For the Love of Sales (and CRM)

As someone who has always loved sales, these are the core principles of our sales consulting business along with the most common challenges I encounter with each company or client I work with.

Salesforce fits for most Enterprise businesses but for everyone else there are better options.

Yes, Salesforce has been and will continue to be a market leader in the CRM space. They have rolled out analytics platforms like Einstein and Lightning, but at its core Salesforce doesn’t allow a salesperson to easily know and manage their own business without considerable resources.

Many out-of-the-box solutions (e.g. Zendesk Sell, Hubspot, Outreach, etc) provide experiences similar to Salesforce without complex integrations from phone dialers and email syncing plus at least one full-time Salesforce administrator on your payroll. And, you still won’t know easily what your conversion rates and stage duration analysis is without some heavy engineering resources.

If your business needs sophisticated and robust solutions for inventory management, supply chain management, human resources, etc., Salesforce may be the perfect solution, but that doesn’t apply to most small to medium businesses. Using a more simple and innovative tool can lead to happier sales people and weekly stand-ups that aren’t simply reviewing call counts and showing which deals have been moved to “commit”.

Don’t create 25 required fields or even 5.

If a field is relevant and a driver of the business, Sales will find value in collecting and recording it. I have assisted several clients implement their CRMs and now I do this regularly within our consulting business. Make sure that any data point that you are asking an employee to gather and record will directly impact the likelihood of that deal closing. Some examples are fields such as: primary contact role, technologies used that could directly integrate with your platform, etc.

Fields you should immediately delete without hesitation are “Notes about next steps” (your CRM should be able to show you if there is a meeting or a task set. Ahem, that’s your next step). Birthdate (this doesn’t drive business in most industries anymore), and the date of last contact (your CRM should automatically capture this).

Personnel is a company’s most expensive resource. Adding superfluous fields will only lead to wasting precious employee time, causing frustration, and – still – sparsely completed CRM fields.

Don’t use too many pipeline stages.

Typically when a company has over 5 pipeline stages, they are typically not stages, they are activities (e.g. call completed, demo scheduled, etc). Each stage should be a tipping point that directly impacts the likelihood of that deal closing. A simple, effective example would be:

• Stage 1 (Qualification): The deal has been qualified and it is worthwhile for your sales team to allocate resources to pursue it.

• Stage 2 (Evaluation): Your salesperson demonstrates to the prospect why they should consider your product or service (this is where your salesperson earns their salary).

• Stage 3 (Negotiation): Pricing, Terms & Conditions negotiation.

• Stage 4 (Outcome): Won or Lost deal

Most pipelines will have more stages but these are the core buckets and when stages are set up correctly you can have key insights into bottlenecks and coaching opportunities to accelerate your growth.

Invest in a CRM that automates as much as possible.

If you must constantly remind your Sales staff to enter data daily into their CRM, it means they aren’t finding value in it and you need to re-think your tech stack. A CRM that is set up correctly for your business should be where sales people live and breathe everyday.

If they are exporting and prioritizing lists in Google Sheets or Excel then – while they are owning their own success – you are losing valuable insight into what is actually driving business. A strong CRM will automatically capture calls, emails, notes and meetings. This means your sales rep is performing the tasks expected of them without expectations of more manual data entry.

Don’t set revenue targets based on what your board of directors or investors expect.

Build a case for your targets with logical justification using available data. If you don’t have the data to build that equation (or don’t know if you do), feel free to reach out below to set up a 30 minutes introduction call with us.

Targets and milestones are a certainty in Sales. But knowing your conversion rates at each stage will help you identify whether you need to hire more BDRs to start conversations, sales reps to handle demo requests, or sales leaders highly trained in negotiation to get deals across the finish line. These needs and capacity planning are different for each business and different at each stage of growth. Having the right CRM and tools to provide basic, yet accurate, data on your business performance helps compose a compelling story to clearly explain and justify Sales targets.

Sales is simple math…

… and we want to keep/make it that way. It is surprising how many companies overcomplicate their processes and analytics, and that is part of the reason we started JEM Analytics. We want to help companies make things simple so that as business gets more complex, we ensure you have clear business fundamentals in place.

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