Can I do a couple of CRM-things without a whole CRM?

September 10, 2019 6:50 PM

I looked through other questions with similar aims, but found most of the suggested options are now subscription-based, defunct, or too much/too little for what I'm after:

What I'd like to do is spend one day a week following up with selected customers.

I'd like to populate a handful of fields with info and notes, and then say remind me in [x] months (issue-specific) to look at this again.

Each week, I'd like to look at the list and just see the items that bubbled to the top, follow up appropriately, add notes, and say bug me again in [x] months.

I've mostly found very feature-rich sales applications that are much more than needed, or too-limited phone apps. I'd prefer to do this at my desk, and ideally search, sort and export (not required though).

I'd also like it to be for the low price of (at least almost) free. For clarification, Daylite looked like a great option until I saw it was $24/month, not $24/year. Even that had a lot more features than I'd ever use it for. While this is for business, it's a one-person task, and a full-blown SaaS doesn't seem justified. This isn't a product we'll grow to depend on for other things -- the goal is specifically to use it as a one-off, separate from the rest of the management systems already in place.

Also, the fields will need to be manually populated, so integrations with LinkedIn/Gmail/whatnot aren't going to help.

The only thing I've come up with so far is a template in Evernote and one note for each contact, with reminders for each, but this doesn't make for handy reference.

Windows, Mac, Linux, or web-based are fine (macOS preferred), just not mobile-only.

Thank you in advance!!

posted by hypersloth to Work & Money (5 answers total)

Best answer: Have you looked at Zoho Creator? They hide their free option a little but it exists, and it really is very easy to use for basic data management. I've never managed to understand their backend coding language but when I've gotten past my depth and the drag-and-drop interface couldn't handle my needs, I've described what I was trying to do to tech support and they've just magically made it for me.
posted by teremala at 7:54 PM on September 10, 2019

Best answer: Airtable is another nice free option.
posted by HeroZero at 9:18 PM on September 10, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: If you’re okay with setting notifications as a date (as in “remind me on Nov 5”) instead of “in a month”, then you could do this with Airtable.

Airtable is already a great database that you can use to make a CRM, and you can use their calendar function and connect it to your calendar app or phone so that you get notifications/can see which client to follow up with on which day.

Also free or very inexpensive.
posted by many more sunsets at 9:19 PM on September 10, 2019

Response by poster: Thank you! Either of these looks great, didn't see the free options. I'll play around with them and get there, I'm sure.
posted by hypersloth at 2:00 PM on September 11, 2019

I came to suggest AirTable as well. Here's a pretty detailed guide to using it as a CRM, along with a base you could use.
posted by synecdoche at 4:58 PM on September 13, 2019