How I designed a lead tracker in Airtable

If you're manually tracking your leads and your sales, you're going to want to tune into this episode. I'm going to share how I designed Airtable to be at my C R m where I'm tracking all my leads, my sales, and my current clients. We'll talk about what makes Airtable great for tracking leads and sales. I'll show you some of the different views I'm using. I'll share how I'm populating the table with different sources of information. Plus, I'll share how the info in Airtable helps me make decisions about where to put my marketing time. I'm Lex Roman and this is the Low Energy Leads Show.

[00:00:30] Before we get into this week's episode, I want to remind you about my Networking for Introvert series coming up in September. If you have a great tip about how to network as an introvert, I'd love to hear it. Drop me a line, find that info in the show notes. If you're creating your own lead tracker or you're thinking about choosing a CRM, you're going to want to think first about the ways that you're going to use this information, right? What are the things that you need to do with the leads that are coming into your business? You might want things like email templates where [00:01:00] you can respond quickly to inquiries. You might want your proposals and your invoices there, and you might want to manage those client projects all in one place. So there's a lot of different things that you can be doing with your lead tracker.

In my case, I used to do more one-on-one services, but now I operate mainly through group programs, so my lead tracker primarily does four things for me. First, I needed it to handle direct inquiries. If someone reaches out through my contact form on my website, I needed that to go somewhere. The second thing I wanted it to do was keep track [00:01:30] of my wait list for growth trackers. Even though those prospects are also tracked in a newsletter segment, it's helpful to bring them front and center in case I want to reach out or learn more about them as I'm gearing up to launch the program. The third thing I use my lead tracker for is understanding where people are finding me, which of my marketing channels are more effective, and I'm going to talk about how I've shifted from one touch attribution more of a how did you find me model to first touch and last touch, where I get a little bit more of a sense of the role of each of my marketing channels.

Are they helping people find out about me in the [00:02:00] first place, or is it a channel that's really developing, know, like, and trust that's causing someone to reach out and become a lead. Lastly, and most importantly, my lead tracker ensures that I keep up with my clients. Current clients and past clients are really important to me, especially now that I have a group program where I'm not necessarily face-to-face with people one-on-one every day. It's really important to me that I keep up with current and past members, and I don't just do that in my lead tracker. I also put them in my networking table so that I make sure that I am checking in with people, whether they're actively [00:02:30] working with me or have worked with me in the past, they're in here so that I make sure that I do not lose sight of them.

The idea of having a lead tracker might be new to you. You might be tracking your lead sources in a C R M tool, which is valid, and I was doing that before I set up my Airtable. The reason that I moved to more of a spreadsheet model is that I mostly needed to keep track of people, so I wanted to know who they were, where they were in my pipeline, where they came from, and I really didn't need to be doing invoicing or proposals or managing projects folks. So if [00:03:00] you do need some of that other functionality, if you need to send proposals and contracts, if you want to be doing invoicing, if you're managing projects with clients, I might look at a C R M instead of something like Airtable, but I'm going to show you how my Airtable works so you can get a sense of whether or not it would be useful for you.

There's three different ways that Airtable gets populated. The contact form on my website is an Airtable embed. The growth tracker's wait list gets zapped over from mailer light, and then I manually input people if I get a DMM somewhere where it's not tracked in the base. If you make an effort [00:03:30] to contact me through my website, and I hope that you do, you'll see the Airtable form is embedded there. It actually loads kind of slow, which you'll notice and you can see here that I have a caveat that just allows you to open it in a new tab because I've noticed it kind of loads slower than the form that I had in there before. It was a trade off that made sense to me because of the way that my website is built, because of the fact that I'm sort of downplaying my contact form, and for the most part, people are coming in through my newsletter and not necessarily filling out this form.

