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The Advanced Selling Podcast
Stop Treating Your CRM Like a Filing Cabinet
00:15:19
Too many sales teams use their CRM as a record-keeping tool instead of an agent of action. In this episode, Bryan breaks down how a well-utilized CRM can drive sales efficiency, improve deal visibility, and keep your pipeline moving. He shares simple...
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Brian Neal
Foreign. Welcome everybody to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in the history of podcast. My name is Brian Neal. No, Bill. Today, solo episode. You know, Bill and I have been doing these little solo episodes for a couple reasons. I got asked this yesterday by a long time listener, why are you and Bill doing solo episodes? And I said, well, two reasons. Number one, it gives you the listener a couple more shots, a couple more hits, you know what I mean? We're going one time a week with the two of us, like, you know, let's spread the love a little bit. Logistics get in the way of us recording a bunch. So that's one of the reasons to give you a little more, some more flair from the ASP channel, so to speak. And then the other thing is just, you know, sometimes you get a little solo episode, you get different perspective. Maybe just, uh, hearing from Bill is, you know, on a certain topic is valuable to you. Maybe hearing from me on another topic is valuable also. Of course, everything that I do is themed around football, Blind Zebras, the company. And I'm calling this the two minute drill. And it is the longest two minutes in the history of podcasting because it is 20 minutes. Ish. As you know, couple announcements from my side of the fence. We have a huge on awesome event for sales leaders. Sorry, sales people. Like, dang it, it's for sales leaders only. We're gonna have one for sales people in 2026, but for 2025, just for sales leaders. It's called Huddle. H u d D Le Bird tickets are still on sale, but they stop in the end of February, February 20, 2025. So go to blind-zebra.com you get tickets for Huddle. That's for your sales leader. If you're a salesperson, listen to this, forward the episode to your sales leader and like, hey, I'm gonna go check this out. Really, really cool speakers. We have some awesome content. It's going to be all around connection, connecting with people, connecting with your connectors and connecting with your customers. And it's in late October, October 28th and 9th and 30th in Indianapolis, Indiana. And it is well worth the ticket. That's Huddle. H u d D L E Just go to Blind Dash Zebra. There's a big banner there. You'll see it. So let's get into our topic, shall we? All of our sales listeners love this topic. You just love this. You love this. I'm going to talk to you about why you should be all in on your CRM. Now, if You're a sales leader. Like, stop. Neil. He said it. He said it. Brian Neal said you should be all in. And if you're a salesperson, like, oh, my God, I hate this guy. I hate this podcast. I'm never listening again. This sucks. I'm out. Okay, deep breathe. Let's stay with me for a second. I will also tell you that me, as a user, we run at Blind Zebra. We run our entire. Our entire company runs on Salesforce. And I am not necessarily what I'd call a power user. So I'm in the camp that most of you might be in, which is like, oh, my gosh, it's a waste of time. It takes a lot of energy and effort. What is it actually used for? How is it useful to me? Okay, so I'm probably more on that side of the fence than the other. But I'm going to tell you why we have gone all in with CRM. Our entire team, everyone that works here, except me, I. I have my own little version the way I work, and I actually work with the team. I elevate, delegate, something I learned from my coach. So I have my team help me with it. I'm like, alongside. But in terms of the actual mechanics, I'm not the one usually typing this stuff in, but I'm right there with them to translate. So let's talk today's episode about why you should be all in on your CRM. And then in the next solo episode that I'll do in February, I'm gonna actually give you some tools straight out of our operating system. By the way, we're cert people. We now have, after just a year in the Blind Zebra sales operating System, we have 43 certified coaches that represent about a thousand salespeople across the country. Only after a year. We are certifying now as we speak. Typically, we will certify a leader or leaders in a company. We have certified producers, but it's a corporate deal. It's nothing. You can't do it individually because it costs too much money for an individual. But for a company, the leverage is there. So just go to blind ceber.com we've already had a couple of podcast listeners get certified, so you will be in some good company, but we've got some tools. For second episode of February of my solo episode, I'm going to give you some of our tools to actually help you with this. But today is more about the philosophy of CRM. Let's talk about why you particularly may not like it. Now, some of you, I'M listening to you. Like, I love CRM. It's great. So if you're there, all I'm going to do today is validate you. If you're not there or you're in between, then I want you to be open to a different way to think about CRM. So let's talk about it. I heard a statement, a quote from one of our speakers at our last year's huddle who said, your