Top 5 insider CRM tips from sales ops expert you should start using now

More and more businesses implement CRM (Contact Relationship Management) systems into their daily workflows. Why? Because it’s incredibly effective.

A CRM platform increases sales by up to 29%, boosts sales productivity by up to 34%, and improves sales forecast accuracy by 42%, a Salesforce study revealed.

The question is how to use a CRM platform to unlock its full potential and boost revenue.

After all, you want to you receive your ROI after implementing a CRM and hit your sales targets. Today, you will learn how to do it.

Lucas Perret, the sales operations manager at lemlist, shared proven and effective CRM tips, so get ready to start implementing them right now.

Meet our expert:

Lucas Perret streamlines revenue processes and drives growth with tech and workflow automation on a daily basis, so he knows the ins and outs of sales operations tools, including CRM.

Lucas shared his insider advice on implementing, operating, and managing CRM systems to get the most out of them.

His CRM tips are so simple and practical that any business can start using them right now and see the benefits on the go. Let's buckle up.

5 top insider CRM tips to boost your sales:

1. Spend time defining and automating lead statuses and lead lifecycles.

Lucas: CRM Lead Statuses and Lead Lifecycles are critical to visualizing your sales activities. They will help your team better collaborate on each lead, know what to do at what steps, and analyze your reporting activity better. So, I really advise people to spend time on this as early as possible because it will help them measure their sales performance more easily.

With it, You’ll be able to get metrics such as:

• #of leads contacted
• #of leads that replied
• #of meetings booked
• #of new customers

At the end, you’ll know how many leads you should contact to get one customer, and this will help you better organize your activities and optimize the whole process. With workflow automation on your CRM, you can automate lead statuses to save a lot of time from your sales time and measure your activities more accurately. For instance:

• when a lead receives an email, move the lead status from new to contacted
• when a lead books a meeting via lemcal, move the lead status from contacted to meeting booked and so on.

This kind of automation is key in a CRM, and I really encourage people to define them very early in their CRM journey.

2. Work closely with your sales reps.

Lucas: CRM is one of the most important tools in your sales team, and they’ll spend a lot of time using it. So don’t overlook UX and ease of use. CRM is very useful for C-level and managers to follow sales activities. But first, it should be a tool that helps your sales team perform better.

My advice is to:

• make sure to train your sales team on how to leverage the CRM at full capabilities
• before implementing a solution, let the sales team test each solution you are considering and make sure the tool eases their work and does not add friction to their work
• when adding new processes to the CRM, always include the sales team in the discussion. For instance, make fields mandatory to complete only when it’s really necessary

3. Don’t do everything with CRM.

Lucas: CRM is great at tracking a sales opportunity, but it won’t help your sales team get great results in prospection, even if they offer some features.

For instance, Hubspot offers a sales engagement solution to their suite. Even if the solution is very convenient, it won’t help your sales team get the best results. For instance, they won’t help you achieve good deliverability (many users reported issues in that domain).

Instead, I suggest you use the best-of-breed approach, where you use your CRM for sales opportunity management and a sales engagement platform like lemlist for your prospecting activities.

To make it work, always check integrations between your tools and try to choose the most flexible tools regarding this criteria.

4. Define the format of your ID to avoid duplicates.

Lucas: At lemlist, we use the company domain as an ID to identify companies within our CRM.

It helps us prevent duplicates when we add data to our CRM.

Since ID is unique, you can only have 1 entry with a value. Which will help you avoid duplicate in your CRM.

However you need to specify a format to avoid to have 2 entries for the same companies, like “lemlist.com” and “https://www.lemlist.com”.

My advice is to:

• make sure to define a format you’ll use all the time when you add companies to your CRM
• create a workflow that cleans your company domain to ingest them correctly every time

5. Make sure you log everything in your CRM.

Lucas: Spend time setting your CRM so that all your emails, LinkedIn messages, and meetings are logged into the CRM.

This way, when you go back to specific records after a long time, you’ll have a complete overview of what happened with your lead.

It’s better to have too many logs than not enough since you can filter them from your views if necessary.

So try to integrate:

• your emails (for instance, Hubspot has a Gmail integration)
• LinkedIn with your CRM (use tools like Surfe to do this)
• call recordings (at lemlist all our recordings are sent to the CRM)
• meetings, prospecting activities, and so on.

Key Takeaways

There are five the most effective CRM tips shared by the sales operations expert.

First, you set up and automate lead processes in your CRM to track sales performance accurately.

Second, you must ensure the CRM is user-friendly for your sales team, involving them in decisions related to its use.

Third, combine your CRM with specialized tools for better efficiency and ensure they integrate well.

Fourth, use a standard format for entering company information to avoid duplicates.

Lastly, all interactions with leads in the CRM must be logged for a complete history. These steps will make your CRM a more effective tool for increasing sales.