7 Ways a CRM helps your sales leader stay sane

Chip: We are talking about seven ways a CRM helps your sales leader stay sane and I am joined by a couple of incredible Revenue leaders today the first is Mallory Lee who’s VP of operations at NYLAS and they’ll then we also have Ping Del Guidice who’s an experienced Revenue leader and also former VP of Revenue Operations at Leapsome. I myself I’m Chip House. I’m CMO and Insightly the modern CRM that teams love to use and I’ve spent the vast majority of the past 25 years in CRM and marketing technology in B2B SaaS companies leading marketing teams and so but I am just the host today I’m going to lean in heavily on my guess and so let me have each of the guests tell you a bit more about themselves I’m gonna have Mallory go first

Mallory: Awesome thanks for having me today uh so Mallory Lee I work at NYLAS we are an API platform. I live in Indiana I grew up in marketing operations and I actually was lucky enough to work with Chip at Exact Target way back when so a little bit of a reunion today um excited to talk to you guys and when people ask for my fun fact I usually say I have three boys and no Hobbies so that’s me the boys are your hobbies it’s it’s fun to see you again Mallory excited to have you with us and Ping.

Ping: Well thank you so much to I am paying and I’ve been in RevOps before RevOps became a thing I started a sales Ops filter it from the down up at at three different startups and then from there you know different companies inherited amazing marketing Arts sales arts csrps and then we form rivers in two scale outs I live in New York with my husband and two wonderful kiddos and we’re enjoying the last week of summer break before they head back to school next week it’s pretty late in New York we don’t start till after Labor Day um and now that Mallory said a fun fact I feel like I should too fun fact for me I have 40 cousins first cousins it’s a big family

Chip: I think it’s about genius and Insightly for this chance to talk about you know one of my favorite topics keePing sane in CRM for sure. It’s so great to have you both and thank you all, by the way, for for sharing your favorite beverages. Like I said mine in the morning is is coffee and then sometimes in the evening it’s it’s a beer that helps me stay sane. Let’s dive into the topic. Let’s face it. B2B sales the role of a sales leader is both exhilarating and challenging and juggling targets managing teams and making critical decisions can be demanding and overwhelming. This is where the power of a well-implemented CRM comes into play. Over the next 45 to 50 minutes we’re going to explore how a CRM isn’t just a tool but a strategic ally that empowers sales leaders to maintain their sanity admits the chaos plus occasionally coffee and beer or whatever. We’ll delve into seven key strategies that transform a CRM into a force multiplier enabling sales leaders to streamline processes enhanced decision making and Elevate the entire sales ecosystem. And who knows with these two guests we may end up with more than seven and if we do then then that’s what we’ll go with. First on our list we have is making your CRM the single source of Truth and this is especially true when your company has say more than five people and you have multiple teams that need to engage with the data inside of the CRM The first thing that comes to mind is the old adage if it’s not in the CRM it didn’t happen and Mallory I think I’ve heard you say this so I’m going to send it to you first and tell me more about this and why this is appropriate

Mallory: I think we all have heard that phrase and I’ve used it many times you know if it’s not in there if I can’t see it and report on it then it’s not real come back later um this comes in handy quite a bit when people are looking to get paid for closing deals so I would say that’s when it’s the most powerful part of the toolkit for Revenue operations or Finance or sales leadership but you know over the course of the last call it five years that I’ve been digging in more on the revenue side I have seen that there are some things that happen outside of the CRM and they exist for a while before they make it in there and so I’ve seen you know the reasons why and every once in a while I feel some sympathy for the people that are keePing things out of the system um but really it’s just taught me that you have to use that data for good you never want someone to feel scared that when they put their data into the system it will somehow create this extra layer of you know fear or responsibility or accountability you want them to be encouraged to go ahead and put everything in there so that you have the insights I I think there are some people that are better at this than others some are used to maybe Post-it notes or something they figure they’re going to get around to it but I think that that can be you know a problem so I think the challenge is if you’re a leader in an organization how do you help enforce this and how do you walk the walk Ping do you have thoughts about that?

Ping: I mean I can definitely appreciate a good you know handwritten notes I like to do that myself um having I think you know when the sales leaders are doing 101s or the forecast calls and team meetings to pull up the CRM some dashboard that actually pulls the data directly from what’s in the CRM you know if it’s not in there the sales manager asks a question and the rep says this happened well did it really happen or did it not happen to what should both you and Mallory said right if it’s not in the CRM it didn’t happen it can happen put it in.

Chip: I mean I think that’s how people approach a CRM right you assume that the data is in there about a customer if it did happen and so you know one of the things that’s been talked about is managers can kind of reinforce this by using the CRM in one-on-ones right when they’re talking to an individual sales or go to market person Mallory do you have experience with that can you tell me your thoughts about that?

