How to make your CRM not suck

You need a CRM - part 2

I got an unprecedented number of emails sent to me from my last newsletter about getting a CRM.

You can read that below:

The gist of that newsletter was to get you to start using a CRM so that you don't have to use your brain for everything. And I emphasized that forget all the fancy bloat most modern CRMs have. Focus on simple things that get you acting instead.

For the benefit of everyone else out there, I wanted to share the ideas with everyone.

1. Can you recommend me a CRM?

This was the most asked question. Sure, send me an email and I'll recommend a few to you. Most of them have too much bloat. It's all about finding ones that are simple and easy to you. There are a few CRMs that really nail this really well (and I've either intimately used or demoed close to a dozen of them - including almost sitting for my Salesforce Admin certification).

2. What do I do after I get a CRM?

Connect it with your inbox.

A good CRM should have an Outlook or Gmail extension. That means you can just click a button and it should automatically pull the contact info from your mail provider and create an entry in the CRM.

Syncing with the email also means all future communications with that email will go through your CRM. Which means each "deal" can have a trail.

3. Should I get a vendor to implement a CRM?

Probably not. At least not initially. We tried a waterfall approach towards building a CRM. That means we listed every little thing that we want our CRM to do (and it's a lot!) and gave it to our vendor.

The vendor went out and built it all out. While it met all of our requirements, it wasn't a pleasant experience to use it all.

We now use a more agile approach to building a CRM. That means we pick 1-2 "features" we want to build out, get a freelancer or vendor to build it out, we test it and iterate as needed.

Our goal is to continuously build better processes on the CRM.

Which takes me to my 4th point.

4. How can I make sure I'm getting the most out of my CRM?

Ironically, the answer to this question doesn't lie in the CRM. Instead, what you need to do is go for a nice long walk and think about how you want your sales process to look like.

What is the process? Where do your clients come from? Where do they usually stall? What do you wish could happen when clients stall? What do you wish you could always ask when you take a client through the journey with you?

Do you wish you could be reminded 3 days after you send that onboarding email to see if the client filled it out? Do you wish you had a checklist of questions pop-up right before a meeting so you don't forget to ask or question something?

Do you wish you could quickly answer emails to question xyz?

Great, you did that for your clients. What about referral sources? How do you want to build things out for them?

All of this becomes a checklist of things to build out in your CRM. You can use these designs to build out workflows.

5. Why doesn’t the CRM just “click” for me?

It’s because you’re not doing what the tool is supposed to do — help you take action!

You leave things unactioned. The whole point of a CRM is to help you take the right next action with ease. Without thinking about it. It's a piece of software that can do this thinking for you once you program it in.

It's sort of like a fast food joint that gives you exactly what you want no matter where you go in the world.

It frees you then to improvise, be creative, be present, be authentic when you're building a relationship with a client. Because you know the rest of the process is coming together with mechanical accuracy.

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I hope you find these ideas useful! If you have a question or area that you're struggling with when it comes to building your practice or firm, just hit the reply button to send us a private email!

And if there are others who you think would benefit from reading this newsletter, please share it with them.