CRMs: Love Em Hate Em Do I Still Gotta Use Em
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Brooke Greening: the best type of CRM is one that you actually use. If you don't use it, it's not going to work for you. And in fact, it starts to work against you and you start to hate it and you don't wanna work with it.
And it really upset me because I felt like I was working for my CRM that my CRM owned me instead of me being able to use it as a tool to help me to continue to keep track of all of my customersI can tell you if you have a messed up CRM, you're usually gonna have what we call a messed up sales pipeline because they do work hand in hand.
what do we do when our customer doesn't buy from us the first time? 'cause if they buy from us
Scott Greening: Welcome back to Sippin Matcha and helping you make more sales. I am resident matcha maker and question asker. Scott Greening the host of this podcast, along with our sales coach and matcha drinker, Brooke Greening, who also happens to be my lovely wife. We're excited to be with you today and got another great question for you.
So Brooke, here is today's question. There's a little bit of context here, so it's a little longer. But let me read it for you and get you all set up here. After really digging into our sales process, I think we have a good grasp on what to do, what not to do, both conceptually and in real life.
But sometimes gets stuck on the physical tracking of who to follow up with and when it gets messy on our tracking sheet. And we've tried CRMs but have yet to land on the best way. Suggestions? So this is again from anonymous and so they're asking CRM questions how to track people.
Brooke Greening: Love it.
Scott Greening: What do you think?
Brooke Greening: All right, so the first thing is, as they were sharing in the question, the. To the best of my knowledge, it's not saying, Hey Brooke, we don't really know exactly what to do in our sales conversation, per se, in regards to follow up and moving them along. But it's what in the world do we do after if they don't buy on the very first try?
What are we supposed to be doing after that in regards to being intentional and also just making sure that we're not losing people. 'cause they said they've tried different CRMs, they've tried tracking sheets or tried a lot of different things, but nothing has really. Feeling comfortable for them or sticking with them.
And so I wanna encourage you, the very first thing is that the best type of CRM is one that you actually use. If you don't use it, it's not going to work for you. And in fact, it starts to work against you and you start to hate it and you don't wanna work with it.
Scott Greening: I would just remind you from conversations past I do think your perspective on CRMs is something that has changed and you may or may not have earlier in your career, come home and wanted to put your head through a wall because of the blasted.
CRM so what kinda has changed your perspective on CRMs?
Brooke Greening: A hundred percent because when you're in sales and you have it in, there's a lot of things that people are talking about. One, they always say, if you didn't document it, it didn't happen. And so for those of us who are in sales, and we love having those conversations and we love working with people and it feels like the CRM piece of documenting what we've said and making sure that we have the right intentional follow up.
All of that starts to feel like it's slowing us down and we can't do what we really enjoy doing. But then on the flip side, we know we have to keep up with it, so then it takes hours to fix it and to make it back. Not back, but what we would say, like it's, it looks like what we've actually been doing. The last week or a couple of weeks, and so there would be so many times I would be coming home way later in the evening than I ever wanted to because I had to keep updating my CRM and doing those things.
And it really upset me because I felt like I was working for my CRM that my CRM owned me instead of me being able to use it as a tool to help me to continue to keep track of all of my customers and make sure that I was. Intentional with every single one of them at every step of the path that they were in, in that buying process, instead of it feeling like, Ugh, I just have to do this because when someone's gonna look at it.
Or usually it was because someone was going to look at it. So I did not like that until I decided I need to make the CRM work for me. And then that's when things started to change.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And eventually you became, I don't know what the term is. You were like CRM Ninja or
Brooke Greening: I was. Yeah, I went through all of the training and I became what was called a Spark Power user.
And so that, and that didn't mean like I did, took an hour long training and got a certificate. It took months and intensive training and going into what they call the sandboxes and creating, email campaign, all the different things that I had to be able to do, but that's when it really helped me. And then when I became a sales specialist and I was going into communities trying to turn them around as quickly as I could, the CRM was something that I was using all the time.
And I can tell you if you have a messed up CRM, you're usually gonna have what we call a messed up sales pipeline because they do work hand in hand. So whether you're a sales professional and you've got someone like looking at you and trying to see what's going on in your CRM, or you are a business owner and you're just trying to figure out like, these spreadsheets are not keeping track of my customers.
What am I supposed to be doing? There are things that we're gonna be talking about today to help you to know how you can be able to follow up intentionally after that sales conversation happens, and to make sure that nothing is falling through the cracks for you.
Scott Greening: Great. So we've talked about loving your CRM, your we're changing our relationship status from it's complicated to CRMs, to, to being in a in a loving relationship.