Mallory: I’ve definitely had dashboards or reports in the past that you know surface the activity of a sales rep they’re open opportunities what their pipeline is looking like um really having the ability to use a report to guide the conversation is a great way to make sure that reps are looking at the right metrics there is one source of Truth and oftentimes leaderboards help with this too so if you guys are working toward any kind of spiff or you know group activity um creating reports that everyone can see for a leaderboard for that contest is an excellent way to make sure everyone’s looking at the same thing and if for some reason their activity is not being loved or if for some reason not all of their contacts are in the system they’re going to start to fall behind on that leaderboard and the competitiveness of sales people you know will eventually catch up to them and they will you know start putting things in there because they want to win so that’s one trick that that I’ve looked at neston certainly the closer you can get to having your source of Truth for things like Commissions in the CRM that is also beneficial because they will continue to go back to that data set to understand if they’re going to hit their quota if you can gamify it and appeal to that sort of sensibility that a lot of sales people have I think you’re right on Mallory sorry go ahead Ping

Ping: I just wanted to add on to that as well CRM some people think that it’s a sales tool sales people use it but then if you have access that access to the greater company right marketing is it even products definitely leadership the dashboards that Mallory mentioned earlier the more people sees it and the competitive in the sales reps hey I actually closed these still whoops but I didn’t update it to close one I need to do that so it can it can show up in my dashboard that I’m not actually you know fifth out of six or whatever it might be um that that’s what in the visibility it helps encourage rabbits to enter information and I think it goes for other departments too that engage with the CRM Beyond sales like whether it’s it’s CS or the help desk or or marketing for that matter right um and I think to summarize maybe leaders can walk the walk a bit gamify it and the leverage of that data as they’re having one-on-ones with their team so I want to move on to the second uh point that we wanted to talk about today and that’s about data hygiene practices and you know nothing is going to drive a sales leader crazy more than having a dirty CRM and I certainly in my history remember days where we just gather together okay everybody clean up the CRM today you know and you kind of just say okay it’s data cleanup day but keeping your data clean with data hygiene practices is clearly a way to help keep your your sales leader saying sane and how do you go about driving those consistent behaviors to keep the CRM data clean Mallory what are your thoughts

