Signing up is not a strategy
Signing up for a CRM is the first ten minutes of the job. It isn’t the strategy.
I’ve watched what happens next. A business buys the licence, someone imports a spreadsheet, and the system fills up with records. A year on, nobody trusts it, and the verdict is that the CRM doesn’t work.
The CRM usually works fine. What’s missing is the set of decisions it was built to record.
A CRM without decisions is a database
A CRM records decisions: who counts as a lead, what happens when one arrives, when a deal is real, who follows up. If nobody has made those decisions, the software can’t make them for you. You end up with a database with a login.
On a recent project, a business already had a CRM. It held more than ten thousand leads, nearly all of them sitting in the first stage, and thousands of deals with no stage at all. Its website form collected useful answers about each enquiry, and none of them showed on the contact record.
Nobody had decided how long a lead could sit untouched, what a stage meant, or what the team needed to see when an enquiry arrived.
Answer these before you configure anything
Start with five questions, in this order.
- Who are we trying to win, and where do they come from today?
- What has to be true before an enquiry is worth a salesperson’s time?
- What are the stages between first contact and a signed job, and what does a deal have to show to move from one to the next?
- Who follows up, and how soon?
- What do we want to see on a Monday morning that we can’t see now?
The third is the hard one. We spent an afternoon with a sales team on what each stage meant. We left with drafts and no agreement. The fix is one sentence for each stage saying what gets a deal in and what gets it out, then testing those sentences against real deals.
Clean the data and name one owner
Old data is the next trap. An import brings everything with it: contacts nobody has spoken to in years, leads from a list someone loaded long ago, deals that were never closed. Pick a cut-off for how long a lead can sit untouched, apply it, and keep an export of whatever you close or archive so nothing is lost.
Then make the system ask for what you’ll want later. More than a hundred leads in one portal had been disqualified as “not a good fit”, which told us nothing about why. We made a note compulsory on disqualification, and now it’s how the business learns which enquiries it’s getting wrong.
Last, name one person who owns the system day to day. Without an owner, every change becomes a negotiation. Other people’s work can also sit on the same fields: stage names can be tied to another system, and a marketing agency’s reports may depend on them. Tell them before you change anything.
What to do this month
- Write the five answers on one page, even where some are guesses.
- Define each stage in one sentence for getting in and one for getting out.
- Set a cut-off for leads nobody has touched, archive what falls outside it, and keep an export.
- Make one field compulsory that you’ll want to report on later.
- Name the owner and give them ten minutes a week.
Then train the team on the decisions you’ve made.
I help businesses do this. If you’ve got a CRM and no strategy yet, book a free 30 minute conversation.
