Practical ideas for teams that want their sales process to run smoother and more effectively.
10 articles
Every mainstream CRM is built on the same four building blocks, and most of the messes I get hired to untangle come down to information living on the wrong one. The software rarely stops you from filing things wrong, which is exactly the problem. So here's what each record type is for.
Read articleEvery team with a duplicate problem has run the big cleanup at least once. Someone burns a weekend merging records, the database is spotless on Monday, and within a quarter the duplicates are back like nothing happened. At that point people blame the software or the team. Usually it's neither. Clean
Read articleMost CRMs are excellent historians and terrible assistants. Open a typical deal record and you can learn everything about the past â every email, every call, every change since day one. What you usually can't learn is the only thing that matters at 9am: what happens next, who's doing it, and by wh
Read articleSomewhere in your shared drive is a document called "CRM Process Guide." It was written with real effort right after launch, it was accurate for about six weeks, and nobody has opened it since. That's not a discipline failure â it's a format failure. A separate manual has to be remembered, found,
Read articleSmall teams don't usually fail at CRM because they picked the wrong platform. They fail because they configured too much of it. Every field, stage, and automation added on day one is a guess about how the team will work â and day-one guesses are mostly wrong. The team ends up working around the gu
Read articleCRMs decay quietly. Nobody decides to let the data rot â it happens one skipped field and one duplicate import at a time, until the sales meeting opens with twenty minutes of arguing about whose numbers are right. If any of these five feel familiar, you're due for a cleanup. 1. You search a custom
Read articleStrange thing for a CRM consultant to admit, but plenty of businesses that ask me about CRMs get the same answer: not yet. A spreadsheet is a legitimate sales tool, and at certain sizes it's the better one. The trick is knowing which side of the line you're on â and noticing when you cross it. Wha
Read articleOpen a struggling CRM and you'll often find a contact marked "Active," with a status of "Follow Up," attached to a deal in "Negotiation" that hasn't moved since March. Three fields describing the same customer, telling three different stories. The team stopped trusting all of them â which is usual
Read articleEvery CRM field list follows the same story arc. The system launches lean. Then marketing wants an industry field, finance wants a budget field, the owner wants "how did you hear about us," and eighteen months later the new-contact form has 31 fields and your reps fill in six of them. Everyone wante
Read articleAsk five software vendors what a CRM is and you'll get five feature lists. Here's the honest answer: a CRM is your company's shared memory of every customer relationship. That's the whole job. Everything else is decoration. Right now that memory probably lives in a dozen places. The original quote i
Read article