CRM should be. It should be an agent of action, not an agent of record. It should be an agent of action, not an agent of record. And most people don't like CRM because they feel like it's just an agent of record. I'm just documenting what I'm doing. And that's the biggest first stop for a lot of people is they don't think of it like an agent of action. And so if I asked you, I said, how do you know what to do every day? Because all of you get up, you've got a sales job, you listen to the podcast. A lot of you, the first thing, thank you for that. And then you go to work. How do you know what to do? How do you know what to do? All of you have an answer. That's what's cool. Like, well, I look at my priorities. I check my email, I go to my to do list, my task list, that sort of thing. And then how do you know then that those are the right things to do that you've chosen? You have some decision tree in your head. And what happens is with CRM is oftentimes those decision trees aren't thought about. You just sort of do it. Okay? And so the first thing to think about is using your CRM as an agent of action instead of an agent of record. If you go all in on a CRM and trust it to tell you what to do, it will tell you what to do. All CRMs are wired to do all sorts of awesome things for salespeople. Okay? We are all in. We run on Salesforce. And if you are on HubSpot or Sugar or any of the big ones, it doesn't matter. But it drives our business. All of our stuff is there. And even though we run on it, when we hire a salesperson here at Plain Zebra, all we think about is making their job easy to use the CRM in and then make sure that it's valuable to them. We don't use it as Big Brother. We never will. I promise you, it is not a Big Brother thing. It is not a Big Brother Thing it is wired to tell our sales team and us where our priority should be. Here are some examples. We have reports that tell us if we don't have a clear future date scheduled on any open opportunity. Now, I got to define that for you. If you listen to our podcast for a while, you've heard me and Bill talk about this, we love calendar clarity. Clear future dates are four elements. They're binary. They have them or you don't. Time, date, action, and an accepted invitation to the next meeting. We have a report that shows us on one look, all of our open opportunities. And of all those open opportunities which don't have a calendared accepted next scheduled date for that customer. Okay, so then what happens is with our system, it triggers us. It pushes those forward. They. They're actually color coded red and green. I can instantly look at all the red deals in a, in a millisecond and know where I don't have a next scheduled meeting. We all know time kills deals. So then there I go, I'm triggered. Now it's an agent of action. It tells me, hey, you've got an open opportunity with Centos that doesn't have a scheduled meeting. What should I do today? Oh, Centos, that's a pretty big company, nice opportunity. I should probably reach out and try to schedule a meeting with them because I'm kind of blowing in the wind here. Even if you have a to do item, even if you have a to do item. That doesn't count. That doesn't count. This is about calendar clarity. So that's one example of CRM helping you decide what to do. Then I don't have to worry about it because it tells me where I'm missing as just one example of an agent of action over an agent of record. Okay, the next thing then is where you keep and archive your conversations. Now here's what happens. And I get this. So I'm on this camp. I don't want to type in every single freaking note that I talked about. I just don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. And it's. It's a lot of. It's a lot of stuff. And so then. And I also don't not want to. So I don't want to not put anything in there. And so the question comes back to us like, well, what should I do? How do. I don't really have time to do this. It's. And. And if you say this, God bless you, I'm gonna. I'm gonna get you. Oh, that takes away from my selling time. Like, do not ever say that to me. It takes away from my selling time. Because I will, without you knowing, follow you around with a GoPro camera, and I'll look at and analyze all of your air quotes. Selling time. And I'll find some space. I guarantee it. No one's too busy. No one is too busy to do this. It's a choice. Okay, so when you're thinking about taking notes, here's a little trick of the trade for action is. And you do this on your own. Now, we have templates in the blind zebra sales operating system. We've got templates that help you, but you can make your own template. Here is, instead of just dumping a bunch of notes in there, you need to organize the notes under headings. We teach people to organize them under four things. One is motive, one is money, one is process, and one is calendar clarity. So as you're filling in the boxes in your notes, instead of just putting like a conversation that, you know, an hourong conversation just verbatim in there, just put headings. Motive. They're really upset with their current vendor, They've gotten you treated like crap, and they're ready to make a move their contracts up. Motive. Okay, Money did not discuss pricing yet. Open item. Okay, process. Meeting with champion, but three others involved. No action. It starts to tell you then what to do. Then you can look at that real simply motive, money, process, and