thoughtful as well. It makes you think of them again. It's kind of reinforcing that connection. And that goes back to one of the things I was going to mention. So it's interesting. You are using this Personal CRM for a few hundred individuals, we'll call them maybe close and also more distant friends. That's like the audience.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: And I would say, I'm using this more for close friends and immediate family. And I think one other audience that we haven't discussed directly, but was related to your landlord example was just like ... I mean, I think this in general is just really useful for networking or broader utility beyond a personal friend group.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: I think there's this personal benefit as well. Right?
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: Like, why is my former coworker sending me this card? Probably because there's ... the motivation might be friendship, but it might also just be keeping in touch in case there's a useful professional connection there in the future.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: And I think that this is really helpful for those types of scenarios. Another thing that CRMs are used for is actually acquiring and tracking potential leads. Or I guess in personal speak, trying to keep track of individuals that you're interested in speaking with or people you're interested in befriending. I think there's an app like pretty significant professional utility as well. Like, I really should be doing this. People that I've talked with at conferences in the past or people I bumped into as part of various groups I'm in. Those sorts of connections that could be strengthened if I chatted with them or even just reached out occasionally. So I think I really need to build that up, but I think that's enormous potential benefit.
Ulysse: Thanks for listening. All the tools and research we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes. If you use any of the Personal CRM tools, don't feel bad about reaching out to people only when you're feeling social and talking to no one when you're not. The beautiful intro music to this episode was created by Oliwia Orłowska. This relaxing melody is by Neighborhood Vandal. Links to both of these songs can be found in the show notes.
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