At VA Partners we are now having monthly sales team sessions on different topics and in September we looked at everyday CRM tips.  We have written blogs and recorded many videos with a central focus on CRM as well.

For each client engagement, our team follows a sales cadence that would typically include a number of calls and emails. With that in mind, the team decided to talk about ways that we use our CRM to make ourselves more efficient. Here are our top CRM tips.

Contacts

There is required information needed for a contact. We like to have these items not only in the object, but also easy to display when in the regular contact view.  Office and mobile numbers are great to have there. Their LinkedIn bio URL is also helpful so we can make a quick trip to their profile if needed. Sometimes names can be tricky to pronounce. We will add a phonetic spelling where we have it.

Companies

If you can easily connect a company to a contact, do it from the start.  In some CRMs contacts could start as leads and then be converted into an account and contact once there is some interest in your solution.  You may want to leverage a parent and child set-up for companies and their subs and/or separate locations. This is important if they make decentralized decisions.

Notes

Notes are great to have highlighted information that is top of mind for calls and interactions. We will often have these linked to the contact we are doing the outreach to, not just the organizations. A few of our favorite types of notes:

• Link highlights of the company to the contact so you don’t need to jump to the website before a call. Focus on the things that are most important to your prospecting success.
• When preparing for an upcoming meeting add a short summary of the plan and any information you want to cover into a separate note. This is especially helpful when there is another team member involved.
• Add a note for bad email addresses and phone numbers.  If you just delete them when they are not working, you may add them again.

Tasks

One of the most components of the CRM is what you plan to do.  Keeping on top of different types of tasks is key to closing business and booking discovery calls. Here are a few of the VA Partners teams’ top tips;

• Name the task type in the task name. We run many different sales cadences and it can get confusing. You can add a 2nd call or 3rd email to the task name.
• We like to add the time zone into the start of the task. They help with planning out our call timing.
• Tasks that are associated with deals get added to a queue called deals. This allows us to make sure all the deal tasks are dealt with first.
• When you need to research a new contact, phone number, or email then tag the contact with research. You can then bundle together your research tasks and do them at a time that isn’t prime for calling or emailing.
• If you finish a round of calls and the next task is an email, then send or schedule the email before you leave the contact.  This is more efficient than scheduling a task and then having to go in and send the email.

We hope you have found these CRM tips helpful. If you need some help with CRM planning for your team please reach out.