calendar clarity, and instantly shorten all of your notes. But then it tells you what to do. So you have these holes, you have these gaps, and so the notes feed you, and you just be real with yourself. Don't give me this decision maker stuff like, oh, I'm talking to the decision maker. No, you're not. There's no such thing. It's a process. So if you're talking to someone who's your champion, who you think's a decision maker even though they're not, I want you to put open item. Open item. Then as you go back into the notes, what do you need to talk about in the next meeting? Well, I need to clarify process because I got an open item. We need to have a pricing economics discussion because we didn't do that yet. And it tells you what to do. It's an agent of action, not an agent of record. An agent of action, not an agent of record. Okay? That's the second big thing to think about is as you're taking notes because a huge resistance point I get, you know, pro tip. I know people. If you shrink this down. This will be easier for you if you know in every sales call you have this template to follow. And if you organize your actual notes, if you're taking notes on a one of these writing things on an iPad or there's some other one, I can't remember what it's called that everybody loves, I don't use it. Or if you're typing notes on a laptop, whatever. If you organize the notes in the way I just told you, then you just cut and paste. Motive, money, process, calendar clarity and just pop them in there. It's done. You don't have to go back to your written notes like, what did he say? What did she say? What is that? You can capture some of those things in those headings, but you don't need to capture everything. The trick is you organize the way the info gets in there. Then if everyone on the sales team organizes the same way and the sales team buys a collective Powerball ticket and they all win Powerball and they all leave. If I'm the sales leader, well, guess what? If everybody's got their templates set the same way in their notes, I'm good. If we let it's a free for all, right? Rogue cowboy, cowgirl. Everyone's putting in whatever the hell they want then doesn't work as well. Okay, so that's the second thing. Get really, really structured in how you take notes and put info in there. Okay? Then the last thing is create some mechanism to make sure that your stuff in your CRM is up to date every week. Now here's the little trick I'm going to give you. Most of you, with great intention, save time either at the end of the day or the end of the week to air quotes. Update CRM and you have a little time block. It says update CRM and it's from 4 to 4:30 on Friday. And then it's June 15th and it's really sunny out and it's really beautiful and it doesn't feel like the kind of day that you want to sit from 4 to 4:30 on a Friday and put stuff in CRM. So guess what? You don't. You go for a walk, a jog, you play golf. You go have a cocktail. You do whatever you do because it's a really nice sunny day and you blow it off because it's just you. The trick is, if you want to do that, do it in the early morning of Friday, not the end of the day. Now here's the real pro tip. Do it with two or three of your Peers at the same time and leave your cameras on. Leave your cameras on to do it and just get it all done at the same time. So instead of waiting 4 to 4:30, Friday and doing it by yourself, do it Friday morning, 9 to 9:30, and do it with two, three or four of your peers. That's also a tool in the operating system that we have called a prod pod. Not going to go into the detail of that, but that's what that's for. Then it's done. Now if you got some stuff during the day on Friday, that comes up, but I know a lot of you on Friday. Sometimes you know, you know, you, you check out is being real, right? Some of you grind, some of you grind, which I love, but some of you don't. And so just get that done. Do it in small pods and do it at the, at the early morning of the end of the week, not in the, at the afternoon. Because that's when people start to check out. Okay? So more than anything in this episode, I wanted you to take away. You know what? Let me just shake. Shake hands with CRM. Holding my hand out. If you're not, if you're. I'm just shaking hands. I'm like, you know what? CRM, I love you. You're a good little guy. CRM or gal. There's a song by Toby Keith called Red Solo Cup. You know, feel like there's, like, you're my friend, you're my friend. Red solo cup. CRM. You're my friend, you're my friend. Let's hug it out. Okay? Learn to love your CRM. I promise it'll love you back if you do what I'm talking about here today. Okay? It's a spectrum. It's a process. Just take a step toward some of the things I'm talking about. Life will be good. Okay? If you want to learn how to get certified in Blind Zebra, sales operating system. We're rolling, man. It's rolling. Go to blind zebra.com. it's at the top heading. If you're not in the insider program, we've talked about it forever. What more do we need to say? Best bang for the buck. Live coaching with my co host, Bill Caskey. That happens usually the first Friday of every month and prices just went up. But it's still the biggest bang for the buck in sales coaching and it's got a cool little culture. That's the advanced podcast dot com. And then look for the insiders where you join that. So that's it. I'll See you next time on the Advanced L Podcast. Cheers.