Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
Most people in this industry don’t have a CRM problem. They have a “where is everything” problem, and they buy a CRM hoping it will answer that question for them.
It won’t. A CRM is a filing cabinet with a memory. If you don’t know what you want filed, the software just gives you a more expensive place to lose things.
I’ve been part-time in this industry since 2002 — over twenty years of watching people set up systems. The pattern is dead consistent: the team that wins isn’t the one with the fanciest stack. It’s the one where every person can answer, in ten seconds, “who am I following up with today and what did I say last time?”
That’s the whole job. Everything below is in service of that one sentence.
In this guide
Before you pick software: decide what a “contact” means
This is the step everyone skips, and it’s why most small-team CRMs die within ninety days.
Sit down with your team — even if your team is you and two other people — and write down the definition of each stage a person can be in. Not the software’s default stages. Yours. In plain language.
Something like:
- Cold — I have their name and a way to reach them. No conversation yet.
- Conversation — we’ve exchanged real messages. They know what I do.
- Presented — they’ve seen the actual offer.
- Customer — money changed hands. They are using the product.
- Builder — they’ve decided to work the business.
- Dead / Not now — with a date attached.
Two rules that matter more than the list itself:
- Everyone uses the same definitions. If your definition of “presented” is “I sent a link” and your teammate’s is “we did a 40-minute Zoom,” your pipeline numbers are fiction and your coaching is guesswork.
- “Customer” means an actual customer. Someone who bought because they wanted the product, not because they were buying a position. This distinction isn’t just semantic hygiene — it’s the difference between a durable business and a legal problem. The FTC’s guidance on multi-level marketing is explicit that a compensation structure driven by recruitment rather than real product demand is where things go wrong (FTC Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing). If your CRM can’t tell you how many people are buying and staying because they like the thing, you don’t have data — you have a recruiting log. I wrote about this at length in the complexity trap and the real customer.
Do this on paper. Twenty minutes. Then pick software.
The checklist
1. One system, not four
Pick one place. If your contacts live in a CRM, your notes live in a notes app, your follow-ups live in your phone reminders, and your team’s shared list lives in a spreadsheet — you have four systems, which is the same as zero.
Everything in one place, even if that place is imperfect.
2. Start with a spreadsheet unless you can name the reason not to
I’m serious. A shared spreadsheet with the right columns beats a sophisticated CRM nobody fills in.
Columns: Name, contact method, stage, last contact date, next action, next action date, notes, owner.
That’s it. Eight columns. If your team can’t keep eight columns current for thirty days, adding automation will not fix that — it will just hide it.
Move to real CRM software when you hit an actual wall: you need automated follow-up sequences, you need call logging, you need permissions so people only see their own contacts, or you’ve got enough volume that scrolling is painful. Those are real reasons. “It feels more professional” is not.
3. Every contact has a next action with a date
This is the single highest-leverage field in the entire system.
Not “follow up soon.” A date. If you can’t think of a next action, the stage is “Dead / Not now” and you set a date three months out. Nobody sits in your pipeline without a date attached.
Why this matters mechanically: your daily work becomes a filter, not a decision. You open the system, filter for next-action-date ≤ today, and work the list. No deciding who to contact. No staring at 400 names. The decision was made when you logged the note — which is a much cheaper moment to make it.
If deciding what to do next is where you consistently stall, that’s a different problem than software, and I’d start with how to stop procrastinating and actually take action.
4. Notes are for facts, not feelings
Bad note: “Great call! Really excited!”
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.
Good note: “Works nights at the hospital, wants out by Christmas, wife is skeptical, asked about the refund policy. Sending the comp overview Tuesday.”
Six months later, the second note lets you have a human conversation. The first note tells you nothing and probably wasn’t even true.
Train your team on this specifically. It’s the difference between a CRM that makes you better at relationships and one that makes you worse at them.
5. Log the contact, not the intention
The last-contact-date field only works if it means “I actually communicated with this human.” Not “I thought about them.” Not “I liked their post.”
Small distinction, huge downstream effect. Once that field is trustworthy, you can find every person you’ve gone quiet on — and that list is almost always where your next customer is hiding.
6. Owner field, always — even on a team of two
Every contact has exactly one name attached. No shared ownership. No “we’re both kind of working them.”
Shared ownership means two people message the same prospect in the same week, or nobody does. Both outcomes are worse than one person owning it imperfectly.
7. Decide your data rules before you have data problems
Three decisions to make now:
- Who owns the data if someone leaves the team? Answer it in writing while everyone is friendly.
- How do people opt out? If you’re sending anything that counts as commercial email, you need a working unsubscribe mechanism and you need to honor it — the FTC’s CAN-SPAM compliance guide lays out the requirements plainly, and “I’m just a small team” is not an exemption.
- What don’t you store? Don’t put anything in a shared CRM you’d be uncomfortable having the contact read.
8. A weekly ten-minute hygiene block
Once a week, everyone does the same pass: anything with no next action gets one or gets closed. Anything untouched for 60 days gets a decision.
Ten minutes. Same time weekly. The whole system rots without it, and stays useful forever with it — that’s the same compounding logic behind protected focus blocks and behind what Atomic Habits actually gets right for entrepreneurs.
9. Onboard new people in fifteen minutes or your system is too complicated
Real test: hand your setup to someone who joined last week. If you can’t teach the whole thing in fifteen minutes, cut fields until you can.
Every field you add is a field somebody has to fill in, at 9pm, tired, after a long conversation. Fields nobody fills in aren’t neutral — they make the whole system look untrustworthy, and people stop trusting the parts that do work.
10. Review pipeline shape, not just activity
Once a month, look at how many people sit in each stage. The shape tells you where the problem is:
- Piled up in Conversation → you’re not asking.
- Piled up in Presented → your follow-up is broken, or your offer isn’t landing with these people.
- Nothing in Cold → you’ve stopped meeting people.
- Lots of Builders, almost no Customers → stop and think hard about that. That shape is exactly what the FTC’s guidance describes as the warning sign, and it’s one of the red flags I’d want anyone to check.
That last one is a business-model signal, not a CRM signal — but the CRM is what makes it visible, which is a good argument for keeping the customer stage honest.
What this won’t fix
A CRM will not make you want to call people. It will not make a bad offer good, and it will not make an unclear message clear. It removes one specific form of friction — the “who and what next” tax you pay every single day — and it removes it permanently.
That’s worth a spreadsheet and ten minutes a week. It’s not worth three months of tool evaluation.
If you’re building the rest of the machine around this, start here — it’s the plainest version of how I’d sequence the whole thing.
Set it up this week. Eight columns. One owner per contact. Every contact has a date.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Ten items in a post that opens by warning against overcomplicating things is not lost on me. I’ve read it twice now and I keep stalling on item seven — ‘decide your data rules before you have data problems’ — because I know myself well enough to know I’ll spend a week deciding instead of one afternoon on the eight columns. Anyone else notice that tension, or is it just me projecting my own thing onto a perfectly reasonable checklist?
Davey, I recognize this in myself too. What helped me was treating the checklist as ten separate small tasks instead of one large project — I did numbers one and two on a Monday evening, nothing more, and the rest followed across the week without feeling heavy.
Davey, skip straight to the eight columns and set a timer for twenty minutes. I did the data-rules conversation on paper in about ten minutes flat once I actually sat down with my partner — it only felt big in my head beforehand. The planning always takes longer imagined than done.