So this form actually does not get filled out that much. I maybe [00:04:00] get two to three notes a week through this form. On the form I have people explain why they're reaching out. I have them add a little bit of context about how I can be most helpful, a little bit of background on them, and you'll notice that I have here, how did you find me really comment to ask on contact forms? The reason I leave it open is because I find that if it's open, people will think a little bit harder about this question, and if I give them a radio or a dropdown, they're going to just pick from the list and it might not be accurate. So I also wrote here, [00:04:30] if someone referred you, I'd love to thank them because so much of my pipeline comes from my amplifiers, my amplifier partners, I love them.

They send me the best growth trackers, the best clients, and so I really want to make sure that if someone referred you, I know who referred you, and I'm prompting you for that. Here, I'm leaving it open-ended. I want to real answer here, and people often write more context than they would if they clicked a radio button. The second way that the tracker gets populated is if you join the Growth Tracker's wait list. So on [00:05:00] my website, I have a wait list for growth trackers, my program about marketing experimentation. If you put your email in there, you will get zapped over to Airtable so that I can track that you're on the wait list and then I have you alongside the rest of my leads. This is because for a lot of the journey of growth trackers, I have actually done a lot more sales work in order to get members over marketing work.

By that, I mean I've done a lot of hands-on work talking to people one-on-one, looking them up, understanding [00:05:30] where they came from, understanding why they're being drawn into the program. I have done webinars and I have had several members join Growth Checkers without ever talking to me one-on-one first, but it's always an option for me to reach out to people who join the wait list to talk to them. That is always an option for me, so I like to have them in the Airtable in case I want to do that, especially if a launch is going slow. I might opt to reach out to people one-on-one to find out are they interested in joining this round or not, and then I can have clarity on how the launch is going to go. The third way [00:06:00] that the lead tracker gets populated is manually. I will occasionally put people in here by hand if I meet them and they express an interest in joining my program or working with me, especially if it's something like a speaking gig or a collaboration where it isn't something that they would necessarily fill out a form for, I will put them in here so that I can track it, and again, it's a reminder to me I need to follow up with this person because there's some kind of transaction that we might have on the horizon.

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There's all kinds of ways to set up, and I think this is why people are really excited about using Airtable in their business because it's so flexible. So let me share some of the views I have set up in my Airtable lead tracker. Behind every great Airtable is the core spreadsheet, so this is where you put your different columns in. You can label fields whatever you want. In [00:07:30] my case, I have the name of the person who is the lead. I have their status. I have the date that they join, the wait list if they're part of the Growth Tracker's wait list. I have the purpose of their outreach, what they're interested in. I have an open question about how I help. I have their email, I have their website, I have how they found me, and then I have two fields that I manually populate.

First touchpoint and last Touchpoint before sale. First Touchpoint is the first time they ever heard about me, and last touchpoint before sale [00:08:00] is the last thing that happened before they became a growth tracker or a client. Now, the cool thing about Airtable is that you don't just have to look at this as a spreadsheet view. You can also look at it in a pipeline view. So I have a Kanban view where I can see the status of my leads, and I label them one through nine by how they're moving along the pipeline. One is incoming, eight is not a good fit, nine is other. And so people move along the pipeline and I can tell how many people I haven't responded to yet, how many people I'm waiting to talk to on the phone, [00:08:30] how many people I actively have in my programs, past members, et cetera.

I also have a filtered view where I just see people who submitted the form just in case I missed the notification in my inbox. I want an extra check that I can just go through and make sure that I've responded to everybody who's reached out to me, and there's more views that you can add. You can see on the left side, you can look at it in the calendar view. You can filter and group by all kinds of things, but this is really sufficient for me, and you grab the template from my Gumroad store, you can modify it and make it your own. There's so much that you can do with [00:09:00] Airtable if you're new to it, even on the free plan, my views really map to my priorities for my lead tracker. So there's two things I really care about. One is not dropping the ball on anyone, and two is getting a really clear understanding of how my marketing is working and how it maps to my leads and my sales in terms of knowing where they came from.

