CRM Setup Best Practices for Sales Teams

You know that you need a data-driven sales process. 

You have access to incredibly powerful customer relationships management (CRM) tools that promise "data, data, data". 

...but for some reason, your CRM isn't translating "data" into clear, objective insights. 

If that sounds familiar, it's because this is the norm for most teams. They invest in expensive - and powerful - CRM software that has incredible potential....but they fail to set it up properly and get their sales team to use it effectively.

But, there is a solution! In this article, we'll walk through a four-step formula for tracking your sales process and using CRM data to improve sales performance.

Three Common CRM Mistakes Sales Teams Make

Mistake #1: Salespeople don't update the CRM consistently

If you've ever run a sales team, you've probably run into this problem. Your sales reps might struggle to update the CRM consistently, which leaves you with information that isn't accurate. 

You've got to make sure that your team members have objective rules for their CRM updates. More on this in a minute!

Mistake #2: There's inconsistent tracking across reps

Aside from individual reps being inconsistent from day to day or week to week, your entire sales team might be doing things differently from rep to rep. 

This is a killer because you can't use the information to make clear decisions about your sales team's collective performance - yikes! We'll talk about setting clear rules a little later in this article. 

Mistake #3: You can't make data-driven decisions

You might be able to wrangle some understanding from 2 or 3 reps' "creative" inputs into your CRM. Big deal, right?

Well, it is! Assuming you want to grow a sales team, how do you expect to manage a team of 20 sales reps, all using the CRM differently? This gets out of control quickly if you let it!

Three Signs of a Healthy CRM

#1: Your CRM needs to be used. 

Here's a simple test - is your CRM actually being used by your sales team? You'd be surprised, but there are plenty of companies out there who have invested in a sales CRM but never bothered to show the team how to use it to improve their performance. 

If you have a CRM tool that's simply not being used by the team, it's time to reassess things and look for ways to get your team to buy in to the CRM. 

#2: Your CRM must alert you (good or bad)

At the end of the day, your CRM needs to guide you. Whether something positive or negative is happening, you need to be able to quickly pick up on the meaning behind the data. 

A good CRM will allow you to say, "OK, I see we've been doing better and better on (X metric) - I'm going to ask my sales manager what's been working so well" or "Uh oh, why are Bill's email stats so far away from the rest of the team? I've got to see what's happening!"

While we talk about CRMs primarily from a sales-first perspective, it's important to remember that your CRM is also a window into your customer relationships and customer experience. If something positive is happening, it can help you uncover why. And if something negative is happening, it can help you quickly identify (and correct) it. This might feel like something for your customer success or marketing teams, but it's equally important in sales!

#3: It must be easy and accessible. 

Look, you deserve to have a fantastic CRM tool that's modern and powerful. But you've got to make sure that the tool is still easy to understand and use on a day-to-day basis. Just because your software comes loaded with a million CRM features doesn't mean you have to use them all. 

Your goal is to have a CRM that's simple, easy, and accessible to use, while producing accurate, objective, and specific outputs. 

The Four-Step Formula for Tracking Sales Process

Step 1: Lead Management

There are several fundamentals behind good lead management.

First, you need to clearly define your lead statuses with objective language. Here are the statuses we like to use:

• Open: leads that haven't been touched yet. 
• Working: leads that are being reached out to, or "worked".
• Nurture: leads that have been turned over to marketing to continue to nurture. 
• Open Deal: leads that have booked a meeting.  
• Disqualified: leads that do not qualify for your solution.
• Prospect: leads that haven't been disqualified and have said something like "talk to me in 6 months" or "I'm not interested right now".

Here's a flowchart for more detail:

It's important to keep things clear and organized

Then, you need to be collecting secondary intel.

Secondary intel is information that you can't get from a data provider or from their website. This might be information like:

• What software tools do they use?
• When is their contract ending for their current solution?
• How is their company structured? Which person in which department really makes the decision?

