Using Notion to organize inbound domain offers

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Notion (Notion.so), a startup based here in SF that raised $68.2M and has become a formidable player in the task management space. Over the years I’ve done everything I can to move everything possible out of spreadsheets and into more powerful, user-friendly tools.

I don’t do outbound on my domain names so when I sell a domain it happens via an inbound offer. Most recently I have been using Pipedrive to manage my inbounds and keep them organized. Most of my domains have for sale landing pages generated by Efty and I’ve been moving my leads (name, email, phone) to Pipedrive and tracking the follow-up there.

Lately I’ve been feeling like Pipedrive is a bit overkill, it’s really designed for sale organizations with multiple reps and a much more granular sales cycle. So I decided to start look-into other solutions that are a bit more lightweight but still offer the ability to easily customize so I can include the kind of information I need to keep track of when it comes to inbound offers. Typically the data I’m interested in tracking is:

  • Name of person
  • Company
  • Email
  • Phone (if provided)
  • Starting offer
  • Current offer
  • Date of last contact

As most people who sell domains via inbound know, the vast majority of inbound offers aren’t going to turn into anything. The reality is, many people think that domains are $10 and they want to buy a domain for the same price they’d register it. Of course, lucky for all of us, there are also plenty of people who understand the value of a good domain name and the impact it can make on their business. But, it’s a law of large number and you need to field a lot of inbounds from people with no budget until you get someone that can truly pay for what your domain is worth.

Keeping track of inbounds in an organized way is important because you never know how someone’s situation will change over time. While you might get a $500 offer on a domain you want $5,000 for, and you can’t get them to budge above $500, a year later things could be different, for both of you. Maybe you’d be happy to get $3,500 for the name, and maybe they have a bit more cash to spend.

The key is, staying organized around inbounds is important since every lead is someone who is genuinely interested in buying a domain name from you and while they might not have the budget today, they could in the future…but if you don’t have a good system for keeping track of inbounds, you’ll never circle-back to find out.

I’m still getting things setup in Notion but I’ll share what I come up with. If you’ve used Notion or a similar solution for managing inbounds I’d love to hear how you set things up.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton