Building a CRM to track current and future business contacts

dkmcbain

Good afternoon,

I work at a community college and we don't currently have a CRM solution that will help me with the work I am doing. I am trying to create something to track current and future contacts on an organizational level as well as individual. One company might one contact only but in the case of a large organization (like Chevron for instance), there will be multiple. I have a basic excel sheet to track information but I am wanting more functionality and automation of emails.

Information I want to collect: Name, Name of Org, Title, Email, Phone Numbers. I currently also have images so that we can recognize a person. Once I have that information uploaded or entered, I want to be able to have my multiple staff members reach out to these people/orgs and indicate that they were contacted, enter notes about the convo, and who made the contact on what date.

I'm not an advanced SS user and so I'm thinking I would like to be able to expand a company name and see all the contacts under that org?

Any help is appreciated. This is what my list looks like so far in 'draft' mode.

Thanks, Deena

Melissa Yamada

In Smartsheet, the cleanest setup is:

One main Contacts sheet (not grouped by hierarchy)
Have one row per person, with columns like

• Contact Name
• Organization
• Title
• Email / Phone
• Owner (who on your team manages them)
• Last Contact Date
• Notes (or better: keep notes separate—see below)

Instead of trying to “expand a company,” use reports:

• Create a report grouped by Organization
• That gives you exactly what you want: companies with expandable contacts under them (cleaner than hierarchy)

For tracking outreach, don’t put everything in one row—it gets messy fast.
Create a second sheet: Interaction Log

• Contact (link to name or ID)
• Organization
• Date
• Staff Member
• Notes
• Type (Call, Email, Visit)

This lets you track multiple touchpoints per person, which is key.

Then connect it:

• Use a report filtered by Contact to see all history for one person
• Or group by Organization to see all activity for a company

For automation:

• Set reminders like “if Last Contact Date > 30 days → notify owner”
• Use workflows to log “Contacted” updates or trigger follow-ups

For images:

• Keep them as row attachments (cleaner than embedding)

So the pattern is:

• Contacts sheet = who they are
• Interaction sheet = what’s happened
• Reports = how you view it (by org, by staff, by activity)

This avoids the “one big messy sheet” problem and gives you something that actually behaves like a CRM.