How to Work with CRM Systems

This exercise is intended for individual or team sales agents as a way to practice and reinforce learnings. Incorporate this practice into your day and, if possible, into your ongoing sales work. This practice shouldn’t take you more than 10-15 minutes a day. Keep it simple. Good luck and have fun!

Introduction: "Having" a CRM system and "Using" a CRM system are two very different pairs of shoes. For most early stage B2B start-ups the latter can be very difficult. This challenge can be especially daunting when you lack a team member who has years of experience in an operative sales role under their belt.

Instructions for “Prep your daily duties”

Step 1: List the different stages of your sales funnel and write down the quality criteria each deal has to fulfil to enter the different stages along the funnel. Make sure that the name of the funnel stage represents the "experience" or job your customer has during this specific stage. This helps to always keep a customer-centric mindset - even when we are looking at our pipeline and getting ready to manage our daily sales operations. In case you are not sure how to structure your sales funnel, make sure you check out our video and exercise about "how to build your first sales funnel"

Step 2: For each funnel stage make a list of questions you have to answer with you customers in order to meet the quality criteria of the given stage. Add this list to every customer interaction for each given stage and try to find answers to the questions during your customer interactions.

Tip: If you use hubspot you can use the "snippet" function to load your list into the note field you use to document your customer interaction with a simple shortcut. If you use a mac, you can "re-create" this snippet function by making each list of questions accessible via shortcut using the "text replace" function in your mac system settings.

Step 3: Create a grooming checklist to work through your deal pipeline. This checklist should keep you from making mistakes/overlooking something as well as increase your efficiency when working this task. Your checklist should contain items like: "Did I plan a next actionable with this customer?", "Did the customer and I agree upon a next point of interaction?", "Did I understand this customers pain points properly?", "When was the last point of contact with this customer?", "Did we prepare everything in order to reach out to the customer again?" The "tedious" task of grooming your funnel at least once a week ensures that you don't overlook anything in your deals, that you keep deadlines which you agreed upon with your different customers and that you "program your tasks" for your week properly - such as "creating an offer", "get feedback from product management about a certain feature request" or "writing and sending an awaited follow-up e-mail". Bottom line: It prevents you from dropping the ball!

Step 4: Apply your grooming checklist. Do so by working through your deal pipeline back to front at least once a week. Start with the deal which is closest to being finalized and ask yourself: "What is necessary to get over the finish line with this customer?" - Continue through your entire pipeline all the way to the first stage of your upper funnel.

Goal for the next two weeks:
This week: Apply grooming checklist every evening to prepare for your next day's sales action
End of this week: Reflect on how well the application of your funnel grooming checklist did work for you. Were there questions missing? Which questions could you never answer? Adapt the grooming checklist accordingly
Next week: Apply grooming checklist every evening to prepare for your next day's sales action
End of this week: Reflect on how well the application of your funnel grooming checklist did work for you. Were there questions missing? Which questions could you never answer? Adapt the grooming checklist accordingly.