Your sales team can use an effective CRM in Airtable to keep track of customer data and record notes from meetings and phone calls. If one of your sales team members leaves the company, an Airtable CRM will protect you from being left with a set of ambiguous leads and missing information. This is especially important when considering sales team turnover. No one wants to end up being frustrated and asking “did they or didn’t they?” Was this lead hot or cold? Not having access to previous notes can seriously harm your chances of converting leads into clients.
With this Airtable tutorial, we at AirOps will help you move a step closer to a more structured CRM without compromising your sales teams’ efficiency. This tutorial is a continuation of the series Airtable CRM for Killer Sales Teams. If you haven’t yet, please check out our first 3 blog posts to make sure your database is set up.
Let’s dive into logging interactions!
1. Log Airtable Interaction Form
To begin, head to the ‘Interactions’ table and create a form with all the fields we created in our last Airtable tutorial – Developing Improved Collaboration through Interactions Tables. These fields should include “Date”, “Contacts”, “Rep”, “Type” and “Notes”.
Rename the Airtable form to ‘Log interactions’ or a title that suits your requirements. You can also toggle ‘Required’ to on or off, depending on whether or not your sales team will need to input the fields for every interaction.
Then select whether you would like the fields to display as a dropdown or lists.
2. Create Button
Next, create a button field so that we can use it to easily access your form.
Click on your ‘Contacts’ table and navigate to the interactions view. At the end of the columns, we will add a new ‘Button’ field titled ‘Log interactions.’
Buttons within Airtable are perfect for triggering customizable actions.
To get the form URL, head over to the ‘Interactions’ table, go to the form view titled ‘Log interactions’ and click on ‘Share form’ on the right-hand side of the view title. Copy the URL.
Paste the URL within quotes. It should appear as something similar to the formula below.
“https://airtable.com/shrX5pG2mYYTEMuAa”
Click Save.
Clicking on the ‘Log interactions’ button will redirect your salesperson to the Airtable form. It should have all the fields that need to be filled when logging an interaction.
If the tutorial ended here, your sales team might end up quite overwhelmed with their workload! Here at AirOps, we understand your sales reps are busy. We do not want your sales team to have to enter all this data manually. The rest of this blog will focus on making logging interactions as simple as possible for your sales team. CRM should not mean endless data entry for your sales team and we will optimize logging interactions by prefilling all known information.
3. Prefill Date Field
First, we’ll prefill the date field with today’s date, i.e., the date the interaction occurred. To begin, head to the ‘Contact’ table and create a helper field. It is a ‘Formula’ field titled ‘Today’s Date.’
TODAY ( )
Under the ‘Formatting’ tab beside the ‘Formula’ tab, toggle ‘Include a time field’ and related functions off. Click Save.
“https://airtable.com/shrX5pG2mYYTEMuAa? ”prefill_Date=”&{Today’s Date}
Changes to the formula are bolded. Click Save.
This step automatically fills the date (the interaction occurred) in the form field. This step is applicable to any information that you may want to prefill within an Airtable form. The format for doing so is the following:
Tip: be sure to add & “&” & before every new prefilled value!
As you can already imagine, writing this formula can become cumbersome and difficult to read. So, if you prefer writing the formulas manually, we recommend writing it on a Word document, a spreadsheet, or a text editor. This way, you can view your Airtable formula in a simpler setting while having more control over the formatting.
Once you write the formula in the text editor, you can paste it into the button field.
4. Prefill Form Template
If you don’t want to write the formula yourself, we have a quick shortcut – via an excel sheet built for prefilling Airtable forms!
The final step is to fill in the fields with data – these are the fields that help our data in Airtable. In this case, we will include today’s date (the date of the interaction), i.e., the column we just created.
The full name is the first column in our ‘Contacts’ table and the sales representative assigned to that contact.
This Airtable template is easy to use as it is just a three-step process.
You can access this template from our website! Fill in the short form, and you are good to go! We will send you the form shortly.
When you click the ‘Log Interactions’ button, you will see all the fields filled in.
5. Test Airtable form
One of our favorite tasks is to test something we built, so let’s go ahead and click on the button. Proceed to fill in the type of interaction and update notes.
Et voila! After we log the form, Airtable automatically fills in all the information. In our example, we see that John’s most recent interaction date is 07/31/2020, and his most recent interaction note is updated as well.
One Step Closer to Setting up your Amazing CRM
Great job setting up the interactions with buttons!
Check out our other videos and blogs if you would like to view other AirOps’ Airtable tutorials for creating a CRM for killer sales teams.
About Us
AirOps Consulting is a full-service database and automation consulting company. We help our clients build low code databases and automation using Airtable, Zapier, and custom scripts. Most importantly, we enable clients to harness the power of their data and improve efficiency with better systems.
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