Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
Most people in this industry do not have a CRM problem. They have a “where did that conversation go” problem, and they buy a CRM hoping it will remember for them.
I have been in this industry part-time since 2002 — over twenty years of watching people install software they never open again. The pattern is always the same. Somebody signs up for a tool with 40 features, spends a weekend building custom fields, imports 800 contacts, and never touches it again. Three months later they are back to voice notes and a notes app.
A CRM is not a system. A CRM is a place to store a system. If you do not have the system first, the software just gives you a nicer place to be disorganized.
So this post is about the system. The tool comes last, and honestly, it matters least.
In this guide
What a CRM actually has to do
Strip away everything and there are four jobs:
- Remember who you spoke to. Name, where they came from, what they said.
- Remember what happens next. One next action, with a date attached.
- Show you today’s list. Who am I contacting today, without thinking about it.
- Show you where things stall. Which stage eats people alive.
That is it. Everything else — email sequences, lead scoring, automated pipelines with 14 stages, revenue forecasting — is a feature you will use in year three, if ever. Buying for year three is how people end up with an empty CRM in month one.
This is the complexity trap in software form. Complexity feels like progress because it feels like work. It isn’t.
The four-stage pipeline (use this, don’t invent your own)
For a small team — two to five people — four stages is enough:
- New — you have their contact info, no real conversation yet.
- Talking — you’ve had an actual exchange. Not a like on a post. A conversation.
- Deciding — they’ve seen what you’re offering and are weighing it.
- Decided — yes or no, both go here. Both are done.
Notice “Decided” holds both outcomes. A no is a completed conversation, not a failure to hide from. If your CRM has no place to put a no, you will avoid recording it, and your pipeline will fill with ghosts.
Example — Sarah, a two-person team selling a wellness line. Her old system was a spreadsheet with columns for “hot,” “warm,” and “cold.” Every contact was warm, because warm requires no decision. She switched to the four stages above. Within a week half her list moved to Decided-no, and her actual pipeline was 11 people instead of the 90 she’d been telling herself she had. Eleven real people is a business. Ninety imaginary ones is anxiety.
The only fields you need
Resist the custom field urge. Here is the whole schema:
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| Name | Obvious |
| Contact method | Where you actually reach them — the platform, not just the number |
| Source | How they found you |
| Stage | One of the four |
| Next action | A verb, not a vibe |
| Next action date | A real date |
| Notes | What they told you, in their words |
Two of these do the heavy lifting.
Source tells you which of your activities produce conversations. If 80% of your real conversations come from one place and you’re spending your time on four others, the field just paid for itself.
Notes in their words is the one people skip. Don’t write “interested in extra income.” Write what they said: “wants to stop asking her husband before buying things for the kids.” That sentence is the entire follow-up. Six weeks later it is the difference between a message that lands and a message that gets ignored.
Two rules that make it survive contact with reality
Rule one: no contact leaves without a next action and a date. If you don’t know the next step, the next action is “check in” with a date 30 days out. Never blank. A blank next action means that person is gone.
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.
Rule two: you open it before you open social media. Not after. The CRM tells you who to talk to; social media tells you what to feel. Do them in that order or the feeling wins. If you struggle here, focus blocks are the mechanism — a fixed 30 minutes where the CRM is the only thing open.
Example — a three-person team, shared pipeline. They tried a shared CRM and it collapsed in two weeks because nobody knew whose contact was whose. Fix: an “owner” field and one standing rule — you only touch your own rows, and stage changes get announced in the team chat. Their weekly call became “read the stalled list out loud,” which took nine minutes and replaced an hour of vague strategy talk.
The tool (least important part)
Pick from what you already have. In rough order:
- A spreadsheet. Google Sheets, seven columns, filter by next-action date. For under 100 contacts this genuinely beats most CRMs, because you will actually open it.
- A free-tier CRM. HubSpot, Zoho, Airtable, Notion. Fine — but use the four stages and seven fields, ignore the rest of the interface.
- A paid CRM. Only once the free version is genuinely full and you know exactly which limit you hit.
If your upline sells you a CRM, read the terms twice. Tool costs charged to distributors are one of the things regulators watch, and the FTC’s Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing is direct that a compensation structure must be driven by real product sales to real customers — not by participants buying things to stay qualified. That includes software. Anything that requires a monthly tool purchase to remain “active” is worth a hard look; my full list of warning signs is in MLM red flags.
