Why You Should Use Personal CRM?

Mobile version of a personal crm

At Nat, we’ve been tirelessly building a relationship management solution for individuals like ourselves for over two years. Are we totally crazy? Aren’t there better ways to spend our time?

We don’t think so. Humans, people, connections, … are all that matters. You can build a beautiful business like the Basecamp team or become the richest man on the world like Jeff Bezos (or Elon Musk, depending on when you read this) but at the end of the day, when you close your computer, what does actually matter?

Even inside our small bootstrapped business, we have many ideas for other businesses that we could build, but we won’t until we get this personal crm right.

We want people to be the central piece of our lives. We want to build a great business, be financially comfortable but more than anything, we want to be rich socially.

We want to be crazily wealthy in social capital. We want to know many people, we want to have awesome close friends and many connections all across the world. This is what our very own 2nd best personal CRM is for (as ranked by ourselves in 2020).

So if you have just heard of the term and are wondering if you should use one, here is a short overview of what a personal CRM actually is and how it will practically change things for you.

What is Personal CRM

We know what a CRM is, but what, for heaven’s sake, is a Personal CRM?

We don’t really know neither why it’s called like that, it probably started as a Twitter meme and now this is what people type in Google when they search for a product like Nat.app so we had to accept our fate and call ourselves a Personal CRM.

Since the term is still rather broad (there still isn’t a Wikipedia page for it!), we will define a personal relationship manager based on our vision as a team.

On a high level, a Personal CRM is a tool that helps you to focus on your network, relationships and contacts as if you were spending 10 hours per week, of your own time, on it. Instead of spending those hours thinking about who you need to reach back out to and remember what you talked about last time, tools like ours automate the automate-able and create frictionless processes to help you invest in your network.

Connection > Conversion

One reason we particularly dislike the Personal CRM term is that it reminds us of the CRM, the dreaded customer relationship management apps like Salesforce and Hubspot. Those apps are anything but human.

They’re designed to turn customers into numbers in a very big spreadsheet. Don’t take our word for it, simply ask people who have to use those CRMs, they all hate it.

To imagine what a Personal CRM is, you have to forget everything you know about the business CRM. Forget the sales pipeline, forget the manual data entry, forget the deal size, … Forget it all.

Why a personal CRM doesn’t have a sales pipeline

A sales pipeline helps salespeople to get an overview of who is a lead, who is on trial, who is sold and who is lost. That doesn’t apply to your contacts!

Some of your contacts might indeed be customers of yours but that is not the point. You’re staying in touch with them because you like them, want to learn from them and build a long term friendship.

If a contact of yours doesn’t want to buy your product, you haven’t lost them! They’re just a friend of yours that won’t buy your product.

Of course, you don’t want to be friends with everyone! There are some people you just don’t want to stay in touch with, that’s fine. We have built a hide this contact feature just for that purpose.

Why a personal CRM doesn’t have manual data entry

Account managers and salespeople will tell you, a big part of their job is manually entering data about customers in the CRM. This is because the data needs to be stored and shared with other employees or people who might replace them at the company later.

But with your personal network, you’re the only person that you’re sharing information with. We also connect to your Gmail, GCal and GContacts data to import all your interactions so that you don’t have to do it manually.

We’re not manual data entry haters though. You might still want to take notes about your contacts or log interactions that happened outside of your emails and calendar. A Personal CRM lets you do that but it also works without, of course.

Now that we’ve defined the personal CRM by negation, let’s define it properly.

Find out who you’re losing touch with A Personal CRM helps you to stay in touch with people, that’s why it’s core feature is showing you who you need to reconnect with. It’s like an inbox, but instead of showing you the latest emails you received, it shows you who you’re losing touch with based on a smart analysis of your data.

A Personal CRM shows you who you're losing touch with

An overview of your relationship with every contact Your Personal CRM is your command centre when it comes to people. That’s where you can see when you last interacted with someone and the latest notes you’ve written about them.

Depending on what communication channels you use most, a Personal CRM might not be right for you. For example, if Gmail and GCal are not part of your daily routine but you’re instead chatting mainly on Telegram and Skype, you won’t be able to use a Personal CRM as those apps don’t offer native integrations.

A view of a single contact in your Personal CRM

Searchable data about your contacts Just to be clear, a personal relationship manager will not be able to compare with LinkedIn in giving you broad publicly available data about a person. If you want to know who lives in London or who is a Designer, your best bet is still LinkedIn.

But once you’ve taken a hundred notes about your contacts, you’ll be able to leverage that information and search for it. To know who is a crypto expert or who has a dog in your network, that’s when you want to search your personal CRM.

Searching through your notes with your personal crm

Reconnect in a personal way Finally, a personal CRM is an app that lets you reconnect with your contacts in a personal way. The basic feature is obviously the ability to send emails from the app but you can expect relationship management apps to go further. For example, we’re pioneering voice notes per email. We love this feature in apps like iMessage and WhatsApp and think that it has a place in the email ecosystem.

How to improve your relationships using a Personal CRM?

Now that we’ve defined what a Personal CRM is, and why you should use one, let’s finish off by explaining what impact such an app will have on your life.

Grow your network The first thing that you will notice (and that our customers have noticed as well) is that your network will start to grow. You might start with 100 people in your network and after a month, you’ll be in touch with over 200 (this is a true story that happened to a customer of ours).

A 100% increase in your network is not usual, but you can easily expect a 20% increase, month over month. This is because you will stop losing touch with people.

Without a smart app that tells you who you’re losing touch with, you tend to forget about the people you aren’t in contact with daily. You stop interacting with them and after some time you wouldn’t dare reach out because it would just be awkward.

A Personal CRM catches those contacts for you and lets you reconnect before you enter that awkward phase.

Build a database of personal notes The second effect of using a Personal CRM app like ours is that you will start to use plugins like ours to take notes about the people you meet, have calls with and so on.

This accumulated data compounds and after 6 months, you’ll realize that you now know much more about the people in your next meeting than you would ever have because you have taken notes about things you’d have otherwise forgotten.

The combined effect of those two powerful positive changes in your life will lead to a sort of network-based ripple effect.

  • The next time you’re looking for a job, you’ll have much more people to reach out to.
  • The next time you start a business, you’ll have much more people to go and sell your idea to.
  • The next time you need to hire someone, you’ll have much more smart people that know and trust you.
  • The next time someone asks you to refer someone, you’ll have a much larger and more qualified pool to draw from.

This after 6 months, imagine how your life will look after having used a personal CRM for 6 years. This is why you should use a Personal CRM and why we’re building one for you.

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