In this episode, we discuss the sales aspect of CRM. We cover tracking opportunities and the way it’s done with CRM.

00:22 Andy Shore: Welcome back everybody to Clues for the Clueless CRM Marketer. And we’re gonna continue our deep dive into all things CRM and we’ve talked about a ton of stuff so far and had our tangents here and there, but we have mentioned there is a sales side of CRM and it might not be the primary use for your business, but it does exist, and with sales comes transactions, right?

00:47 Paul Rijnders: Yeah, and there’s gonna be CRMs that are going to be better suited to your type of business. So I think that whoever you’re auditioning to be your CRM or whatever product you’re looking at you should, where possible, where applicable, look for specialization. And so let me kind of unpack that a bit. The most traditional CRMs are gonna have kind of a process that goes like this. Okay, well, I’ve got leads, so let me upload a list of leads and I’ll have my people work ’em either on the phones or through email or through whatever means that is. At a certain point we’re gonna qualify that lead and we’re gonna say, “Wow, that person really, I think we can sell them something. Let’s create an opportunity for them.” So you got this little button that says convert. You convert that lead to a contact, at the same time you create the opportunity. And so here’s where that little line of distinction goes where you say, “Well, is that opportunity gonna be with that contact or is it gonna be with that organization?”

01:49 PR: Some CRMs are co-organizations accounts. For me the way I like to explain it, “Well, who’s paying for it? Does John work for Acme and is Acme actually paying for it and this product’s for the benefit of Acme?” Well, that opportunity that you’re tracking, that should be with Acme. Or is it, Wendy that’s buying this and Wendy’s actually buying it for herself and the fact that she works for IBM is inconsequential because this is actually for Wendy’s household. Well, then IBM is out of there, don’t track it for IBM, ’cause they are not your customer. That opportunity should be with Wendy. That said, now you have this converted lead record that’s a contact, and now you have this new record that’s an opportunity and you’re actually creating follow-up tasks on the opportunity, because you want to do everything you can to actually close that opportunity. If it’s something you got to personally do for Cindy or whoever it is, Wendy or John, that has nothing to do with the sales you’re trying to close, then you can make that task and relate it to them, right? And this might sound complicated, but it’s just this, it’s when you create that task, what does this relate to?

02:57 PR: Well, this relates to Wendy, or this relates to to this opportunity. That way down the line, when you’re looking at the tasks that you gotta do for the day, you may not be looking at a task of 100 of ’em, you can start doing your accomplishments for the day and you know to what that relates to. So that said, that transaction now becomes this opportunity you’re trying to close. Well, these are for big-ticket items. I think that if you’re selling something big, like you’re selling helicopters at the Catalina Mixer that yes, you really wanna have an opportunity because you’re trying to close something that someone’s spending $1,000, $2,000, $10,000 on, right? Or even if you’re a music shop, and you’re selling $400 or $500 items, these are opportunities and you wanna kind of track those. Or you’re selling a contract or subscription, those are opportunities. You’re selling a house. What if you’re a food truck or you’re an ice cream shop or you’re a flower shop? I don’t think that you wanna have an opportunity open for every single bouquet of roses that you’re trying to close, although you might. Some of them are expensive, I bought those edible arrangements, and those could be like 100 bucks.

04:02 AS: Wow.

04:03 PR: For fruits! For fruits. But they’re good. [chuckle] Whoever you’re sending to, they feel a little special because someone cut all the little watermelon and tangerines in these little stars and stuff. So I’m going on record and saying, edible arrangements, probably those are opportunities. [chuckle] ‘Cause you might… You’re gonna take a couple of tasks to close me on buying [chuckle] another one of those things.

04:23 AS: I just had a flashback to my grandparents telling me about traveling somewhere in Asia and trying to get a melon and it being so expensive, ’cause that’s not where they’re growing so they’re having it sent there. And them being like, “Oh, this is something we get for a couple bucks at home.” And it’s just like $50 at this place.

04:41 PR: Somewhere in the cloud is an open…

04:44 AS: This is like where edible arrangements were born. [chuckle]

04:45 PR: Maybe. But somewhere in the cloud somewhere, is an open opportunity that says, “Melon.” [chuckle] And someone is trying to close that deal ’cause it’s so expensive. Okay, so anyway, sorry about that. So I was trying to say that CRMs are specialized, I guess, for different kinds of businesses. So that traditional business model, if you’re selling something big, I’m gonna say that most CRMs off the shelf are going to be good for that, because that’s the traditional kind of model a lot of them follow. But data’s getting smarter, how data gets to you is getting a lot easier and if you’re selling things on an online shop then you’re probably gonna look for a CRM that’s got… It’s a bit more hooked in with e-commerce APIs. The API is kind of a scary term, but basically it makes it so that one program can talk to another, I guess, right? Or one application can talk to another without any kind of… And they could be written in two different kind of languages, so to speak, computer languages. That said, if you… It’s getting a lot easier and some CRMs do this even if you don’t have any kind of development experience, you can just say, “Okay, well, I’m using CRM X and CRM X says I can bring it on all my transactions from Shopify, Etsy or whatever.”

