How to Integrate CRM Tools into Sales Strategy

one of the most underutilized resources in a salesperson's Arsenal is their CRM and today I'm going to talk you through how to integrate CRM into your sales strategy and I'm going to take you through kind of how I select a CRM probably one of my top questions is you know what is your recommended CRM um things to look for and then I'm actually going to take you inside of my CRM the one I Ed the one I've selected and show you exactly some of those critical elements that you should be looking for when you're uh

selecting your CRM and the things that you you should do immediately to kind of optimize that into your sales strategy and get the most out of it cuz ultimately um I'm always trying to help you operate as a sales team of one so be able to produce at the level of a team um but as an individual so let me kind of take you through uh this document if you want this document there will be a link in the description so you can kind of grab it and use it as a tool to kind of

work through and and more or less like a checklist so one of the interesting things that has always intrigued me about CRM and and many years ago became kind of my initial Fascination was that uh just the name itself customer relationship management always seemed ironic to me because most of our sales performance and the things that we're tasked to do as salespeople is to actually generate customers um we often don't have a relationship so we don't get paid uh to manage relationships there's often other people that do that so the primary tool that we use

is called customer relationship management and we certainly don't have a customer or a relationship to manage based on most of the things we do so I early on um you check the Wikipedia page uh I think I was unique in coining the term lead management system and then that's become sort of it its own um segment within these types of tools so uh we still most of the tools that are available to us are still characterized as CRM tools but what I'm going to show you today is how to turn that into a lead management

system um of course that assumes that you have some mechanism to gener leads I've got other videos to help you with that but would encourage you to one start to build that system so that when that lead flow starts happening you can be uh a lot more productive with your time so here's kind of the short list of things that I look for in a CRM um I want it to be easy to get data into the CRM I don't want to be doing a lot of data entry a lot of crms uh Salesforce is

probably one of the the worst at this kind of assumes that the salesperson is going to enter a lot of data even if that's like spreadsheets and stuff like that but you want to um if you are generating realtime leads which hopefully you are inbound leads we want to make sure that that's easy to get in we want to make sure that if you are getting sort of leads from other things that you're doing within your email within your calendar and those sorts of things a lot of times our activity is outside of our CRM

which isn't ideal but it's going to happen so we want to make sure that that's synchronized into our CRM system and then of course the obvious and most do this pretty well we want to be able to import data um you know know into the system through csvs and and stuff like that there are also a lot of uh systems that allow us to Prospect and build list um and it's nice to have those be able to be integrated as well for most all of this zapier is going to to get you there right whether

you have web forms coming off of your uh website or you're trying to integrate something like Apollo or or some other sort of source Or List Builder there's lots of opportunities to do that with zapier and usually just to keep it simple it's the best way to do it instead of somebody do some custom integration uh web Hooks and all that sort of thing the other thing that most crms are getting really good about is um I use Google workspaces I think it's pretty similar with Outlook but just the ability to synchronize uh your email

and calendar activities again you don't want to have to if you're working in Google your uh mail account or your calendar you're working on something you're setting up a meeting or you get an email in you don't want to have to switch back over to CRM and do all that you just want to do that activity in Google and it syncs up and in you know the other end of that that is if you're inside of your CRM and you're setting some things up you want that to sync back so uh again these systems are

getting better and better at this I think the actual Google workspaces and Outlook is getting better um and sort of opening up that synchronization so that's really powerful the other thing in this checklist um and I think again this is one of those factors that is way underutilized um and that's the ability to create templates specifically email templates um but you may create some other templates like documents that you normally send out or um even contracts or agreements that are pretty typical but the ability to set up templates so that you're not typing from scratch

new emails now I know AI is coming to sort of help with that a little bit a lot of these systems have integrated that but even in using that it's better to start with a template because it forces you uh to one notice the repeated patterns that are happening inside of your CRM the things that you're doing over and over again communicating or providing you know some level uh of material collateral value it's good to sort of recognize those and to start to turn them into a standing standard operating procedure right and templates help you