Mallory: I approach this in two different ways um you know the first thing I was not the person who implemented this at nihilus but I have seen so many things that our team does they have reports and dashboards that are specifically just for data hygiene so if something doesn’t match the right criteria or if there’s a field that’s empty or if there is something that’s not formatted correctly it will just surface itself in a report as something that needs fixed and we’ve extended this to the way that we use marketing Automation and some other tools as well we just have these audit reports that help us see things that don’t look quite right um so that’s one aspect that I’ve really loved seeing the way that nonetheless does this because they’re very proactive and that makes my job a lot easier um the other thing that I’ve noticed over time is that often when you’re introducing a whole new way of selling or a whole new way of doing something and you want to start Gathering data I think the first inclination is to create this you know standardized pick list right out of the gate and you give them only four choices and I’ve actually seen this work against me in the past because if something is brand new you might not really be picking the correct four choices and so what I have eventually come around to doing is in the beginning I launch it as an open text field and I wait for let’s say a quarter and I wait and see what kind of data we get into that field so that I can then analyze it and figure out what are the common answers that should become our choices um and then this also has a little impact where people start to get sick of it looking messy and they are the ones coming to you and they’re saying hey can we standardize this you’re like yep we can do that for you and you kind of it’s like an Inception a situation where you know you’re waiting to see what the relevant info is before you start restricting um but by the time you do that they’re happy to have it simplified and and that I like because you said you know getting the feedback I think deals change or cell cycle could change um what’s required the sales rep to do in order to hit the next step could change um you know as we get feedback from the actual users themselves they know that we are listening and not just creating fields and the type of feels that we operators want to use the full reports I think that’s that’s key that can sometimes be overlooked and definitely Gathering garbage out you know you could have beautiful reports and dashboards if the data isn’t clean isn’t correct the reports itself isn’t all that helpful and I think it’s also important I think tying On To What We Touch on in the first point like driving that consistent Behavior the Reps who know what they need to do to have the discipline to keep that data clean I think it’s so important um the dashboard it’s not just the clean your room dashboard it’s called operators for the sales leaders keep it to the Reps themselves if a close date is in the past it shows up on the dashboard they know to then go in and change it um I’ve also tried instances where if they receive an email a notification it’s a daily report or weekly report um I found those not as powerful because you tend to get a lot of those reports and then you just ignore them three months down the road you know exactly and I I love those kind of tips because if for example you come up with a pick list you know sales people are busy and they’re going to take the path of least resistance so they’re going to select whatever is there right they’re going to pick one of the four that you came up with Mallory you know um and you’re gonna end up with as you put garbage in garbage out right you’re not going to get exactly what you need to know unless you kind of provide that period That’s a super great tip I love that um somebody made the point I think it was Lydia that made the point that we should if if we help sales understand that this is customer relationship management you know I think honestly you know sometimes thinking of it that way you know and disregarding the this the acronym is actually kind of helpful because it sort of puts forward the point of like why it needs to be clean there’s also validation rules that can and should be used although not too crazily where you need to enter a certain type of information or if you hit a certain stage you need XYZ fields to be completed and it’s also important to to have the right prompt if something isn’t done according to the validation group make sure that the message that pops up tells them exactly what they need to do rather than ah I can’t save this opportunity because I don’t know what I’ve done wrong that’s a great Point um I noticed in the chat that Beck was asking you know what’s an example of where you use these empty fields and I think that I could tie this back to Lydia’s comment as well because if you think about what the CRM is for it is a way to remember everything possible about your customer um if you know that your customer has three boys and their names are this that and the other thing and you can type that in then when you get on the phone with that customer you can say oh how are your boys doing and it’s a way for you to you know call to mind your meetings and your emails and remember what’s going on and really know the customer and the reason I’m bringing that up is because in sales and new business everything we do is really geared toward handing this great set of information off to customer success once that company joins as customer so if sales reps get in the mindset of okay I’m gathering all this information during the sales process so they can have a successful implementation then that kind of guides the way that you think about getting the data in the first place and the example that we recently went through with nihilus is that we started implementing medic as a sales philosophy that allowed us to do better Discovery with our new business opportunities and so we were creating all of these fields for the metrics and the paper process and the decision makers and you know what things are important to them in the deal and so instead of getting these rigid lists of metrics for the Reps to choose from we went ahead and made that open text so they could type in here is the metric that our customer is looking to evaluate to see if nihilus has had a positive impact on their business so medic I can’t remember exactly what it stands for it’s like metrics and then um the executive sponsor decision maker paper process there’s like all these acronyms I can send you guys a link for it um but we didn’t have you know this big set of well-defined metrics yet and so if I had just created a rigid list people were probably not sure and they would just pick one like Chip is saying and the worst thing that you can see in a report is that everyone is just choosing the first choice in the menu and I think that’s happened to all of us it’s like okay everyone’s just picking the very first thing and then you stop trusting the data anyway which is not helpful right so I mean when you have the validation rules in there they’re going to help you standardize the data formats you know what fields are required and which ones aren’t and honestly I think a bit of it is you know the salesperson themselves is sort of trying to optimize the platform for themselves and that’s how they think about it and I think it’s the sales Leader’s role to tell them here’s how we use all of this data in act in aggregate right and that’s why there has to be some standardization around the reporting remember these dashboards that’s how these get populated right with some some commonality to to the responses so that’s a great topic thank you for your feedback on that so this is kind of related the third one here just to ensure that you are enforcing those definitions so once you have a set of you know business processes and definitions as a company um how well are you training your team and enforcing those definitions inside the CRM and those can kind of manifest uh themselves in a couple of different ways you know for kpis for example Mallory so mql’s sqls what constitutes an opportunity in your org is it banned is it something else what how have you seen the CRM help sales people and sales leaders kind of reinforce those kpis and make sure that they’re common if I could start with a little story that I had I joined and when I started looking at the opportunities I started singing hundreds and hundreds of sn0 opportunities that were outdated last updated maybe 12 months ago and I was like what are these opportunities and I learned that these were opportunities that weren’t actually I mean I