I have three columns for that. The first column is, how did you find me? And that's a column that I have them fill out. If they submit the form, then I have two columns that I fill out, first Touchpoint and last Touchpoint. The reason [00:09:30] that I do this is because based on what they said and how did you find me, I might interpret that differently. For First Touchpoint and last touchpoint, and I'm going to give you an example of this from the Growth Trackers wait list, I received an application for growth trackers, and in that application I also ask, how did you learn about growth trackers? I want to know where did they find me, and this person wrote YouTube in the column, how did you find me? It would've come in as YouTube, but I'm actually going to attribute this lead to LinkedIn, and the reason is that I know who is in this person's [00:10:00] network, and I believe that the reason that I came onto their radar is through mutual connections that we have on LinkedIn, and then I actually think YouTube is the reason that they decided to apply.

So I'm going to give YouTube last touchpoint credit here because I think what happened is that they found me on LinkedIn. They came over to YouTube to watch my live stream, the Growth Gym, and that is what convinced them that they should apply for growth Trackers. Now, I dunno that for sure because I have not talked to this person yet, but when I do get on the phone with them, I will confirm that story or I will get more information [00:10:30] and I might come back in and update this later. One of the other cool things about Airtable is that you can populate fields into charts, and of course you can do this in a Google spreadsheet too, but honestly, it's just not as nice as it is an Airtable because of the way that the two panes can sit together and you can hide the charts and bring them back when you want to look at them.

You can see right alongside my lead tracker, I can quickly get a glance at my first touchpoint, my last touchpoint, and my leads and clients by status. So I have my pipeline visualize as a bar [00:11:00] chart, and then I have pie charts that make it really clear where my most popular touchpoints are. So I can see that my first touchpoint is most commonly LinkedIn, mark Cuban and past colleagues. Thank you so much to Mark. If you haven't been watching this on video names that are populated into this example, lead Tracker are mostly from Shark Tank. In the last touchpoint, I can see that my newsletter one-on-one calls and podcasts were the last things that people did before they booked with me. It gives me a sense really quickly where I'm going to put my marketing time and money, so if [00:11:30] I want more leads, I'm going to put more energy into those first touchpoint channels that are showing value that are working the most.

And if I want to close more sales, I'm going to put some energy into those last touchpoint channels, things that I know are taking people who already know, like, and trust me, and turning them into paying clients and members. As I mentioned before, it's really important to me that I also stay focused on my current and past clients and members. So I track those relationships also in my network tracker, and every week I look at that list and I say, which members should I check [00:12:00] in with? Which past clients should I check in with? And if you've ever been a member or a client of mine, you know this because you get my check-in messages. So it's really important to me that I put my clients and members in multiple places so that I always keep them top of mind. The most valuable audience is the one you already have.

Marketing isn't a one-time occurrence. It's pretty rare that someone finds out about you and then wants to purchase from you that same day. There's a little bit of a journey there, and so I like to know what is the channel that first made this person aware of me? How did they find out about me in the first place [00:12:30] and what was the thing that convinced them that they needed to work with me? Those two things are quite different. The role of your email list is different than the role of a social media account is different than the role of a partner. Introduction is different than the role of a speaking engagement. Understanding the role of each of your marketing channels can help you put the right amount of effort in there and can help you have the correct expectations about what the outcome should be.

It's pretty easy to lose sight of that. We're moving fast in our business and we just want every channel to be as optimized as possible. So the way that this Airtable is set up, it really helps me understand this is a visibility channel, [00:13:00] and this is a conversion channel. You do your best, you track what you can. The information you gather can help you figure out where to put your time in your efforts when it comes to marketing your business, but you win some, you lose some. When it comes to attributing your leads, I want to give an honorable mention to my other Airtable bases. I also use Airtable as my network tracker, as my content calendar, and to keep track of my email templates that I use regularly with clients and members.

If we haven't met before. I'm Lex. I teach marketing experimentation to small business owners who want to find their clients [00:13:30] more predictably. If you found this episode useful, you should really check out my interview with system strategist Devin Lee. The way that Devon talked about using Airtable in her business day-to-day to keep up with clients, partners, her network was really illuminating to me, even though I've been using Airtable for many years. If you're working on implementing some systems, go check out our interview.

Until next time, keep that energy low until the value will be high.