What To Track in LeadTables vs. a CRM

Something that’s been challenging for me is knowing where to “draw the line” between what should live in LeadTables and what should live in a CRM.

(Because LeadTables isn’t a CRM and isn’t planned to ever become one.)

This is relevant when thinking about tracking interactions, and using those interactions to make decisions about things like following up with ghosted leads.

Here’s where I personally draw the line, and it’s what drives my LeadTables architectural decisions:

• ✅ If a metric/piece of info is relevant for you building lists, iterating your cold outreach campaigns, comparing performance of campaigns to each other, etc. it goes in LeadTables.
• 🙅 If a piece of data is more about you “optimizing your direct interactions” with leads who’ve engaged, or “keeping track of detailed personal info” about individual hot leads who’ve entered into your sales cycle, it would be a better fit for a CRM.

Here are a few examples of things that I’d recommend housing in a CRM instead of LeadTables, to help you see what I’m getting at…

🙅 NOT A Good Fit For LeadTables

• 🙅 Keeping track of engaged leads who’ve ghosted you, so that you remember to follow up
• 🙅 Keeping track of your status on lead magnet fulfillment (e.g. recording a loom) and leads who are still waiting on their lead magnets
• 🙅 Knowing when to manually follow up with leads from old campaigns that engaged but didn’t pan out (e.g. they booked a sales call but didn’t close — they probably deserve a higher-touch followup vs. a fresh cold email campaign as if they were a stranger)
  • NB: it ✅ WOULD be appropriate — and necessary — to use LeadTables to track exclusion status for them from future cold outreach campaigns so you don’t re-cold-email your hot leads.
• 🙅 Knowing what the next “funnel action” is for a given lead to keep them flowing through your funnel
• 🙅 Storing rich details, notes, etc. for your leads
• 🙅 Managing your sales call scripts and notes used for leads
• etc.

You can of course jankily do all of that stuff in LeadTables if you really wanted to, but if you try, just go into it knowing you’ll have a sub-optimal experience vs. a CRM.

And importantly, go into it knowing I probably won’t be pushing the inevitable feature requests that will come up for you if you try to do it, e.g. if you email me with “Hey Zach I’d love it if I could click into a contact and add notes about my past interactions with them,” that request will probably never get fulfilled because it’s outside the scope+goals of LeadTables as a platform. 🙂