How to Make Your CRM Work For YOU

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A CRM can be the most useful and critical tool available to any salesperson. The problem is, sales managers typically use a CRM as a way to micromanage their sales team, and therefore, the salespeople are reluctant to actually use it to their advantage. 

Yes, a CRM is there to help sales managers do their job more effectively, but a CRM is more than just a tool for your managers. 

A CRM is a tool designed to help YOU outperform your competitors! 

This article will go over several ways you can turn your CRM from the annoying piece of software your boss is always going on about, to a piece of software that actually works for YOU! 

Log Your Phone Calls and Meetings 

I know, trust me, I know. You hear this day in and day out from your manager, and that’s the last thing you want to hear from Sales Therapy. But, just hear me out for a minute. 

Logging your call does a few things for you. Firstly, it gets your boss off your back, right? 

Well, more importantly, logging your calls and meetings helps with remembering what happened. Generally speaking, I suggest clients log their calls as soon as physically possible after their customer interaction. This helps keep things fresh, and keeps your notes as accurate and useful as possible. 

When I say as soon as physically possible, I am absolutely serious! A lot of folks will actually wait until the end of the day to log all their calls. This system may work for them, and helps them crank out more calls during the day, but waiting 5-6 hours to log your call is actually not doing you any favors whatsoever. 

For example, when I am on the road and running from meeting to meeting, I still make time to log my notes in between visits. When I am on the road, I have my cell phone with unlimited mobile hotspot, my laptop which can connect to my phone’s hotspot, and my CRM which can be accessed from any internet connected device. 

When I can’t find a McDonald’s or Dunkin to sit down for a few minutes, I’ll just pick a random parking lot and set up my “mobile office” complete with music, air conditioning, and portable work desk. 

Bottom line is, unless you have meetings booked right on top of one another, there is really no excuse to not crack your laptop open and log your notes while they are still fresh in your mind. 

But, why do you need to log your notes anyway?

Well, the main reason is to capture the essence of the conversation you had with a customer. You want to be able to look back on the meeting six months in the future and be able to get an idea of how the conversation went without having to rely on your memory at all. 

You can log what was discussed, any objections the customer gave you, action items to which you agreed to complete, or any type of follow up items that resulted from the meeting. 

Basically, logging your notes as completely and thoroughly as possible NOW will help you with your follow up activities LATER. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself for taking the time to truly log your notes in the CRM immediately after a customer interaction. 

Schedule Your Follow Up Call or Meeting 

Just like you did with logging your notes immediately after a conversation with a customer or prospect, you should also schedule your follow up activity immediately. Preferably, it should be scheduled immediately after you log your meeting notes. 

The reason you should do it immediately is simply because otherwise you may forget. The entire point of having, and using, a CRM is to not rely on your memory to manage customer relationships. 

Believe me when I say, if you don’t schedule your follow up immediately, you may never actually have the next conversation. The biggest problem with this is, regardless of how interested your customer was, they will most likely not call you back. If you don’t schedule a follow up call, and actually place the call when it’s scheduled, you may never actually make that sale. That means you did a bunch of work, and running around, for absolutely nothing. 

Now, the beautiful thing about scheduling a follow up task is that it can always be rescheduled. For example, let’s say you schedule a follow up call for a week after your initial conversation. But, between the initial call and your scheduled follow up call the customer emails you and says the project has been put on hold for another couple weeks. 

Well, you can just open up that scheduled task, and change the date to when they said they would be available. This means that you don’t have to create another new task every time. You simply create it once, and keep pushing it out until you finally get them on the phone or in a meeting. 

The other reason you should schedule a follow up activity is to help you remember what you want to discuss on that next call. Typically, when I schedule a call to a customer, I include notes about what I want to discuss. I will also include answers to any questions the customer may have asked during the first call, and keep track of the “action items” I committed to complete. 

Essentially, scheduling follow up tasks in your CRM just helps you stay focused on your customers’ needs, and make sure your next conversation is just as productive as the initial conversation! 

Know Your Numbers! 

One of the most useful tools in a CRM is the ability to run reports on practically any piece of information logged in your CRM. You can run reports based on customers, leads, or even completed and open activities! 

Knowing your numbers is also an important part of sales. Remember, regardless of what we discuss in Sales Therapy, sales is still a numbers game. I just try to help you reduce the number of attempts you have to make in order to hear a “yes” from a prospect. 

Let’s say, for example, you have a goal of scheduling 10 meetings per week. Well, let’s assume you need to make 100 cold calls in order to schedule those 10 meetings. 

