Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
Most small teams don’t lose deals because their CRM is bad. They lose deals because there is no CRM at all — just a phone with 400 unread messages, a notebook with three names in it, and a memory that swears it will follow up “tomorrow.”
I’ve been in this industry part-time since 2002. Over twenty years, the single most common gap I see between people who build something durable and people who churn out in ninety days is not talent, work ethic, or even the company they joined. It’s whether they can answer a simple question: who did I talk to, what did they say, and when am I talking to them again?
That’s all a CRM is. Everything else is decoration.
In this guide
What a CRM actually has to do
Strip the software marketing away and a CRM for a small team has exactly four jobs:
- Store a person. Name, contact method, where they came from.
- Store what happened. The last conversation, in plain language.
- Store what’s next. One action, with a date attached.
- Show you today’s list. Everything due today, in one view.
That’s it. If a tool does those four things reliably and your team will actually open it, it’s a good CRM. If it does forty things and your team quietly stops updating it by week three, it’s a very expensive spreadsheet nobody reads.
This is the same trap I wrote about in the complexity trap. Complexity feels like progress. It’s usually avoidance wearing a costume — building the system becomes the substitute for doing the work the system is supposed to organize.
Start with a spreadsheet. Seriously.
For a team of two to five people, your first CRM should be a shared spreadsheet. Not because spreadsheets are better — they aren’t — but because the spreadsheet forces you to learn what you actually need before you pay for something.
Here are the columns. Resist adding more:
| Column | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Name | Obvious |
| Contact | Phone, email, or handle — whichever you actually use |
| Source | Where they came from (referral, content, event, list) |
| Status | New / Talking / Follow-up / Customer / Closed-no |
| Last touch | Date only |
| Next action | One sentence, imperative: “Send pricing”, “Call re: timeline” |
| Next date | The date that action is due |
| Notes | Free text, newest at top |
Sort by Next date. That sorted view is your entire day. Everything above today’s date is overdue and needs to be dealt with before you do anything else.
Run this for thirty days. At the end of thirty days you’ll know exactly which fields you never filled in (delete them) and which ones you kept cramming into Notes (those become real columns). Now you know your requirements. Now — and only now — go shopping.
Choosing the actual tool
When you outgrow the spreadsheet — usually when two people start editing the same row, or when you need automated reminders rather than remembering to look — pick on these criteria in this order:
Does it work on a phone? Most of your logging happens in the ninety seconds after a conversation ends. If logging requires a laptop, it doesn’t happen.
Can you add a contact in under fifteen seconds? Time it. If adding a person requires filling six required fields, your team will batch it, then forget it.
Does it have a “due today” view on the home screen? Not a report you generate. The default screen.
Can you export everything? Your contact list is your only real asset. If a tool can’t hand you a clean CSV of every record on demand, don’t put your business in it. Companies get acquired, prices change, terms change. Own your data.
Does it price per user in a way that survives your team doubling? Ten dollars a seat is nothing at three seats and a real conversation at fifteen.
I keep a short list of tools I actually use and pay for on my recommended products page rather than repeating vendor names here — pricing and features move faster than blog posts do.
The five-minute daily routine
A CRM only works if it’s touched daily. Here’s the routine I’d hand a new team member on day one:
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Morning, before anything else (10 minutes). Open the “due today” view. Do the overdue items first, oldest first. Every one of them gets either an action or a new date. Nothing stays overdue silently.
After every conversation (90 seconds). Log two things: what they said, and the next action with a date. Not “follow up soon.” “Call Thursday 2pm re: whether their spouse is on board.” Vague next-actions are how pipelines die.
End of week (15 minutes). Scan for anything with no next date. Those are your leaks. Either give them a date or move them to Closed-no. A contact with no next step isn’t a prospect; it’s a memory.
That’s under five hours a month for the whole system. If your team can’t sustain that, the problem isn’t the CRM — it’s that nobody has protected time to do focused work. I wrote about how to build that protection in Deep Work for Entrepreneurs, and about the specific failure mode of knowing what to do and not doing it in how to stop procrastinating.
Rules you can’t skip
This part isn’t optional, and it’s where a lot of small teams get themselves in trouble without meaning to.
Consent and outreach. If you’re sending marketing email, the CAN-SPAM Act applies: accurate header and subject lines, a working opt-out that you honor within ten business days, and a physical postal address in the message. The FTC’s own compliance guide is the primary source — read it directly at ftc.gov’s CAN-SPAM guidance. Your CRM should have a field for how someone opted in and a status for opted-out that nobody can accidentally text again.
Automated calls and texts. The Telemarketing Sales Rule and the FTC’s telemarketing guidance cover prerecorded calls, the National Do Not Call Registry, and what you must disclose. Start with the FTC’s Complying with the Telemarketing Sales Rule. If any part of your team is running bulk automated outreach, someone on the team needs to have actually read that page.
Income and product claims live in the CRM too. Whatever you send from your CRM is a business communication. The FTC’s Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing is direct about earnings representations and the standards they’re held to. Templates are the easiest place for a bad claim to get copy-pasted a hundred times — so review your templates, not just your one-off messages.
If you’re evaluating an opportunity as well as a system, my post on MLM red flags covers what to look for before you build a pipeline pointed at it.
What “small team” changes
Solo, you can get away with a lot of informality. With a team, two things break immediately.
Ownership. Every record needs exactly one owner. Two people calling the same prospect is worse than nobody calling — it signals disorganization to the one person you were trying to impress. Add an Owner column on day one, even at two people.
Shared language. “Warm” means nothing. Define your statuses in one sentence each, write them down where everyone can see, and don’t add a status without agreement. A five-status pipeline everyone uses the same way beats a twelve-status pipeline everyone interprets differently.
If your team is bringing on people who’ve run real businesses before, the standard goes up — they’ll expect the system to exist before they join, not after. That’s a good pressure. I unpacked it in recruiting professionals.
The honest summary
A CRM won’t make anyone want to talk to you. It won’t fix a weak offer, a bad fit, or a market you haven’t earned attention in yet. What it will do is stop you from losing the people who already said “check back with me in the spring” — and in a small team, that leak is usually bigger than any new-lead problem you think you have.
Build the spreadsheet this week. Run it for thirty days. Then buy something.
If you’re not sure where the CRM fits in the larger picture of what you’re building, start here.
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Four jobs, fine. But ‘if your team will actually open it’ is the only job that matters, and it gets one sentence. Nobody’s CRM problem is which columns exist. It’s that logging a call feels like homework at 9pm.
Marla, what you’re describing has a name in the adoption literature: it’s not a features problem, it’s friction at the point of use — sometimes called the ‘moment of use’ cost. The research on habit formation the post gestures at actually supports your point more than the CRM columns do. A system succeeds or fails on the ninety seconds after the conversation ends, not on the schema.
Philip, that ninety-second window is exactly where mine fell apart the first month. I would finish a call, tell myself I would log it ‘in a minute,’ and by week three I had eleven blank Last Touch cells and no memory of which contact went with which vague note. What actually fixed it was not a better spreadsheet, it was refusing to sit back down at my own desk until the log was done — standing in the kitchen, thumbs on the phone, before the next thing could interrupt me. Small mechanical fix, but it’s the only part of this whole system that survived past week three for me.
Philip, I am curious about something practical from outside the US: the CAN-SPAM and TSR sections are very specific to American law. For those of us running a small distribution business elsewhere, is there a similarly plain government guide, or do we simply have to translate the principles ourselves? The four columns and the ownership rule, though, those need no translation at all — they are exactly the discipline I have been missing.