Building a Contact Database or CRM in Evernote Part 2

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest episode of the Triple 'T' Productivity Podcast is out, continuing my journey of looking at ‘productivity’ from an holistic point of view. This week a great chat about Imposter Syndrome with Kara C Payton.

This is the final part of a two parter about using Evernote as a basic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or contact database. You can find part one here which talks about setting things up.

Managing projects and notes

So we have our system set up from part one. There’s a notebook for each client and a contact sheet that holds all the information you need to keep.

At the bottom of the contact sheet is a section for projects.

This is where Evernotes internal linking feature comes in really handy as I can slot a link to another note into each cell of the table like this.

The note for the individual project lives in the customers notebook and there’s a couple of ways to insert the note into the table.

First is to drag the note from the notes list in the sidebar into the table.

The second is to use Evernote’s internal link feature using CTRL+ALT+K on PCs or Cmd + Opt + K on Macs.

Just search for the note you want, click insert and it appears in the table.

Tip: Make sure you view the note link as a “Preview”. This way you’ll see a snippet of text and a thumbnail image which makes it easier to identify the project.

The great thing about using a table to store the notes is you can drag and drop the notes from cell to cell to reorder them so the projects you’re working on right now appear at the top of the table. I do this a lot.

I also remove finished or achieved project notes from the table to keep it clean and simple. The archived project stays in the client notebook but it doesn’t appear in the table.

One other little useful feature is when you link to your project note from your contact sheet, the project note gets a little ‘Backlink’ at the top right so you can get back to the contact sheet really quickly.

So this is how I’ve been managing my clients for years. The introduction of fancy card style preview links and backlinks with Version 10 of Evernote has made things easier. I also use the ‘Switch To’ feature (Ctrl + Q on PC or ⌘ J on Mac) all the time to find client notes really quickly.

Do you manage clients or contacts in Evernote? How do you do it?

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon