Tag: personalization

Most CRMs don’t fail because they lack features. They fail because reps don’t use them properly, data gets messy, and the pipeline stops reflecting reality.

If your CRM feels like admin work instead of a selling tool, here’s what’s usually happening:

Deals don’t have clear next steps
Follow-ups rely on memory
Data is outdated or incomplete
Managers don’t trust the pipeline

The result is predictable: missed follow-ups, stalled deals, and forecasts you can’t rely on.

This guide breaks down 7 CRM best practices that actually improve how your team sells:

Keep your pipeline clean and current
Make next steps non-negotiable
Track what’s working and double down on it
Give reps clarity on what to do every day

Teamgate is built around this exact idea: disciplined selling, clear next steps, and pipeline visibility you can trust without adding admin overhead.

Let’s get into the practices that make the biggest difference.

However, companies who adopt a Sales CRM as a tool for Sales Enablement achieve some pretty impressive results…
Check this out:

These results from Aberdeen Research prove that by having the right mindset to use a CRM effectively, impressive results can be achieved… and consistently!

Sadly though, an estimated 25-60% of CRM projects fail to meet expectations.

But fear not…

In this article, I’m going to share seven CRM best practices for 2017. After reading all the way to the end, you’ll be able to identify the right sales solution to guarantee 2017 as your best year yet.

So let’s get into it:

#1 – Clean, Reliable, and Up-To-Date Data

If your CRM data isn’t clean, nothing else works.

Forecasts become guesses. Pipeline reviews turn into debates. Reps waste time chasing deals that were never real.

Clean data isn’t about “tidying up.” It’s about enforcing habits that keep your pipeline accurate by default.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Every active deal has a clear next step
Stale deals are flagged automatically (no activity, no movement)
Duplicate contacts are prevented at entry
Deal stages reflect reality, not optimism

The problem is most teams try to fix this manually. They clean data once a month, then it breaks again a week later.

The better approach is system-driven hygiene:

Automatic duplicate detection
Deal aging indicators that highlight inactivity
Required next steps to keep deals moving
Activity tracking tied directly to deals

This is where a CRM should do the work for you.

Instead of asking reps to “update the CRM,” the system should:

Prompt the next action
Flag what’s falling behind
Keep data current through normal selling activity

When this is in place, your pipeline becomes something you can actually trust, not something you need to double-check.

#2 – Company Wide Snapshot

Another CRM best practice: Clarity.

“Clarity affords focus.” – Thomas Leonard.

Your CRM dashboard needs to be the first thing you see every day. It’s the central control and pulse of the company.

At one glimpse you should be able to achieve full clarity over your company’s most important metrics.

As a salesperson this may include:

Your sales goals
Current leads you’re working
How those leads are responding to communications you sent the prior day

As a sales manager you need to be able to see:

Your team’s goals
Lead sources and their conversion rates for accurate forecasting
Top loss reasons so you can support your team in areas of weakness

Ultimately having this kind of clarity and visibility over the company’s performance brings everyone that much closer together, and highlights areas of weakness that you can focus on improving for the most impactful uplifts in performance.

Without it, you’re simply lost at sea.

#3 – Segmentation

Segmentation is the first step towards personalization. But taking a step back, lead segmentation is about organizing your data so that relevant contact information is never more than a click away.

A CRM best practice for this modern era involves the automation of lead segmentation.

What do I mean exactly?

Let’s say you’ve just finished an initial Online Meeting with a new prospect.

You’ve spent 15 minutes on the call via your CRM’s SmartDialler, and have managed to successfully qualify them into the next stage.

As such, you simply drag and drop the prospect from the “Online Meeting” column to the “Push Column”.

The lead gets automatically tagged, a follow-up task is created, and an email is triggered thanking the prospect for their time on the call.

Automagical. This is 2017.

#4 – Source Tracking

This is by FAR the latest and greatest CRM best practice for 2017!

Source Tracking is a great way of accurately predicting sales forecasts based on where a new prospect has entered your CRM from.

For example:

Facebook
Google
LinkedIn
Bob’s DIY Podcast

….you get the idea.

At Teamgate we’re huge advocates of the Inbound Sales process. This means we typically generate the majority of our new leads via web forms.

(By the way, you should be too!)

Now, based on where that lead has come from, we want to know the likelihood of that lead converting to a sale.

Fortunately for you and me, the top CRMs will track this automatically for you.

I can’t stress enough the importance of making sure your CRM has this capability.

It’ll highlight the lead sources that are most lucrative for your business so that you can invest more in what’s working, and less in what’s not.

Deal? Good.

#5 – Deal Movement Tracking

Ever had a deal slip through the cracks?

Look, I know – we’re busy salesmen and it happens all the time, but there are measures we can take to ensure it doesn’t happen to you and me.

Deal movement tracking is brand new and essentially allows salespeople to see the active movement a deal has gone through from stage to stage.

Why is this important?

With a quick look at your CRM’s Deal Movement board, you’ll be able to see in an instant which deals haven’t moved an inch. Allowing you to jump right on them and move them forward.

No more deal slippage!

In fact, Deal Movement Tracking is a real timesaver if you return from a vacation, and want to see what’s happened whilst you’ve been away.

Simply fire up the Deal Movement Board and see all the progress that’s happened whilst you’ve been away – obviously great for sales managers, and highly motivating for salespeople!

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#6 – Geographical Insights

Does your current CRM allow you to see where all of your contacts are based on a map inside your deals view?

Ok, so this one may not be relevant to all businesses. However, if you’re an international company it’s a great way of quickly visualizing which countries are performing best for you.

Not an essential one in my opinion, but a great insights tool that requires no additional input on your part.

Seriously though, it’s very cool. Just take a look at this example taken from Teamgate:

#7 – Personalisation

Lastly, and probably one of the most important features of our CRM is the ability to get personal.

As salespeople, we sometimes fall guilty about making our prospects feel like a number in a system. Cold callers (yes, some businesses still sell like it’s 1982) have probably a lot to answer for on this front.

However, we need to pay extra attention to personalization.

Why?

It makes our prospects feel like we care because we take the time to care about what’s important to them.

This is a quote I like to use a lot when talking about influential sales tactics.

“People don’t buy when they understand. They buy when they feel understood.”

Like that? It’s so true though, right?

So how can your CRM best support this in 2017?

Your CRM should have a contact timeline where all calls, emails, website, and link clicking actions are recorded automatically.

This means anytime you communicate with a prospect you can see the specific user journey they’ve been on all right there in front of you. And as such, you can speak to them in a way that fits the experience you know they’ve had so far.

Conclusion

Most CRM problems aren’t technical. They’re behavioral.

The teams that win aren’t using more features, they’re following a more disciplined process:

Every deal has a next step
Follow-ups are consistent
Data stays current without manual cleanup
Pipeline reflects what’s actually happening

When these habits are enforced, everything improves:

Forecasts become reliable
Deals move faster
Reps spend more time selling
Managers coach with real data

The seven best practices in this guide all point to the same outcome: a CRM that runs your sales process, not one that just stores it.

If your current system still relies on reps remembering what to do next, that’s the gap.

Fix the process, support it with the right system, and your pipeline stops being a guessing game and starts becoming predictable.

If you are working with large amounts of data, every time you need to find some specific information may become a nightmare, right? Even if you have automated sales processes with the help of a CRM, sometimes you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of information. Luckily, Teamgate CRM has powerful filtering and sorting features, which help to keep everything well-organized and improve your productivity.

Complete Filtering

Basically, you can quickly filter every available list, including leads, contacts, companies, deals, and files. Items in each of the lists can be filtered by predefined and custom fields. Let’s say you need to see a list of every single lead from a specific country; you can do it in just a few clicks by either selecting the country or typing it in. Likewise, you can easily get a list of all won or lost deals, new leads, and much more.

For your convenience, you can choose which of the custom fields should be added to the list of filters. It is easy to adjust filters considering your business needs. Moreover, not only ‘Standard text’ but also ‘Multi-select’ custom fields can be filtered.

Clean Filtering

Teamgate filtering solution is user-friendly and neat. Even if you use a lot of information fields, you won’t find filters too overwhelming – they can be expanded or collapsed so you can customize viewing options. To improve your experience, we made it possible both select and enter options manually. The latter helps when there are hundreds of options, e.g. zip codes, and it’s simply too time-consuming to scroll down the drop-down list.

Besides, Teamgate supports sorting. This feature may help to see a better overview of your lists. For example, you can sort leads by the lead score, and instantly see the hot leads at the top of your list; or sort your deals by value to see the most valuable ones. It may seem like a very simple feature, but it can help to grow your business.

Add Some Extra Value!

If you want to get the most out of Teamgate filtering solution, it’s entirely up to you, because we also support tagging. You can use the keywords of your choice and re-use this data to make filtering more relevant. Teamgate adds some default tags, but you’re free to create as much custom tags as you need. Maybe you want to remember that a lead is a #CEO or #purchased your product, or maybe some contact is #important? You can easily do this! And remember that tagging is also helpful when you use Teamgate Insights.

So, wait no more and try Teamgate CRM yourself!

If Mark Twain was a salesman, he would definitely advocate the new Teamgate & Slack integration. He once said that “to get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with” and we couldn’t agree more. In the fast-paced society, one often doesn’t have time to stop, appreciate winnings, and share the good news while they’re still relevant. Luckily, we live in the 21st century and technology is at our fingertips – let’s use it to spread the good news!

By now, you most probably know that with Teamgate you can improve communication with customers, boost your sales and implement set goals. But how about letting people know about the success? Traditionally, you could organize a status meeting and gather a group of people in a room. But we all know how busy work schedules can be. You’re lucky if everyone’s at your meeting few weeks after a deal was closed successfully. However, the good news is the most exciting while still fresh.

Fortunately, we know a way to keep your managers and teams up-to-date with your Teamgate activity, even if they don’t have an account! All you need is to use Slack, a multi-device team collaboration platform. Connect an integrated CRM solution to share instant, automatic notifications when deals are won. A few simple steps and your communication is improved significantly!

How does it work?

To be able to set up this integration, you will need the most powerful, yet free, app integration platform – Zapier. With this platform, you can connect various products into one solution to use them on a daily basis. So, you need to connect Teamgate with Slack over Zapier using easy selection steps inside the platform.

Create a new channel on Slack, e.g. #DealsWeWin, and make sure to invite the entire sales team, as well as other interested parties, to join the channel. Now, when everybody, including the Teamgate Winbot, is there, real-time notifications about winning deals will be pushed and the good news shared on the channel. You can setup the notification message yourself – include details about a customer, deal size and value, sales reps, etc. It is even possible to add more sophisticated messages and use them to congratulate your sales team member for doing a great job. Because they deserve this, right?

Added value hides in simple things

For those wondering why this integration is better than tracking winning deals inside Teamgate, for example, using pipelines, insights, dashboard, here’s our argument: with this small feature you can be informed of the same minute wherever you are, with no extra action required. As Slack is a multi-device platform, one can be notified instantly, even on the go, because we cannot live without our smartphones and smartwatches!

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Use Zapier wisely to build different information structures and you will improve your team communication by spreading the good news and appreciating great work. You’ll not only be the first one to do that, you’ll also save precious time spent in status update meetings where, most of the time, information shared is often outdated.

In a nutshell, if you decide to use the Slack integration, you will be able to:

Instantly share information about winning deals with a group of people.
Build the structure of information the way you want.
Improve team communication and reach those on the go.
Appreciate the excellent work.

We come across articles discussing the SaaS sales leaders ranging from Jim Herbold to Sam Blond, about how they have driven a stellar revenue growth for their companies. It can easily be concluded that behind every successful and ravaging SaaS is an amazing VP of sales. However, before you can leap up to the SaaS unicorn, you first have to move forward from where you are to the SaaS VP of sales, and to tell you the truth, it is going to be more of a jump than just a step forward.

So, the question you would be asking yourself is how one can become the SaaS VP of sales. There are two crucial components that can get you there, and these components are no piece of cake.

Make sure you have the ability to identify a great opportunity before anyone else can
Understand the SaaS metrics

Identify a Great Opportunity before Anyone Else

Getting to know how to accomplish this can be difficult, but it isn’t that difficult if you know what you are looking for. To know whether a SaaS company can rocket under your leadership or not, is by having some strong answers for the following questions.

Does the company have an ARR between $1 million and $5 million?
Is the average ACV greater than $3,000 and less than $10,000?
Is the Churn less than 30%?
Product Market Fit: The Product Market Fit should be kept 100% contingent to the answers of the above three questions.
Are there any profits pouring in?
Do they have a strong product team?

When evaluating a SaaS opportunity based on the question mentioned above, then there are just two distractions that can lead you astray:

No leads
Bad Website

Understand the SaaS Metrics

Once the criterion has been determined based on the questioned mentioned above, and then your next goal is to aim for the position of the VP of Sales.

Therefore, there are only two goals left for you:

Master the SaaS Metric
Determine how you can show it

To be able to master the SaaS metric, all that you have to do is to go through all the blog post, twice, that have ever been written about the SaaS. Becoming the SaaS VP of Sales means that you will be the highest paid employee in the company, then you should have a plan, and to become one, you need your playbook. All you have to do is master that playbook.

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There are a few key metrics that you should stick to for the purpose of getting a better chance to be a VP of sales.

Monthly Recurring Revenue

For any SaaS business, all the payments made are upfront. Here before getting the customers you have to build the product by spending on it earlier, and the downside of it is that customers do no pay upfront. However, to build a sustainable business, you will have to survive this far. To do so, you will have to track the monthly recurring revenue. This is the amount of revenue that you are adding or losing of what you expect to receive every month. To achieve this, you will have to dive deep into the financials to get that number. Monthly Recurring Revenue is one the most important metrics that a SaaS business should track.

Churn

Churn is a metric that measures the percentage of the people who leave your product every month. Retaining the customers is what determines whether your business can survive or not. For SaaS, churns are easy as the customer purchase every month; therefore, you will have to build the churn around that.

Cost Per Acquisition

Marketing is an expensive feat, and utilizing wrong channels for the marketing can leave a huge hole in the profit margins. To avoid this, the VP of Sales can go for the tracking of the cost per acquisition of the campaign. If you are spending more money for the acquisition of the customers than what you are receiving, then there is a problem. As a VP of Sales, you will have to find the best solution for it.

Average Revenue per Customer

This metric is straightforward. This is the average revenue that you are already receiving from your customers. Once the churn rate is brought under control, you get a sure way to acquire the customers. The basic keys for increasing the revenue are the up-sells and cross-sells. Up-sells are when you compel the customer to move to the expensive version of the product. Cross-sells are the extra features that you sell along with your product. Here the goal of the VP of Sales is to build the system that increases the revenue steadily, that you receive from the customers.

Understanding these metrics and the way to move around them along with your team members, you get the sure shot of being the VP of Sales. Since none of these metrics can be accomplished with only a single person, it becomes your duty to take the team with you and climb the ladder as you go.

Summary

Your sales pitch matters in order to implement the metrics; hence, it has to be compelling enough to show your scholarly understandings of the problems at some million dollars in ARR and a vision of how the revenue can be grown 2x, 3x, or 4x. Using the defined metrics in the SaaS business, you can determine how the metrics will give you the desired result.

If you are not a salesperson, it can be easy to look at Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and shrug it off as something exclusive to salespeople. Granted, CRM find its popularity in sales since it mimics business workflows and sales pipelines. More importantly, the current “Age of The Customer” requires any business and product to be customer-centric. In the salesperson’s world of leads and clients, CRM usage allows businesses to keep customers at the core of their processes.

But can non-salespeople use CRM as well?
In this article we will talk about:

Why CRM Works For Other Professionals
Who Else Should Use CRM
How to Customize Your CRM

Why CRM Works For Other Professionals

Truth is, almost every professional working in a field requiring frequent contact with customers can benefit from CRM. Take a look at the following graph of the most requested CRM features:

(Graph and study by Softwareadvice)

Access to a centralized platform for contacts (emails, phone calls, meetings etc.), metrics and task management are features that make CRM a powerful toolkit for salespeople and other professionals alike.
Without a CRM, professionals have to resort to building their own ecosystem of apps. Although the choice of great app substitutes is limitless, having a dedicated platform where all the features are easily accessible can be a great boost to productivity –and revenue.

Who Else Should Use CRM

To misquote the bard:

“All the world’s a market, and all the men and women merely salespeople”.

Professionals have services to offer –or sell, they have contacts that require various degrees of engagement and they need data to make informed decisions. If we follow this reasoning, every professional is a salesperson as well.
Let’s explore how other professionals can use CRM:

Online Freelancers:

Freelancers have to manage their clients, do customer support, manage projects, and prevent old leads from turning cold while doing their own marketing. Without planning and organization, these tasks can be very challenging to manage even for the more seasoned freelancers.

A CRM is the ideal toolkit to manage the complex web that is the freelancer’s contacts. On one platform, you can schedule follow-up emails, visualize your pipeline and receive smart insights on the likelihood that a lead will convert based on previously gathered data.
A pipeline can help you see the steps through which your deals progress. For freelance writers for example, a deal will start with a pitch, then an initial contact, a quote, a negotiation then closure.
The more you populate your CRM with data, the more information you can gather about:

Which deals are easier to close?
Which clients are more profitable?
The pipeline step where deals are most likely to fall through.

Besides freelance writers, any independent contractor who regularly deals with a variety of customers can use a CRM. This includes:

Designers
Developers
Consultants
Virtual Assistants
Customer Service Representatives.

Non-Profits & Fundraising

For a non-profit to stay afloat financially, it has to manage a delicate network of established donors while trying to acquire new ones. Even with the advent of online crowdfunding efforts, fundraising is a field where high-touch engagement with donors is conventional if not required.
With contact management and segmentation strategies, non-profits can afford to easily give their owners the attention they deserve. In addition, the data gathered thanks to frequent CRM use can highlight the particular donor/prospect personas most likely to be generous.
Lastly, task and relationship management through scheduled and well-recorded contacts allow for better-targeted marketing campaigns and as a result, happy email-reading customers.

Musicians and Promoters

For musicians who do not feature on the Billboard Top40, a great deal of management is needed to land a show. Musicians and promoters have to constantly look for venues (leads), manage their relationships with old customers (agents, music venues, labels, etc.), and send Demos.
Although creatives are typically portrayed as scattered individuals with a distaste for organization, their success will still depend on meticulous planning.

A CRM can help:

Manage client contacts for venues, promoters, agents, labels, etc.
Track previous and ongoing Deals (a deal can be a show, a gig, or a record contract)
Compare Deals based on profitability, geographic location, and other customized variables.

How to customize your CRM

The most important trick to making CRM a versatile tool for any profession is customization. Although the sales jargon can be applicable to many other professions, it’s best to replace it with something you’re more familiar with. Let’s find out how!

Pipeline

The sales pipeline consists of all the steps each deal goes through prior to closure. The default Sales Pipeline provided by Teamgate has the following stages:

Incoming
Contacted
Quote
Evaluating
Closure

You aren’t bound to keep the pipeline as it is. This is my attempt at creating a Freelance Writer Pipeline:

You can create your own pipeline by navigating through:
Click on your Profile then Settings
Pick Deals and Deals settings on the left tab.
Then Add New Process
Add a new stage for every stage of your ideal pipeline.

If you can’t think of a clearly defined and recognizable stage, it is perfectly fine to keep the original Sales Pipeline and keep tweaking it as you go.

Integration

Allowing your CRM to communicate with your apps of the trade is one of the best ways to customize it to your own liking. Although this can often require some API knowledge or CRM support, we thankfully now have options like Zapier which makes integration a breeze for non-developers.

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Experimenting

To have a CRM tailored for you and your profession, there’s no substitute for practice. Tweaking around your pipeline and implementing different tag subgroups will allow you to learn more about the CRM and your own business practices.

Take Teamgate for a Free Trial today to see if it’s the best fit for your job.
Back to you! Do you use CRM for non-sales-related tasks? How do you use it? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

#1 – Clean, Reliable, and Up-To-Date Data

#2 – Company Wide Snapshot

#3 – Segmentation

#4 – Source Tracking

#5 – Deal Movement Tracking

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

#6 – Geographical Insights

#7 – Personalisation

Conclusion

Complete Filtering

Clean Filtering

Add Some Extra Value!

How does it work?

Added value hides in simple things

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

Identify a Great Opportunity before Anyone Else

Understand the SaaS Metrics

Therefore, there are only two goals left for you:

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

There are a few key metrics that you should stick to for the purpose of getting a better chance to be a VP of sales.

Summary

Why CRM Works For Other Professionals

Who Else Should Use CRM

Online Freelancers:

Non-Profits & Fundraising

Musicians and Promoters

How to customize your CRM

Pipeline

Tags

Integration

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

Experimenting

Mobile applications

Safe payments

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