A personal CRM system is a tagging scheme, a simple pipeline, reconnect cadences by relationship tier, an assistant that drafts the touches, and a weekly review that holds it together. In Orbit you can stand the whole thing up in an afternoon. This playbook walks the five layers in order.
A contact list is names. A personal CRM is names plus a way to know who to reach out to, when, and why. The difference is structure: tags that mean something, stages that move, cadences that fire, and a review that resets the whole machine each week.
Build it in layers. Each layer is useless without the one before it, so do them in order. Skip ahead and you get a pretty database nobody uses.
An afternoon of setup buys you a system that keeps your relationships warm for years.
The A/B/C three-tier system: A contacts (top clients, key partners) hear from you monthly. B contacts (good relationships, warm prospects) quarterly. C contacts (everyone else worth keeping) twice a year. Tag the tier, set the cadence, let Hiro draft the touches.
Once contacts are tagged A, B, or C, the cadence becomes something you can act on. Ask Hiro who in each tier is overdue by last-touched date, and it drafts a check-in for anyone due. You approve, edit, or dismiss. The structure remembers so you do not have to.
Smart views make the tiers visible. Build one view per tier filtered by tag and last-touched date, and your weekly review becomes a three-minute scan: who in tier A is overdue, who in tier B is slipping. The cadence is the rule, the smart view is the dashboard, and Hiro drafts the touches.
This same structure scales from a freelancer's network to a small book of clients. It is the backbone of every good sales routine for solopreneurs, because it turns "I should stay in touch" into a thing that actually happens on schedule.
Work in five layers: tag your contacts by type and source, build one simple pipeline, set reconnect cadences by relationship tier, turn on Hiro to draft the touches, and run a weekly review. Do them in order, since each layer depends on the one before it. In Orbit the whole setup takes an afternoon.
You sort contacts into three tiers and give each a reach-out cadence. A contacts, your top clients and key partners, hear from you monthly. B contacts, good relationships and warm prospects, quarterly. C contacts, everyone else worth keeping, twice a year. Tag the tier and let Hiro draft the check-ins when each is due.
Start with about five: lead, conversation, proposal, won, lost. Five stages are easy to keep accurate and honest, which is what makes a pipeline useful. The free plan includes one pipeline, and any paid plan adds unlimited, but resist adding stages until a real gap forces it.
Hiro, built in, drafts your follow-ups and tier check-ins, flags deals that have gone stale, and keeps your data clean by spotting duplicates. Everything is approval-gated, so it drafts and you approve. It runs on monthly credits included on every plan, with no API key to paste.
The weekly review is the answer. Block 20 minutes every Friday to clear overdue follow-ups, close stale deals, prune tags, and reset your tasks. A CRM dies from neglect, not from bad setup. The review is the ritual that keeps tags, tiers, and cadences honest week after week.
Tags, tiers, and cadences on the free CRM; add Hiro to run them. Try the CRM free, no credit card.
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