Your Complete Guide to CRM Best Practices for Startup Sales

When you're a busy founder AND you have a lot of fresh sales coming in regularly, it's easy to lose track of all the details.

That's why Ergo CEO Yash Dulla recommends maintaining a tight, easy-to-scan, and well organized Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM. Ideally, this can serve not only as a way for you to quickly access information on clients and potential clients but as a "solid source of truth" for data and analytics about your company and its overall performance.

CRM data provides a foundation for your company's future growth. Not only is it essential for continuity, as salespeople exit and join the organization. Sales data is also vital for forecasting and reporting. Many of the concrete numbers your investors will request during fundraising can be derived from a clean, well-moderated CRM.

This data is also essential for tracking which sales approaches and strategies have proven the most effective, so you can adjust and fine-tune your approach over time.

So here are some of Yash's pro tips for keeping your CRM neat, tidy, and efficient.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT CRM FOR YOUR BUSINESS

You want to choose a system that's going to remain viable for your company over several years. Constantly migrating from one CRM to another is both painful and time-consuming. So avoid small CRMs that your company is likely to outgrow.

Conversely, if you are a relatively small startup with a limited team, you don't want to choose a CRM like Salesforce, that's designed for massive enterprise clients. Specifically, Yash recommends Hubspot for startup teams.

USE OBJECTS EFFECTIVELY

There are three important types of "objects" to identify in your CRM.

• DEALS: These represent specific revenue opportunities. You should create a new "Deal" object any time you have a qualifying conversation (with a pitch or a demo) with a potential client. When starting out, it's likely you will have one Deal object per customer or client, but as you grow and develop "upsell" opportunities, there can potentially be multiple Deals per company.
• COMPANIES: This is where you store high-level data about a business entity with which you're working, such as their industry and employee count. You should create a new Company object any time you identify a potential sales target, whether or not you're currently in touch with anyone specific.
• PEOPLE: The People object represents individual contacts related to a company or deal. You should use these to track anyone with whom you're interacting on a project.

Deals should be organized and categorized based on the stage of the negotiation. The most basic categories would include:

• LEAD: A potential sales target has been identifeid
• IN PROGRESS: The client has been pitched and negotiations or discussions are underway
• WON: The contract has been signed
• LOST: The contract was not signed

Other categories could include stages like QUALIFICATION, DISCOVERY, SCHEDULED DEMO, NEGOTIATION, FUTURE NEED, CONTRACT SENT, and so forth.

These should be determined based on your company's specific product and process. For shorter sales cycles, your company probably only needs a few "stage" designations to remain organized. For enterprises or deals with a number of "touchpoints," you will probably want to include more stages to keep everything straight.

As well, if your product has a "free trial period" or other offers that impact scheduling and revenue, it should also be noted in the CRM whether a new client received a free trial, and when it ended.

TRACK ALL THE RELEVANT DATA YOU'LL NEED

ALL relevant information regarding the deal should be included in the Deal object on your CRM. To quote Yash, the CRM should serve as "your single source of truth for the entire sales interaction."

This includes:

• Whether the contract bills monthly or annually
• All relevant account activities, including meetings and email exchanges
• Important tasks that must be completed as part of the deal, with stakeholders tagged and identified.
• Key challenges that the customer has mentioned facing in their business
• Sales tools you're utilizing and integrating with
• Important people and companies associated with each deal

The key concept here is continuity. Sometimes deals are delayed or fall through, but you want your team to be able to pick right up where you left things off if anything resurfaces or becomes newly relevant.

MAINTAIN "PIPELINE HYGEINE"

All together, this is a lot of information that you're including in your CRM. Essentially, you are logging everything that impacts an account or deal daily, including calls, emails, demos, follow-ups, and more.

That means you're going to have to be alert and diligent about updating your CRM and quickly moving entries around and relabeling them. Failing to do this regularly, as events transpire, will add up to a messy, disorganized and crowded CRM, and it will negatively impact your ability to make timely observations and implement changes based on your data.

If your account executives and sales teams start feeling overwhelmed, fear not: some of this repetitive, data entry-style work can be offloaded to AI tools. A number of CRMs have already added tools that automate basic tasks like adding new contacts and companies into the database.

In particular, Yash recommends Zapier, a third party tool that can help you customize and automate your basic CRM activities.