Trello and clickup allow you to create your own system for managing clients and if you’re already using it for other parts of your business it just makes sense. You’re already in the program so you are far more likely to use it.
How would I set up trello?
If you only have 2-3 active clients at a time you could potentially house everything on one board. That said I’d personally suggest creating a team and labeling it CRM. The benefit of doing this is you can share it with your team and allow them to use it too. This helps you and your VA keep on top of everything needed for your active clients.
After creating the team you would then create 2-3 boards.
- Leads
- Active clients
- Past clients
Leads and active clients can be one board if you are a small company. But as you grow you’ll want to separate those out. The cool thing is you can have templates for each step in the client process. Checklists and workflows that you add to each personal to ensure that each client gets the same treatment and you’re following the same process each and every time.
Here’s a video of how that would look in Trello and how to use it.
And how about Clickup?
Clickup would be much the same but you would create a space for your CRM. Then create lists for Leads, Active Clients, and Past Clients. Clickup will also allow you to track time through programs like Harvest or Toggl. This is useful for tracking paid work time for clients and simply tracking how long it’s taking you to do admin tasks and communicating. This kind of information is essential when you to increase pricing or just adjust pricing after you’ve actually begun to do the work.
Video for Clickup coming soon!
Are there any sticky bits?
Now it’s not all roses and rainbows. There is a dark side to using a CRM like this…there’s no way to export the names and email addresses so that you can add them to your email marketing software. The work around here is to simply add them by hand to a certain list or segment. This would be a task that you added to your checklist. Personally I would not add them until they become an active client. Once you move them to the past client board/list make sure that you then move them over to the past client segment within your email marketing platform. Again this should just be a part of your checklist.