do that the other power of the templates is kind of this next thing and that's to be able to take those templates and turn them into sequences and you'll kind of see when I pop into my CRM um how I actually set up those sequences uh in my CRM uh which I use cloes it actually calls them workflows which is a good characterization of that as well the other thing is to be able to create custom statuses now this can be a little bit dangerous because statuses I see a lot of times people overwork these

statuses and it can cause problems one it can create a lot of spaghetti so you're not really sure what's happening to certain things or records or contacts in there uh the other thing that can happen uh with those statuses that you have sort of unnecessary statuses and it starts to kind of muck with the actual reporting and the statistics that you're getting back so I believe to normally start simple um and then from there uh get more complex and you'll see mine has actually been sort of Whitted back down to Simplicity for the most part

my statuses are things like hey I've got a new lead because uh and again A lot of times these are organized by like okay that means I need to do something right or I need to move it forward in some way or that triggers some sort of workflow right so I have new lead so what am I trying to do with a new lead well I'm trying to get them to a scheduled appointment and then I have a scheduled appointment status meaning okay they've scheduled something with me I'm sort of waiting on that event to

happen um and then things like uh prepare a proposal which in my case involves some other people and then ultimately that proposal is out because again it's sort of in that monitoring status and I do things while that's out there I create some automation there uh and then one and lost right so that is an area between one and lost that's kind of difficult to manage sometimes because there's a lot of deals that we don't know that we've lost or we're not sort of convinced that it's totally lost or we think there's a chance for

a win back or something like that so so statuses are kind of an art but they are really important to use in the proper way and then like I said kind of mentioned here the ability to trigger workflows automations and sequences right I want to be able to and a lot of systems aren't great at this that you have to kind of manually do some things clothes has gotten better at this where again I have the opportunity to automate a trigger right based on some sort of sequence of events or or characteristics of a lead

uh sort of being met now again this can be dangerous this is probably why close didn't do this for a while and and close uh kind of has a philosophy uh about things which is uh I think has been great over the years because it it sort of constrains you they have this this sort of like I said philosophy or mentality that tries to keep you from hurting yourself and so anyway this one can be dangerous uh automated triggers but the ability to to turn on or to trigger a workflow even manually is super powerful

some crms don't allow you to send anything into automation which is again problematic I don't want to just set up a bunch of task and reminders for me to do things um ideally if I've created a pattern or a consistent work low I'd love to kind of turn automation loose on that and again we're trying to create Force multipliers here and then some bonus points phone integration SM SMS integration these things are getting more and more difficult with regulation so I would say in the current compliance environment you would want to steer away from systems

that integrate dialers and just sort of random Automation and sort of power moves if you will but it's super helpful to have those things at your disposal so I can quickly communicate Via SMS or communicate via phone or instead of just always having to rely on email within my CRM so those are nice integration points I would generally look for a system that allowed me to maybe cue certain records and contacts for you know a phone session where I can kind of dial through several different uh Records uh very efficiently but doing that dialing in

a manual way again sort of for compliance reasons and SMS uh again that I would set up a queue and I would be able to send some m ms messages or as I'm working my leads just be able to quickly send off an SMS message but I don't want to because I think this will get you in trouble in this current environment to just you know cue a bunch of people and then just turn loose Auto dialing or turn loose an SMS campaign I think those are sort of problematic so uh be careful with those

okay so the big question what do I use um I use clothes and I'm going to take you into that uh have been for years it's what I'm comfortable with it's what I built all my systems in but there are some other Alternatives that I'll kind of share with you a lot of clients that I work with are increasingly using high level sometimes they call it go high level CU that's their their URL I think this is a good solution because of its flexibility it does require a little bit of technical skill in order to

kind of get the full value out of it but I think probably the best use case for it is if you are in a business where providing that CRM or lead management uh is a critical part of your service or or even a critical part of your success and you would like uh for your folks to be using something that you've kind of customized or built this is a great solution they got a great pricing model for that they have a white labeling system for this and so I see a lot of people particularly my

business lead generation where they're offering that as a solution it's already set up uh it conforms to what they think is best practices or what they've seen working and so go high level can be a great solution in that context the other thing the other solution that I really really like particularly for those of you that might be buying large quantities of leads so there's a lot of verticals that uh just inherently by Nature are typically lead buyers mortgage insurance solar so if you're those sort of businesses my big preference is for shape and I