Same instinct applies to how you talk about the tool. The FTC’s Endorsements and Testimonials guidance requires you to clearly disclose a material connection when you recommend something you earn from. If you promote a CRM with your affiliate link, say so. Plainly, in the same breath, not in a footer.
Reading the pipeline once a week
Fifteen minutes, same day each week. Three questions:
- Who has no next action? Fix those first.
- Who has been in one stage over 30 days? They are not deciding. They decided, and didn’t tell you. Move them to Decided-no or ask directly.
- Where do people pile up? A pile in Talking means you never ask. A pile in Deciding means the offer isn’t clear. A pile in New means you’re collecting contacts instead of having conversations.
That third question is the whole value of the CRM. Not storage — diagnosis. A stack in one stage is a specific, fixable skill gap, and you cannot see it from memory.
Watch your own bias here too. The pipeline you remember is always better than the pipeline that’s written down, because you remember the good conversations and quietly drop the rest. That’s one of the cognitive biases quietly costing you money — the written record exists specifically to overrule your optimism.
What this does not fix
A CRM will not make people want what you sell. It will not fix a weak offer, a bad company, or a comp plan that only pays when you recruit. It makes an existing process visible and repeatable. If the process is broken, you now have an organized view of a broken process.
I stepped back from doing this seriously in 2017, and I’ve written about why. But the operational discipline transfers to anything with a pipeline — freelancing, agency work, any business where humans decide over time.
Start with the spreadsheet. Seven columns, four stages, two rules. Run it for 30 days. If it breaks, you’ll know exactly which feature you actually need, and you’ll buy for a real problem instead of an imaginary one.
If you’re earlier than that and still figuring out the shape of the thing, start here.
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.
‘Diagnosis, not storage’ — that’s it, that’s the whole post in four words. Everything else is just showing your working.
The Source field advice is something I will use this week, truly. In my business the four stages translate very naturally — New, Talking, Deciding, Decided works the same in Turkish as English, which is not always true of advice from American blogs. Only the FTC section does not apply to me directly, though the principle behind it — say plainly what you earn from — surely does everywhere.
Sarah’s story is doing a lot of work for one paragraph. Ninety contacts to eleven, one week, tidy. Fine. What was her actual conversion on the eleven real ones versus the ninety imaginary ones — because if it’s zero either way, the spreadsheet didn’t fix anything, it just made the number smaller and more honest. Honest isn’t the same as working.
Marla’s question is the right one and I don’t think the post gives us enough to answer it. An anecdote where a system change produces a smaller, cleaner-looking number isn’t evidence the system works — it could just as easily be evidence of reclassification with no underlying change in outcomes. What would actually tell us something is a before-and-after comparison of how many of the eleven ‘real’ contacts converted to a decision within a fixed window, against how many of the original ninety would have, had anyone bothered to track them properly under the old system. Without that, ‘eleven real people is a business’ is a claim, not a finding, however much more sensible it sounds than ninety imaginary ones.
Raj, I’ll offer the closest thing I have to real data rather than an anecdote: when I left in 2022 and looked back at my own numbers honestly, the ratio of real customers to people I’d optimistically logged as ‘interested’ was worse than I wanted to admit, and no CRM stage would have hidden that from me if I’d been willing to look. Your point stands. A cleaner pipeline shape isn’t the same as a better one underneath it.
Four stages, seven fields, two rules — that’s a clean state machine, and I mean that as real praise. New to Talking has one input (a reply). Talking to Deciding has one input (they’ve seen the offer). Deciding to Decided has one input (a choice, either direction). Each transition is a discrete, observable event, which is exactly what most homemade pipelines get wrong — people design stages around how they feel about a contact instead of an event that actually happened. The only place I’d add a transition check: nothing should be able to skip from New straight to Decided. If it can, one of your stage definitions is leaking.
Ninety imaginary contacts down to eleven real ones sounds less like relief and more like the number I’d be too embarrassed to admit to myself. Explains a lot about why I’ve never actually run the four stages properly.
Small correction: the Endorsement Guides cover any material connection, not just paid affiliate links — including free product sent for review. Worth knowing before assuming unpaid mentions are automatically exempt.
Priya, that distinction matters more than people think — I got a free product sample two years back and mentioned it in a group chat without thinking twice, and someone in that same chat who worked in compliance for her day job pointed out exactly what you just did. Changed how I write about anything I didn’t pay for since.