06:02 PR: And then now you’re not necessarily looking to track these opportunities you’re trying to close, maybe you just wanna see all the things someone has bought and you wanna bring that in so that you can sell them more of that. And then maybe your whole business model’s not calling them up on the phone, it’s they go to your shopping cart, they buy something or they go to your shopping cart or your website, go to shopping cart and abandon it. You kick off an email that says, “Hey, you know what, you left something in your cart.” Right? Or maybe they didn’t even get to the cart, maybe they just visited this URL and this URL, so you know, “Oh, wow. So that person is very interested in ceramic mugs.” So then you start sending out the emails for the ceramic mugs and as they purchase those, you open up the record the next time, and you see those purchases because all that comes in from API, and I’ll close it out and say this, what you really don’t wanna get in a habit of doing is, say, looking at one program, because we see lots of customers that do this, that they’ll look in one program and they’ll say, “Oh, that person bought this, this and that.” And then they’ll go in the CRM and they’ll type in that the person bought this, this, and that.

07:00 PR: Does that work? Yes. Does it scale well? No. Well, if your program that you’re using or your CRM that you’re using, can interface with whatever it is that you’re tracking your sales through, that information should come in and it shouldn’t be even stored at your CRM, it should be pulling in live. You open up that customer, a little call goes out to wherever that information is housed, whatever your e-commerce retailer is, and now that pings back, “Oh, these are the five or six things they bought.” So, you get up-to-date accurate information and you don’t have data that’s redundantly stored in a number of places. And that allows you to be actionable and if you can trigger certain automations based on those actions, where you can create views of customers that meet certain criteria based on what those transactions were, all the better. So I’ll close this out by saying that if you were an e-commerce-type seller and you’re not doing a lot of face-to-face selling or you’re not even doing hot calls, [chuckle] cold calls, medium calls and everything is solely based on transactions, then you really want a CRM that’s really hooked in with your e-commerce site and allows you to do these transactional types of follow-ups.

08:08 AS: Yeah, for those of you that don’t know, Paul’s saying, I’m gonna close this out twice as he’s trying to close it out as peak Paul, [chuckle] I say.

08:16 PR: That is a perfect example.

08:19 AS: And for listeners, that user-facing side of what he was just talking about, is think about if you’ve ever been on Amazon and you look at a product and even if you don’t put in your cart, you better believe you’re gonna get follow-up emails like, “Hey, still interested in this?” Or, “The price just dropped,” or whatever that is, that’s just their CRM, tracking where their users are on the page and following up to make that sale. And so I think that’s all Paul was talking about.

08:43 PR: So now I can’t close out ’cause I gotta tell you the story about my dad and the first time we had GPS installed.

08:48 AS: Go for it.

08:49 PR: Okay, so, I guess, like a decade ago, I got this 4×4 type thing and I put GPS in there. My dad and I followed this car club out and we went to a four [09:00] ____ over in kinda like the hills over there by the border of California and Mexico. And my dad was kind of marveling at the GPS and it showed where we were at, and he’s like, “How is this working?” And I said, “Well, it just kind of triangulates based, I think.” I guess I was explaining the way I understood it, which wasn’t very well, but… Or very good. But I did know that it was automatic and it was based on satellites and that they were finding your position based on that, right? Or not they, it. But my dad was hung up on they. [chuckle] He’s like, “Well, how does it know where you’re at?” And I’m like, “Well, you know the satellites and this or that, it’s detecting.” And he’s like, “No, there’s gotta be a guy up there.” [chuckle]

09:38 PR: And I’m like, “Wait, wait. There’s no guy up there.” And he’s like, “No, [chuckle] there’s gotta be a guy.” And I was trying to explain there’s no guy up there that’s doing it and he’s like, “No, this is too accurate.” And then I was like, “Well, Dad, I bought this thing for $100. There’s no way that my $100 purchase gets me a guy up there [laughter] dedicated to telling me where this is at all times.” So to hook this back to the Amazon thing, right? I bet there’s a few listeners out there, hopefully, most people are more sophisticated than that, right, that thinks that you need to have a person that’s going to kinda look at what that person puts into that shopping cart and say, “Oh, wow. Okay, they need this email. Okay, fire,” and they send it off. There’s no guy, there’s no girl up there. Those are all this automations based on things that happen within the app itself.

10:25 AS: Yeah, but everyone thinks they’re on their own stage, they’re in their own movie and they have that dedicated person to shine the spotlight on them, right? That’s what that is.

10:34 PR: I wish I had that person. [chuckle] And this is before Siri, right? I can imagine how much worse it would have been if there was a Siri or a Hey, Google. “But I hear her voice.” [laughter] Anyway, I love you, Dad.

10:45 AS: And for you, Siri users, check out of the Heart of Business episode with Susan Bennett, the voice of Siri. She’s a hoot. I really enjoy talking to her, it’s one of our best episode.

10:55 PR: She’s the woman up there.

10:57 AS: She is, maybe, but we’re way over our time for this episode. So, thanks everyone for listening and we’ll catch you next time. Bye-bye.