Managing My Business with Obsidian (CRM)

I manage my business mostly with Obsidian. I have a note for each company (I add Inc to each note name “Company Inc”) and add them to my CRM. Inc is helpful because I usually have another note for the company itself or if they have a product, so I have a clear separation between my “notes” and part of the second brain and business-related CRM notes.

My template looks like the one below, whereas #crmssp is the tag that the Plugin Obsidian Projects looks for. I use mainly “table view” and the “sales funnel” (a Kanban board) for checking status.

Bases: Core Plugin

Since 2025-05-22, there is a new core, built-in project management called Bases. The main advantage, the metadata of project-plugin was hidden in setting folders, bases uses a YAML with the extension .base that gets integrated as normal file. Nice.

Obsidian Base or obsidian-project has different views - have a sales funnel (kanban board), writing pipeline (Kanban), and a table view for following up.

Sales Funnel with Kanban View - based on the same data as above table:

Writing Board with progress of work:

I have another page where I track income and outcomes. I use Basecamp for Todo’s with a reminder, also I can collaborate with customers, but everything else is in Obsidian.

Template for CRM:

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---
Work: Blogs
Action: Needs Assessment
Type: 2-Prospect
Hotness: 5-Cold
Email: ""
Created: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
Origin:
Timing: ""
Segment: ""
Comment: 
---

# <% tp.file.title %>

## Potential Work & Discussions


## Log
- 

## About Company


---
Created <% tp.date.now(&

Obsidian is not for everyone, but what I would encourage everyone, is to use an open file format: Markdown. File Over App.

Just for the simple reason that if you spend time to write things down, that you are sure you can read it in 5 years, 10 years still. I’m not sure if Notion will be there or Obsidian, but I know for a fact that text files will still be a thing. As someone who used OneNote for 10 years, I lost a good amount of knowledge while trying to export the data out of it…

Why not use Obsidian for a CRM? That’s what I asked myself too, and I just tried it. More than a year has passed, and it still works super great.

Obviously, only if you are on your own. All crucial discussions or insights you own, keep, and can connect to other people or products you discussed.

I can’t imagine how much value is in a SAP, or any other huge CRM, stored and unusable after a while.

I wanted to have a simple average word count of my articles. As I write them all in Obsidian, I thought about how I could have a nice overview.

Instead of creating an external spreadsheet, I added the metadata to each blog article and query them with Dataview.

And it works!

This is how it looks in Obsidian. See the aggregated words (SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX):

These are the Obsidian Dataview queries:

Retainer written:

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```dataview
TABLE 
    word_count AS "Word Count",
    retainer AS "Retainer-Month",
    date AS "Date Created"
FROM "path-to-folder"
WHERE customer = "XXX" AND retainer
SORT retainer ASC

Retainer

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```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID 
    Count AS "Articles Count", 
    Total AS "Total Words", 
    round(Average) AS "Average Words", 
    3000 AS "Submitted Words",
    round(3000 - (Average - 3000)) AS "Next Month Target",
    Minimum AS "Min", 
    Maximum AS "Max"
FROM "path-to folder"
WHERE customer = "XXX" AND retainer AND word_count
GROUP BY ""
FLATTEN length(rows) as Count
FLATTEN sum(rows.word_count) as Total
FLATTEN Total / Count as Average
FLATTEN min(rows.word_count) as Minimum
FLATTEN max(rows.word_count) as Maximum

• Obsidian Webclipper for adding relevant people from LinkedIn to my Vault

Origin: Does anyone use Obsidian to manage their business : r/ObsidianMD
References: Freelancing SSP DATA, Obsidian