What other tips do you have for helping people know how to like, keep track of people and when they're supposed to call them. And how do you actually get that CRM, whether it is an official CRM or a spreadsheet system or whatever, but how, what do you do to help it work for you?
Brooke Greening: Yeah, and just so everybody's wondering if they're hopping on this podcast and they're like, what the heck is a CRM? 'cause we're using acronyms. So things in regards to HubSpot, Salesforce, keep where it is digital and they're keeping track of what's happening with everybody that you're talking to. You're usually setting up next steps.
In that there might be email campaigns that are going out. There might be proposals that are connected to it. It's a whole platform that's helping you to keep track of all the conversations you've had with your customers.
Scott Greening: Yeah. CR CRM stands for customer relationship management software or client Relationship Management software.
There you go.
Brooke Greening: Yes.
This is it. The. This is what you can do. So let's just go back to square one when we're trying to talk about what do we do when our customer doesn't buy from us the first time? 'cause if they buy from us for the first time, I don't think they're saying they don't know what to do at that point.
Then they probably have their onboarding process and off they go. But what's happening is they've talked to them, they've had a good relationship. Maybe they've sent a proposal, maybe they've done different steps. But then after a while it just starts to fall apart. They don't know. How do I know when I'm supposed to continue to follow up with them? What am
Scott Greening: Hey, it's Scott Brooke's husband and co-builder here at Building Momentum Resources. If you're feeling like your sales conversations are all effort and no traction, you're not alone. I've been there. That's why Brooke created the Sales Conversation Assessment, a quick free tool to help you figure out what's not clicking in your sales conversations and how to turn things around.
No pressure. No pitch. Just a smart gut check for your strategy, like holding up your sales process to am mirror, except the mirror talks back in a helpful way, not in a horror show way. Take it now at building Momentum info slash assessment. That's building momentum info slash assessment. Alright, back to the episode, Brooke's, probably about to make you some more money again.
Brooke Greening: What am I supposed to do? And they don't have something that's helping them to stay on track. So the very first thing that you wanna be able to do is you just wanna get a piece of paper out, or if your CRM or whatever it is, but you are going to have three columns. 1, 2, 3. The first column is called our 30 day buying timeframe.
So just 30 days done. The second column is 30 to 60. Buying timeframe done. And then the last column is 60 to 90 day plus. So that's everybody else. So they're either saying they're gonna buy within the month, they're saying they're gonna buy within this quarter, or they say they're gonna buy sometime this year or beyond.
That's how you start dividing them up. Then you have to put your, those potential customers in one of those buckets. If they don't land in any of those, you don't have any idea what you're gonna be doing next, and that's really frustrating. So you have those who are on the one to 30, we're paying attention to them.
You have 30 to 60, so they're not ready to go, but they're still interested in working with you, and then you have your 60 to 90. The reason we do that is because if all we do is focus on the one to 30. I'm doing is ever focusing on who's gonna buy for me in the next 30 days. That's when we call that feast and famine comes into play like, wow, I've had a great month and I have all of these sales.
And then we feel like we're restarting all over again 'cause we have not brought anybody else in. But if you have people in the 30 day timeframe and then you have them in the 60 and 90 day timeframe, I'm sorry, 30 to 60 timeframe, and then the 60 to 90 day plus and your 60 to 90 day plus should be full.
'cause those are all of the people who've not bought from you, but have never said, no, I don't wanna work with you. But those are the ones that we have not, we've not been able to have relationships with. When you are focusing on those three buckets, then you're constantly seeing how you can move them from 60 to 90 to 30 to 60, from 30 to 60 to 30.
That's how that process is working. And if you have people in every single category, that's how you know you're gonna be okay and your sales. That's how you know you're gonna be able to make your sales target if you don't, if you just have them in the one to 30 and that's it. Then you're gonna be going all over the place.
Or if you only have them in the 60 to 90, we have a problem because we don't have anybody that's getting ready to buy at this point. So that is the very first step. And your CRM can really help you in that. 'cause you can tag them exactly in that way. And then we call what? We say, bring up your dashboard and you can see very clearly, okay, these are the people that are getting ready to buy right now.
These are the ones that are getting ready in the next 30 to 60. 60 to 90. You can get a very good grasp quickly on what's going on in your sales and what you need to be able to do. And that's what I would do when I would be walking into communities. That's what I was looking at, and that's what I do when I work with my clients.
I am looking at that. A lot of times they don't even have it built. So that's our first step. But it doesn't, you don't have to go and buy a huge CRM, you can do it on your Excel spreadsheet or whatever you want to do. You just have to be, you have to be intentional in those columns.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And then you can it just depends on how elaborate you want to get with your CRM and all that.
