Dedicated salespeople tend to be good at keeping their CRM up to date, allowing their organizations to make meaningful decisions based on the information in it.

Those who are expert advisors or practitioners first, and salespeople second, however, tend to be less compliant with getting information into their CRM, causing no end of frustration for team leaders who want to predict revenue and allocate future resources.

This frustration was captured in a forum post to the Win Without Pitching Academy last week from a team leader of consultants who also sell…

“What should we expect from our sales leads in terms of updating opportunities? No one is putting call notes in [the CRM].

“How do we make the pipeline dependable for forecasting? I find that we edit amounts and move the close date fairly often (“move it out a month”) without any thought or consequence.”

Let’s look at how to improve both issues of getting opportunity-specific information into the CRM and getting predictive information out.

Getting Data In (Adoption)

Dedicated salespeople live in their CRM; it is their source of truth. Experts who also have to sell tend to live elsewhere, in their project management app or email client.

Step one to increased CRM adoption is to accept that your experts will not live in their CRM the way they live elsewhere, therefore the responsibility is on you to meet them where they’re at and to help them move data from one place to the next, automatically if possible, or with as little friction as possible if it cannot be fully automated.

Most CRM entries should be via API calls and not direct entries.

The ideal is that data gets entered only once. AI will make that ideal a reality in the not-too-distant future, but for now you’ll have to set up some automations.

Start with Email

The good news is most CRMs have an email integration of some kind, the bad news is many of them are crap.

Ideally, your people can create and update an opportunity within their email client. Salesforce can do that. Pipedrive (what we use) cannot. (Pipedrive has a Gmail integration but it’s effectively useless.) If you’re deciding on a new CRM, the quality of the email integration is an important feature that relieves a lot of the friction in CRM adoption.

Small businesses tend to favor simpler CRM but that simplicity puts the pressure on the user, whereas a more complicated system puts the pressure on the administrator to make it simple for the user. If there’s friction, it should be with the admin in the setup and not the user where it will occur daily.

Calendar integration is also valuable. Like email, there are numerous ways this can be done, with a range of high and low quality integrations.

Add Notes Through Notetakers

Almost everyone now uses AI notetakers for their online meetings. Those notetakers don’t miss much. The summaries are emailed and those emails should be added to the relevant opportunities, automatically if possible, or simply forwarded to the deal-specific email address in your CRM if it can’t be fully automated.

The only organizations still struggling with missing notes are those that still do not allow notetakers.

For in-person meetings use AI pendants like Limitless, just be sure to let the client know you’re using it and why.

Nobody needs to take detailed meeting notes anymore. Hand it over to AI to record and log.

Getting Valuable Data Out (Reporting)

Now let’s turn to getting meaningful information out of your CRM so you can predict sales and allocate resources, including hiring and firing decisions.

In a business of customized services (i.e., not productized) and customized prices (i.e., you price the client, not the service), sales forecasts tend to be so inaccurate that they’re of little value. When you start to standardize delivery and pricing, you add volume and clearer patterns start to emerge. (I’m not making a case for customized or standardized delivery or pricing here, simply pointing out a CRM tradeoff.)

To make your sales forecast more useful you have to get clear and hard-coded on your opportunity stages, their defining parameters and the probability of closing for each stage.

Set Your Opportunity Stages & Criteria

Most CRMs have pre-populated pick list values for opportunity stages and too many users don’t edit them. Set your own, just make sure you can define the criteria for each stage and eliminate any of the salesperson’s optimism bias.

The mistake here is to choose stages based on the activity of the salesperson (e.g., meeting obtained, proposal delivered) instead of the client’s stage in the buying journey.

At Win Without Pitching, we use the following Open stages:

MQL (Yes, a marketing qualified lead is a lead (not yet qualified) which should be tracked in Leads, but we track these MQLs where the lead has reached out requesting to talk in the CRM as Opportunities. Do what works for you, just beware of clogging up your Opportunities, the most pristine place in your CRM.)

Interested (Qualified in as a good fit, but no timeline, compelling event or meaningful resource allocation. This is an early-stage buyer.)

Intent (Qualified in with a timeline to take action in the near future, ideally backed up by a compelling event. This is a coveted late-stage buyer.)

Verbal Commit (“We’re going to hire you.” Now it’s about getting paperwork done and getting paid — quickly!)

Assign Probabilities of Closing

You’re guessing here, so guess low — again, to guard against optimism — and do not allow the salesperson the discretion to change these values. That is the domain of the manager.

You can adjust as the data becomes clearer over time, but I suggest the following probabilities of closing as starting points:

MQL: 0% (It would be a major CRM crime to assign a probability of closing to something unqualified.)

Interested: 5% (The majority of these early-stage buyers never form intent. They will plug up your pipeline, making it look like there’s money here when there is not. Keep it real.)

Intent: 20% (They’re Intent on solving their problem, not on hiring you. They can still hire others and they can still get buyers’ remorse before they buy, and slip back.)

Verbal Commit: 50% (Committed to hiring you. Lots can still go wrong.)

Whatever your percentages are, they should be hard-coded. The sales manager has the discretion to change the probabilities on a deal-by-deal basis as they feel the odds change. The salesperson does not.

Meeting & Reporting

People update the CRM before a status meeting. Meet weekly, but move through it quickly. Start with late-stage opportunities (Verbal Commit and Intent), reviewing each in detail.

Review early stage opportunities (Interested) as a whole. “Is anything new with any of the Interested opportunities?”

Then go to new leads. “Who has a new lead?” Track leads in the Leads object in your CRM or elsewhere. Remember that leads are voluminous and messy.

Automate the creation and sending of the sales report to go an hour before the meeting starts. People will start to get their information into the CRM in time. Your job is to make it easy for them to do that.

A Final Note on the Future of CRM

All the sales data you need is there in your organization, most of it in email inboxes, calendars, proposals, contracts and recordings of conversations.

CRM will one day be something that people rarely log into directly. They will interact with an AI sales assistant that finds all the relevant information, makes sense of it and eliminates the administrative drudgery of sales. That day can’t come soon enough but I suspect it’s still a couple of years away, or more.

If you need help with CRM adoption, or other issues around operationalizing sales, reach out to see if we can help.

-Blair