have a lot of clients using shape software uh the reason I like sh shave software are really kind of twofold one uh if you need a software to implement into a team and to immediately conform to best practices shape software is kind of like the only solution that does that well the other piece that I like is a lot of these type of verticals have two sales requirements right they have one which is handling inbound leads so those are generally direct to Consumer but a lot of their business a lot of their lead production is

done through referrals so contractors real estate agents professionals like CPAs and and lawyers so they have kind of this B2B aspect to it as well and if you mix all that together in one pipeline it's almost impossible to manage well shape allows you to manage two different pipelines with different sales processes and approaches so you can manage a b Toc for your leads doing mortgages and at the same time you can manage a totally separate Pipeline and business or sales operation with B2B and that working with your real estate Partners right and keeping up on

deals and stuff like that so um love that about shape so that's a great alternative in that context okay so how should I set up my CRM and then again this is kind of a quick list and and then I'm going to pop over to my CRM and kind of show you how I've done some of this one just get familiar with the CRM Basics right how to manage Conta taxs how they're organized in there how the system works go through their basic training and that sort of thing a lot of times they have videos

so really um fully equip yourself with an understanding of your CRM and the basics of using it and then the next thing is to create some mechanism to segment your leads statuses are typically what do that as things come into your queue they'll start to spread out and it'll get harder and harder to manage this is why a spreadsheet never works right because as as soon as that new lead comes in some of them will never schedule appointment some will schedule appointment some appointments you will have had and so they're kind of waiting on contract

so again you may have 10 leads that come in on the same day and all of a sudden and sort of where they are in your sales process spreads all the way across the Spectrum very quickly and then as you add more and more to that pipeline that volume becomes you know very quickly unmanageable in a matter of weeks um certainly within months you'll have leads scattered all over the place a whole bunch of different states and you will lose conversions just because of that complexity so that's again another important reason to use CRM and

to have this segmenting feature the next thing is templates again big fan of templates I'm going to show you how to do that um and then turning those templates into to automation as you've sort of proved them out in those processes um of course analytics are always important being able to kind of see what's going on in there how you're performing and you know how all of your sales processes are are are working over time and then uh personal and communication integrating other tools and just learning and adapting uh is really kind of an important

part of the CRM and then last but not least we never want to forget the fact that we're still in the business of building these relationships and and creating relationships ultimately they will turn into customers so don't forget the human element of all of this that there are people behind those leads and so trying to always work with each and every record as much as you can in a empathetic and personal human way all right so with that said let's kind of really quickly pop over to my CRM and I'll show you how some of

this is is set up okay so this is kind of the entry point uh of my CRM you can see very quickly that I've set up a simple set of statuses new lead meeting scheduled preparing a proposal proposal sent and one and lost the things that are important to know about this is um I always manually move things from one to the next I think that's a really important step uh because that means you you sort of interacted with that lead and most people don't have enough of a pipeline that you would ever have to

do this in an automated way so you can still be highly efficient the other thing that's really important is I want to sort of a at a glimpse I use these cards I want to know kind of where it's at um how much is at stake am I sort of constantly working the probabilities so that all of this in a glimpse is understandable and is Meaningful right so understanding what my you know annualized value is or what it's predicted to be so so my forecasting my sales forecasting is completely automated right because I'm using a

combination of putting a number on it that is again uh reasonable putting a percentage on it which actually this percentage is built out over time so it's based on data uh but I know what they are for each of these statuses and it's linked there and then also when I put them into the status um things are happening right so there is actually automation behind each one of these steps to make sure that I don't lose control of it or lose contact or not follow up uh appropriately so this is my main screen this is

where I live this is where I work uh most of the time I could always pop inside of these and you can see in here a significant amount of communication so again things are linked together you can see here this is another one of the tools I'll probably talk about in another things this is Auto uh autopilot I use this on every single call and then I capture these um these summaries and put them in here um so that I always have a record of that I also use Auto really actively to kind of go