But you can build different types of automations in there. You can assign yourself different types of tasks. The. To call somebody that's a little farther out and check in to send them a text, to share a resource, all of those different types of things. But the first step is establishing like what the buying timeframe is and assigning people in that way.
so what happens if you're looking at a list of names and people and you're like, oh I don't know. I don't know when these people are gonna buy. I don't know. I am not sure I can answer that question.
What do we do then?
Brooke Greening: Yes, that's when I would encourage you. Maybe something got missed in that sales conversation because you should be able to get off of every single sales conversation knowing where their buying timeframe is. That was part of that process as you were trying to figure out how you can help them, when you can help them.
When we talk about creating that urgency, all of that comes into play to help both of us know when is it that you're wanting to have this support? So if you're looking at all of your customers and you're like, I have no idea. This is not a judgment call, but it's just helping you to understand the reality.
We probably didn't get that when we needed to in our first sales conversation, and so the best way to do that is there are just two questions you're gonna ask yourself in every sales conversation. We talk about this on the E and our service framework with the explain next steps. You have to know two things.
One, does my potential client know exactly what they need to do next to move forward with me? Do they know that? Do they know exactly what they need to do, meaning date and time of what they need to do to move forward with me? Have I made that completely clear to them? Everybody is gonna have a little bit of a different plan in that I am not telling you what that plan needs to be.
I am just telling you it needs to be incredibly clear and that you know that your client knows what they need to do. And then the second piece is you need to do know, are they going to do it? If so, when meaning, date and time? And if not, why? If we do not have those two answers, all of the follow up starts getting really vague and fuzzy.
So for you, when you're there, you're gonna look and you're gonna say, okay, according to my sales process, what would be the next step that we need to do? Is it that we're gonna be reviewing a proposal in person? Is it that we need to be doing an assessment with them? Whatever your business is and whatever your next step is, you need to make sure that they know exactly what it is.
And then you need to know if they're gonna do it. If so, when and if not, why? Because that will one, determine which bucket they go into. Immediately, and it's going to help you in regards to your follow up because you said, I'm not sure exactly what to do, when and why. The reason we don't know is because we just don't wanna be weird about it.
We don't wanna say, Hey, I'm following up. Hey, I'm circling back. Hey, I'm checking in. I, that gets really annoying and there's no purpose behind that. So when you know those answers to those two questions, now you can strategically move them forward in a way that's going to be beneficial to them. So if you don't have that answer, you cannot do, you can't put 'em in the right system.
Scott Greening: Great. Thanks. Any other advice for anonymous with regards to their CRMs or anything else that they can do to make the most of it?
Brooke Greening: No, I just think when you have your CRM or if you're using Excel spreadsheets or A CRM, you wanna be looking at it on a regular basis. You really wanna be looking at it on a daily basis When you're looking at, okay, what do I have coming up?
What's going on? Who do I have, what we call like in our one to 30 pipeline in regards to who's getting ready to be buying soon? And then we're reviewing what's going on with that 30 to 60 and 60 to 90. Everybody, ideally should have some sort of next step connected to them, whether they're one to 30, 30 to 60, or 60 to 90.
What happens is when we don't attach something to them or a next step with them, that's when everything starts to get fuzzy. So the very first thing I would encourage you to do is get your customer database out, look at it, and divide 'em into those three categories, and then start asking yourself. What do I know about them, where are they at?
Can I put them in the category? And if I can't, what questions or what do I need to do to be able to understand where they need to go? And then how can I start moving them forward to the next step?
Scott Greening: And if I remember correctly, I think that you have a resource, your daily five sales activities, and a couple of them are CRM related.
If I, if I don't remember. So everybody go to building momentum.info/five and you can get that resource and find out a little bit more. But I think we've, I think we've answered anonymous as a sales question and that we'd love to answer your question. Please share it at buildingmomentum.info slash matcha and you can share your question.
We love fake pseudonyms. So we've heard from Price Shy in Atlanta and terrified in Tahiti. Anonymous works well too. But we'd love to hear from you and answer your question on a future episode if you found this episode helpful. Encouraging. We'd appreciate it if you share it, if you like it, if you give us a review on your podcast platform, that would be great.
Brooke, parting word of sales wisdom for the masses?
Brooke Greening: No, I just wanna thank everyone who is submitting these questions. I love being able to do it. It helps us to be able to do this podcast. And so just keep sending them because if you're thinking of them, other people are too. And so it's great.
I love hearing 'em and being able to help.
Scott Greening: Yep. Building Momentum info slash Matcha. We'll get you there. For those of you that aren't matcha aficionados, that is M A T C H A. Thanks. We'll talk to you next time.
Brooke Greening: Bye.