These need to be fields in your CRM, so that you can consistently add strong intel to your system. 

Lastly, you need to define clear call outcomes. We use the following definitions and automations:

• No Answer | Automation: Change lead status to Working.
• Blocked by gatekeeper | Automation: Change lead status to Working.
• DM - Not Interested | Automation: Change lead status to Prospect.
• DM - Busy | Automation: Change lead status to Prospect. 
• DM - Interested | Automation: Change lead status to Prospect.
• Wrong Target - Referral | Automation: Change lead status to Disqualified and make the Disqualified Reason "not the right person".
• Left Voicemail | Automation: Change lead status to Working.
• Meeting Booked | Automation: [varies based on workflow]
• Disqualified | Automation: Change lead status to Disqualified
• Bad Data | Automation: Change lead status to Bad Data
• Do Not Contact | Automation: Change lead status to Disqualified and make Disqualified Reason "Do Not Contact"
• Other | Automation: [SDR Manual Input]

By having clear outcomes that you can consistently "bucket" your sales team's calls into, you'll be able to 

Step 2: Pipeline Tracking

Keeping your sales pipeline clean and healthy will take you a long way in your sales organization's journey. Here are a few things you need to know to maintain your pipeline's hygiene: 

What's the Meeting Source?

Simply put, you need to know where each meeting comes from. Whatever your overall system looks like, it needs to come down to a finite number of sources that produce meetings. These could include cold calls, cold emails, MQLs, or other sources.  

What's the Meeting Outcome?

Your meetings can be categorized into another bucket of finite outcomes. Tracking these is vital to understand when something worked (or didn't), and then figure out why that happened. We use meeting outcomes like "complete", "no show", and "reschedule", so that we're always able to track things to completion. 

Clear Deal Stages

Your sales process should be organized into distinct deal stages with clear actions that need to happen in order for a deal to progress from one stage to the next. Here's a simple way to organize your deal stages with a clear description per stage and objective exit criteria for each:

If you want to see a deeper dive into deal stages, you should check out this article on the Sales Process Designer.

Step 3: Create impactful Dashboards

It's important that you create a place where the reps can see how they're doing and the leaders can see how the team is doing. 

We like using several simple dashboards, made up of reports, leaderboards, charts, and/or dials that'll summarize things for you and your team. 

#1: Sales Team Dashboard

#2: Sales Leadership Dashboard

#3: SDR Team Dashboard

#4: SDR Leadership Dashboard

Step 4: Customize Your CRM for Better Insights. 

These days, sales CRM software tools come packed with a ton of different features and options. Here at Vouris, we like to add a few customizations that make it easier to organize, analyze, and act on your sales data:

Customization #1: Close Lost Reason

It's not enough to simply mark a deal as "lost" and move on. It's important that you attach a specific reason as to why it's being marked as "close lost". We use the following additions:

• SDR - No Show 
• Not qualified
• Went dark
• Timing 
• Budget
• Feature gap
• Lost to competitor
• Canceled evaluation
• Other

Customization #2: Disqualified Reason

Just like above, you need to attach a specific reason as to why a lead is being disqualified. If you track this over time, you might notice that your targeting or messaging is off. We use the following reasons:

• Too small
• Too large
• No market fit 
• Do not contact
• Not the right person
• No integration
• Other

Customization #3: First Demo Dates

We like adding a couple of simple automations that grab a timestamp for:

• First Demo Date 
• First Demo Complete Date 

This will help you track the number of demos needed, if/when a prospect goes dark, and generally how much time/effort/energy goes into the sale once an actual demo has been booked. 

Ready to set up your CRM the right way?

Now that you know the four steps to take to build your CRM the right way, you'll be able to track your sales process effectively. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions, while also allowing everyone from your reps to your leaders to get transparent visibility into your team's performance. 

You can download our complete CRM Setup Guide and the rest of our free sales resources here:

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