How to Set Up Your CRM for Sales - Guide For Startups & Beginners
Using a CRM for sales can be a game changer for any business but it can also be a nightmare. Depending on the software and implementation that you go with, you can see massive returns or massive headaches.
To clarify things to ensure you avoid early mistakes, we’re going to be sharing how to set up your CRM in a pain-free way that will make both your life and closing deals easier. We believe simplicity is what drives sales velocity so we’ll be sharing our simple CRM setup that you can duplicate and use for your own sales process.
Let’s dive into it!
Before we get started…
It’s important that you understand a couple important points.
Are you selling to businesses or individuals?
Within a CRM, you have leads and this is who you sell to. A lead can be a company or an individual. It doesn’t matter which, just be sure to pick one.
Some companies use CRMs as a way to sell to companies and individuals but trust me when I say “this will make your life miserable”.
You want to keep things as simple as possible and in my experience, every company sells specifically to companies or individuals. Rarely does a company sell to both companies and individuals.
So define your “Leads” as companies or individuals. Just pick one.
Which CRM software are you using?
Next, you need to make sure you’re selecting the right CRM software for your team. Is it easy to use? Does it have the right features? etc.
If you have tons of web traffic and a massive team, you may want to use a more complex CRM like Hubspot to support enterprise functions.
Or if you need more customers and are looking to run cold outreach, you may want a CRM like LeadLoft that’s designed to manage your pipeline and run outbound sales.
Regardless, just make sure you select a CRM software that’s easy to use. If you need some guidance on selecting the right one, I recommend you check out our article on the best CRMs for small businesses.
What’s the difference between Lead Stages and Deal Stages?
It’s important to understand the difference between lead stages and deal stages before getting started because they’re integral to how CRMs work.
Lead Stage: Defines the relationship between your company and a lead (e.g. New, Potential, Interested, Not Ready Yet, Customer).
Deal Stage: defines the stages of closing a deal (e.g. Interested, Demo Completed, Proposal Sent, Negotiation, Won, Lost). Deal stages are only used once you verify a lead is both interested and a good fit. It also tracks the value, likelihood, and close dates of a conversation.
We’ll dive into this in more detail later on.
How to Set Up Your CRM (Step by Step)
Now let’s get into the fun part. For this example, we’re going to be using LeadLoft to set up a CRM - it’s easier to use than most CRMs so it should help make things clear.
Step #1) Set Up Your Lead & Deal Stages
Within LeadLoft, you can manage your lead a deal stage from the CRM Settings tab within the setting page here. The stages we recommend below work for almost every company but you can always add more or less as you begin selling.
Recommended Lead Stages:
- New
- Engaging
- Potential
- Qualified (Create Deal)
- Customer
- Not Ready Yet
- No Response
- Not interested / Bad Fit
Recommended Deal Stages
- Qualified
- Negotiation
- Proposal Sent
- Won
- Lost
Step #2) Define Your Workflow
Next you need to define your workflow. Your Workflow highlights the point at which you want to follow up with a lead and in most cases, this simplifies the entire sales process.
So how does it work? You start by building a workflow, then your entire team follows the workflow’s steps and focuses on execution. The goal is to make sure that each step displays only the leads or deals that need your attention and nothing else.
This means in order to see who you need to follow up with, you just have to click any step of your Workflow and boom! A list of everyone who needs to be re-engage will appear.
You can achieve this by applying filters that filter out any leads that are actively being engaged. We'll cover the exact filters you should use for each step below.
Recommended Workflow
Below we outline the exact filters that define each step of the workflow shared above.
New (Leads)
- Status: Action Needed, Task Overdue
- Stage: New
- No Communication for: --
- Owner: Me
Go Follow Up (Leads)
- Status: Action Needed, Task Overdue
- Stage: Potential
- No Communication for: 7 Days
- Owner: Me
90 Day Follow Up (Leads)
- Status: Action Needed, Task Overdue
- Stage: Not Ready Yet
- No Communication for: 90 Days
- Owner: Me
Deals Follow Up (Deals)
- Status: Action Needed, Task Overdue
- Stage: All Active Deals
- No Communication for: 4 Day
- Owner: Me
Customer (Leads)
- Status: --
- Stage: Customer
- No Communication for: --
- Owner: Me
Step #3) Define the Customer Journey
Next we need to understand how leads move through your CRM.
People often describe sales as a funnel and I think this is misleading because it oversimplifies things. As soon as you hop into a sales CRM, you’ll realize that it’s not really a single funnel. There are all kinds of different stages and it’s hard to understand how they are all connected.
A simpler way to think about how customers move through your CRM, is to split the sales funnel into two separate funnels and stack them on top of each other.
Here’s a nice visualization:
Why two funnels? Well there are different stages within a CRM and it’s easier to understand each funnel individually.
Funnel #1 (Lead Funnel): The goal of the first funnel is to qualify a lead by speaking with them and determining if they are a good fit. If they are a good fit, you will create a deal.
Funnel #2 (Deal Funnel): The goal of this funnel is to close the deal.
Here’s a more detailed visualization of how leads move through your CRM:
To clarify, your goal with each lead is to meet with them and determine if it’s worth creating a deal. Once you’ve created a deal, your goal is to close the deal. It’s really that simple.
Set Up CRM Integrations
The last piece of your CRM set up is to integrate your CRM with the other tools that you are using. Keep in mind that your CRM doesn’t need to be connected to everything. It’s okay to have a simple and streamlined sales funnel and many integrations actually aren’t all that useful and can actually be cumbersome.
So what tools should you integrate with your CRM?
There’s really only a few tools that you HAVE to integrate with your CRM so let’s review them.
- Your Website
- Scheduling Tools
- Digital Ad Platforms
The above three sources are all extremely relevant when setting up your CRM and all can be setup using Zapier - which integrates with more than 3K different software solutions.
Wrapping Up
CRMs are probably the single most important factor when it comes to running a sales process but most teams and software solutions overcomplicate it. We strongly recommend keeping everything as simple as possible and if you follow the steps above, you’ll already be way ahead of the competition.
If you need additional help, feel free to book a demo with our team, we share our own internal sales process on every demo so feel free to come and learn.
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