don't buy a crm

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

Don’t buy a CRM. There’s a spreadsheet link below you can use instead, that’s the email, have a great weekend.

That’s for my friends that like the shorter emails, here’s some more context if you’re up for it:

Many founders in my network know me as the dummy that started a CRM company in 2012 (rip voltageCRM) so they come to me when they are getting ready to start selling and are ready to buy something. The short answer is that they don’t need a CRM, they need a place to keep track of the deals they’re working, and at this stage a spreadsheet is going to be the best tool for the job.

You’re probably thinking “but mine connects to my email” or “it syncs with my marketing stack”… who cares? It only matters if you’re going to use it and use it a enough to justify the investment of money and, more importantly, your time researching, buying, and setting it up. Here’s the biggest reason you don’t need a CRM, most founders I’ve talked to have spent more time researching/setting up their CRM than actually using their CRM. It doesn’t mean CRM is bad, it’s just not something you need to spend your time on right now.

On top of the fact that it’s a colossal waste of time, most founders don’t set it up correctly in the first place. Not only are they not going to use it, when they do they’re not even going to use it right. No judgement if you’ve just bought a CRM, a database, or a sales engagement tool. I’ve been there too. When you’re a founder doing something new, there is so much uncertainty that buying and setting up a new tool feels like making progress. It can be a time hole of dopamine hits that doesn’t help you move the company forward. It’s not just CRM, I once spent a month working with a mentor on a delivery schedule spreadsheet for our consulting team and it was beautiful, functional, and accomplished everything they could possibly want. The problem? Just doing things in their email was easier so the sheet got ignored.

As founders, time is our most scarce resource and so we need to find the minimum effective dose instead of the absolute perfect solution. Today is your lucky day though because my spreadsheet has 80% of the functionality - that people actually use - of Salesforce, it can be implemented very quickly, and it’s 100% free. Ok, it’s not free. It’ll cost you time to figure out how to use it, time to decide whether to move from your current system to this sheet, and an increase in the risk in forgetting a deal when you switch from one tool to another. See, even free has a cost. I’m also going to charge you some attention and make you read some more words in order to find the link (hint - look for the thing that looks like a link down below).

Before I get to the link, let me walk you through the key points of the sheet. The key fields are: Deal Name, Contact Name, Opportunity Stage, Next Action, Next Action Date, & Notes. Those are the basics and tell you where you are in your process and what you need to do next. Here’s what you need to know:

• Stage - this tells you what has happened so far

• Next Action - this is what you need to do next in order to move the deal forward

• Next Action Date - this is when that action will happen

I’m a big David Allen / Getting Things Done fan and 100% stole this idea from him, here’s a great 1 minute video of him explaining the idea. The core idea is that at the end of every meeting with a prospect, you decide on what to do next, write it down here, and pick a date it needs to happen on. This frees your mind because you can forget about the deal until that time makes its way to the top of your list. It’s even more powerful if you and the prospect agree on what to do next while you’re still on the call and book it into your calendar. It’s especially powerful to book a call on a call because it saves you all the headache of following up and getting something scheduled. If the prospect is going to move forward, then you may as well get it booked now and save everyone the hassle.

Your sales stages should be mapped to objective outcomes, not subjective feelings. Below are some sales stages I stole from Jaimie Buss back when she was VP Sales for Zendesk and forecasting ~$500m in revenue within 1% and here’s a link to the related blog post and podcast (at the bottom).

A qualification methodology tells you how much you know about the deal. This is a good proxy for how much you can trust the information in the above section. A good MEDDPICC score of 14/16 does not indicate that the deal is 88% likely to close, it tell us that we know 88% of the information that we’d like to about this opportunity. I’ve included columns for MEDDPICC in the sheet because that’s what I like to use but it doesn’t matter if you use a different framework. There are two columns for each criteria, a score criteria and a note field. The scoring criteria are: 0 = “I know nothing”, 1 = “I know something”, 2 = “I know everything I need to”. The note field is for you to back up your score so someone like me can test if you really have a 2/2 for your Economic Buyer.

Your pipeline stage, next actions, and qualification methodology are the holy trinity of a great sales process. They tell you where you are, what happens next, and how much you can trust the information. When you use them consistently, they also can tell you where your gaps are and what you need to do next. If you nail those three things, you’ll be in a better spot than 80% of sales organizations.

That’s enough context, here’s the sheet, feel free to steal the ideas and drop me a line if you have questions. These ideas are simple but can be complicated to digest on first read. If enough people ping me back with “live!” then I’ll set up a zoom to walk people through the sheet and answer questions.

If you’ve already bought a CRM, don’t sweat it, these are ideas that are easy to implement into whichever tool you bought. If you want a screenshot of what our salesforce looks like with all this added in then hit me back with “salesforce screenshot” and I’ll send you one.

Collin