back in there uh it has a nice chatbot I can query that uh and quickly get an update and summary as to where we kind of left things because as you go between records and you have a big pip line You'll sort of forget the status of things and then inside of here manage my opportunities um and uh a lot of other sort of things inside of here okay so as I'm setting this up cuz this is kind of the focus here I want to once I've set up well actually I'll show you in here

settings so when I set this up uh the first things that I've kind of dove into uh here's another distraction right customization custom fields and activities and all stuff like that I think again you can get into trouble here so don't do this at first um do the basics and then see what you need from there it's I always start with the simplest approach first and then from there I can add complexity so my very first thing is is I want to set up statuses um and you know the different statuses that I'm going to

use so that's kind of what I've done here they kind of use some funny sort of characterizations here um these are I use these I don't really think of these as statuses um but I do use these to kind of disposition if you will the lead so I understand if I lose something oh was it a bad fit were they qualified um and that sort of thing it also helps me with some reports so so this is kind of the first thing that I set up then of course my Basics and my phone and all

that sort of thing this does have a dialer in it I don't use the Dialer for obvious reasons but they do a pretty good job in this dialer functionality of kind of being compliant so you you have to kind of set it in motion and it's an intentional thing so you can kind of be a little bit safe there the other thing that I do uh and I spent most of my time here is building out the templates so things that I have done over and over again um I want to turn into a template

so checking in how are things going um my my schedule a discovery uh message so this as soon as the lead comes in like I want to immediately go after after that Discovery and a lot of times because of the way I'm generating inbound leads that's kind of the assumption that we're going to have a meeting anyway so I want to completely automate this so I don't ever sort of manually schedule a discovery um I send this email out and people are very comfortable with this project this process and they they jump in there and

schedule their meeting the other thing that are kind of some again several different follow-ups that I use the the ghosted sequence like I miss you on our Discovery right I don't want to fool around with that like if they don't show up I wait for like 5 minutes um I have uh this again a template is now still in good time I put in my Google meetly there so that's what I do every single time at plus 5 minutes um on our meeting and then the next thing that I do is I hop off of

the meeting at 15 minutes um and then I start my ghosted series which basically is hey I missed you right uh let's reschedule uh and and I'm also this again is sort of being graceful about it you know so I'm always you know I don't berate them hey you missed it or whatever like I'm trying to be very gracious and understand that things come up and those sorts of things and as a result of this I get a a high percentage of re bookings right so uh I know we're talking about setting up CRM but

there's little tips inside of here okay once I have these templates then the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to do my workflows and so close just move this so I've set up some workflows again I keep it simple I don't want to go over complex I could go you know all over the place with automation and stuff but I have some very simple ones right so I have a ghosted sequence right they miss the meeting um it goes through a set of hey miss the discovery is is still priority timing's

right right again gives me a sequence like 7 days or so to try to win back that ghosted um lost follow-up right there's a lot of things that just go unresponsive um again I've just strung together several of my te templated emails cuz sometimes I use these oneoff I don't always have to use them um in here we haven't talked in a while checking in how's it Le genen going is this still a priority so again I've just sort of sequenced some of those together uh proposals that um have been sent didn't get a response

um again this is a great thing for for sequences and again I don't overwork them I don't I don't run them for like years and those sorts of things um it's just kind of quick little sequences to get started so I think those are kind of the key points I guess maybe one last thing is just reporting because you've done these things um my reporting gets you know really robust here right I can tell um in any different quarter um where I am ahead or behind uh of production I know exactly sort of what my

win rate is I know exactly what the Fallout is from from here to here um I can introduce like I'm in the process of introducing I get a large percentage of New Leads that don't actually schedule a meeting um so I'm going to develop a process for that um again once you've built the system out like this you can look for these uh places where you're losing uh either monetization or just pull through and then you can make some adjustments or you can create a new system for that so uh again hopefully this was helpful

um just getting that CRM set up choosing a CRM understanding what's important always want to invite you um to one be on our newsletter um but if you got this video you probably are already on that newsletter uh and then the other thing that's kind of new is the um sales team of one Community um so encourage you to join that it's a free community it's on school you can pop in there there's all kinds of resources and other folks like you helping each other um but I also do regular live sessions um office hours

um and then there's a bunch of training and courses in there so um Hope you join me uh inside of that Community as well have a great one