4 CRM Best Practices for Your Sales Process

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” – Hunter S. Thompson

As they scale, many organizations don’t have processes in place to support rapid growth. The sales process is an area that is critical to get right early on in a company’s growth journey.

At Quickskill, we’ve worked with hundreds of companies to scale their sales processes. We frequently see a few basic mistakes. But instead of hammering those mistakes here, we’ve opted to list the solutions. 

4 CRM (Contact Relationship Management) Best Practices for a Scalable Sales Model

1. Classify all leads/contacts/accounts

As your organization scales, you will rapidly add leads and contacts into your CRM. While most CRMs force you to categorize the status of each lead and opportunity (deal), contacts and accounts often don’t have defined statuses. This mistake will quickly compound as you multiply the size of your contact base.

While you may not have an active opportunity with a company, it is important to be able to categorize your relationship with every person and company in an effort to target, nurture, and prioritize them.

To address this, add a status field to each record type in your CRM and make it a required field.

2. Optimize your CRM

It is important to have a person/team charged with constantly streamlining your CRM to eliminate unnecessary fields and make it as simple as possible for your sales team. See our article on 9 Simple Tactics to Optimize Your CRM.

3. Define Sales Stages

Sales stages are the key to establishing a good workflow. Each sales phase should have a pertinent name and clear definition, and completion of each stage should signify progress.

Upon identifying and defining the different stages, document these for your team and ensure that they are programmed into your CRM.

4. Track and Manage a Few Key Metrics

With so much data in a CRM, it is tempting to report on every metric. However, to drive sales success, it is critical to define a few key metrics, and then:

• Review both the dashboard and underlying reports weekly
• Confirm your team is entering data correctly
• Review regularly with your team
• Ensure metrics are effective at driving sales performance
• Review metrics/reports as needed to properly incent your team

Related: 4 Ways Outsourcing CRM Management Can Boost Sales Productivity

Never Stop Improving! We Dare You. 

Sales processes should not be static but should be constantly reviewed to improve team productivity. Below are resources to help you continually improve your sales processes:

• Check out these 3 Must have salesforce apps to improve data entry, document production, and data quality
• Follow these sales process experts on Twitter