Unless you keep a running tally of all your calls on a piece of scratch paper, you will most likely not hit your 100 calls that week, and that means you’ll fall short of your weekly goals. 

With a CRM, you can actually run a report based on your phone calls between certain dates, and this will help you keep track of your numbers. That will help you plan for the days ahead, and it’s always nice to know when you are indeed on track to hitting your goal! 

Or, you can also take a look at the history of activities with certain prospects and customers. For example, let’s say you’re about to call a prospect. But, you can’t exactly remember the last time you tried contacting them. Well, honestly, you don’t want to contact a prospect too many times in a week. That just becomes annoying. 

So, if you take a look through your CRM, you can see exactly how many attempts you’ve made, and if they ever responded. 

Personally, I have saved myself embarrassment by doing this. A few times, I would pick up the phone and dial the number of a prospect to hit them with my pitch. But, I always pull up their contact page, and check the recent activities. Believe it or not, there have been times when I almost called a prospect after they’ve already told me to stop calling them! 

So, use your CRM to help know your numbers!

Log Your Email Conversations

Most popular CRM’s will have a built-in function that allows you to email your prospects right from the CRM contact page. The reason this is important is because the CRM will also store your sent and received emails. 

Similarly to logging your meeting and phone call notes, being able to read through previous email conversations will help you stay focused, and can even help with keeping track of previous conversations which will absolutely help you as time goes on. 

For example, I have relied on reading through older emails to find specific promises I made, deadlines I promised to keep, and honestly to make sure I honor the correct discount on a product! 

Another way this comes in handy is when the customer pulls the classic, “You never sent me that email with…”. No, this is not to be used as a, “no, you’re wrong customer. I have my emails logged right here.” 

Rather, you can respond with, “can you check your spam? My records show me I sent the email on DATE AND TIME, so maybe it ended up in your spam folder.” 

More times than not, what this allows the customer to do is search their inbox by date, time, and sender. 90% of the time they end up finding the email while we are both on the phone, and then we can review whatever it is we needed to go over together. 

If You Don’t Have a CRM, Get One! 

If you are employed by a company, chances are good that you currently have a CRM. Now, that doesn’t mean your CRM is doing you any favors right now, but you should have access to one. If you don’t, you should have a talk with your sales manager since a CRM can increase sales by 29% and productivity by 34%. 

If you are self-employed, there’s a good chance you are not currently using a CRM. But don’t worry, there is a FREE CRM available that I would suggest to anyone who is trying to establish a customer base. 

You can visit www.zoho.com today, and sign up for their FREE CRM. Yes, they do have paid versions, and yes, those will have much more functionality. But, for where you are most likely at with your business, the free version should be more than enough to get you started. 

Zoho is rather simple to use, it allows you to add “Leads”, “Contacts”, and “Accounts”. So, if you are trying to do business with a specific company, you can create an “Account” for that company, and associate several different “Contacts” to that company. 

You can add multiple users to a Zoho account, so if you have employees, they can have access to the CRM as well. 

The best part is, there is even a mobile app version! The mobile app allows you to do everything you can on a PC version, but the main difference is the mobile app will send you push notifications for open tasks you have for the day. This makes sure that you are constantly on top of your sales process, and will never let a customer interaction fall through the cracks! 

CONCLUSION 

I’m not going to lie to you. A CRM can be the bane of any salesperson’s existence because of how often they are used as a micromanagement tool for their bosses. Managers love CRMs because of how simple it can be to monitor the productivity of the sales team. 

But, that doesn’t mean a CRM cannot be a powerful tool that will help you excel in your sales career. By using the bare basics of what the CRM can offer, you will be miles ahead of the majority of salespeople out there. 

There is a classic saying in sales, “if it’s not in the CRM, it never happened”. 

Yeah, it’s annoying as hell to hear from a manager when you’re trying to go over a deal or review an opportunity, but you should absolutely live by this rule. 

The entire point of a CRM, for a salesperson, is to act as your long-term memory assistant. That’s basically it! A CRM is just a way to keep your business organized, and help you keep track of all the different conversations you have. 

There are plenty of other ways a CRM can help you outperform every other salesperson on your team, and we can certainly discuss some of those ways during a Sales Therapy meeting. 

In fact, I can help coach you through the best practices for Zoho since that is what I use to keep track of my Sales Therapy clients. 

Download it today, send me a message on LinkedIn, and we’ll get you started!