know we’re going to talk about the definitions of what constitute an opportunity not not a qualified opportunity it was hey if you think somebody fix the ICP go ahead and create one or for CS for example if the customer mentioned hey we may have to meet in the future go ahead and create one but then nobody was really nobody was looking at this opportunity so they just ended up clogging the CRM logging pipeline so it’s definitely so important to enforce the definition what is ss0 if ss0 is a state in the opportunity um totally fine that if it’s not you know two out of the three bands that constitute an opportunity if you want to create a stage before a qualified opportunity so that it’s easier for tracking easier for creating certain conversion reporting no issue at all just make sure that you have the definitions the Reps understand what they mean and bringing back to the key to reviewing the information because if nobody’s looking at it the Reps will go I’ll just put it in nobody look at it I don’t care they think that they’re going to pass under the radar right and you have to prove that they’re not going to no uh I totally agree with that Ping I think that is a super common scenario and I’ve been in several different companies where we might rewrite the opportunity definitions literally once a year because it’s so fluid and the way that you sell can change so that is hard to stay on top of and you know whether it’s a qualified lead or a new opportunity or anything like that um one thing that I like doing is kind of making the data capture process almost like these little interview questions so if I create a new opportunity and the question says um you know what is the CRM this customer uses what is the marketing automation platform they use if you don’t know that information and you can’t fill it in then maybe you don’t really have a qualified opportunity and so getting the right data required at the right time comes back again to some of that business validation and it’s almost coaching you on the page I know we’re going to eventually talk about page layouts but I’m a big believer in having the page coach the person on what they’re supposed to be doing at that point in time and so how am I to do that when we introduced you know medic and some different sales philosophies at that time we also worked around our sales stages and we changed them a little bit and what we found at nilas is that our technical about our technical evaluation is one of the most important pieces of our sales process and our customers don’t buy without doing a technical POC so that used to happen at several different times throughout the sales cycle it wasn’t very easy to understand if it was completed or not and so what we did instead is we broke that out we made it its own stage and so when we look at the screen the page is organized by stage and it will say stage one here’s all the data that we need from you please fill all of this in stage two here’s the data we need from you fill all of this in and you can’t move on to the next stage if you don’t have you know some data filled out for that or if you find that you’re stuck somewhere and you don’t have the data that you need you might actually need to move backwards and do more discovery so you know by putting people in the you know by just asking the right question at the right time with your page layout and the way that you design the data collection process the hope is that they get into the rhythm of understanding okay I’ve reached the point in my sales cycle where it’s time for the technical POC here’s what I need to ask them to get them ready to go do this and then here’s where I can record if it’s been successful or not and we’re just kind of showing them the right data at the right time hopefully I think that’s a great Point Mallory because I think pipeline stages and things like probability of clothes is you know relied on heavily I think by by leaders in an organization and you know there’s the only way to get value out of it is if there’s consistency in what’s getting put in whether it’s you know I think every organization is different right but it’s like there’s some always like a prospecting stage some sort of qualification stage a proposal stage maybe a negotiation stage and they’re all assigned different probabilities and so it’s it’s a function of training and the CRM and you have to make the CRM work for you in some way and I think it’s also important to be extremely clear about what are the entry criterias to go into a specific stage when you’re in that stage what are the activities that should be done maybe by different roles it could be AE it could be either marketing at the time or scr or Channel partner if they’re involved and then once these things are completed what are the expert criteria before you can go into the next stage like definitely you know I’ve also updated stages in my life and different companies one thing that I found was should we mentioned the web negotiation at a company who had a stage Colony negotiation and in one-on-ones and I wasn’t in the one-on-ones but in Four Past calls you know hearing the Reps thinking oh the stage you call it negotiation I should negotiate like not really is the happening with the proposal you don’t really have to negotiate um so when you end up changing the name of the same oh interesting that’s a great example because you know I think that leads us into our next point Thank you thank you for saying that a specific example because every business is different right and the the benefit of a good CRM is it’s flexible and you can customize it to support your unique business and you know that might be one thing you know that’s a pretty basic thing you just like naming you know the stages that match your business and how things really work but I mean what what other things come to mind uh paying you know whether it’s page layouts for your business or something else for customization I have actually used other technology that actually sits on top of Salesforce and um or other CRM and the crms can be good where you know you think you need certain information you try to capture it and the page can get cluttered so easily um with the other tools that sits on top of Salesforce sorry for CRM um you are then picking and choosing which Bill to surface to the Reps that they can make changes and nothing’s on the fly as they’re going through the opportunities anything to simplify their workflow so they don’t have to go through whole pages where is the field I need to update oh wait they moved it where is it now here’s a pop-up error I can’t save this um and and the page layout can and should change depending on your ICP or the sales process like to say you know if you’re selling to SMD for example the process itself is likely quite different from selling into mid market and Enterprise um again making the sales rep sites easy so entering information doesn’t take two hours of their life that’s not selling you’re trying to make it seamless right so so their time is optimized Mallory do you have other examples of that I think some easy wins win that people can look for are ways to put you know the key facts at the top of the page so if you’re in a hurry let’s say you’re in the middle of a board meeting and you get the question about a certain customer you have to race in there and look up their account if you can see the things that are the most important right away right at the top of that screen that’s a great way to give people just those quick pieces of information so when is the renewal what’s their health look like what is their you know air are with your company something along that line find the easy way to put the most key information at the top and then you know just limiting what you do have on the page um sometimes over time we collect just tons of fields that are not used anymore but we are afraid to take them out of sight because we’re not sure what’s going to happen and what I love to do is just take them away and see who yells at you if no one cares and no one says a word then clearly they’re not worried about that data and if they’re not worried about it and if they’re not using it it’s not useful to you anyway so I don’t go and just delete a bunch of things but I’m very happy to take them off the page to declutter it and just kind of wait and see does anyone even care about this thing and sometimes they do which is great and sometimes they don’t I love that it’s it’s it’s still there you’re just not showing it in the visible interface right and so I think nothing will drive a sales leader crazier probably than scrolling past all sorts of empty Fields right or things that are no longer relevant and so it CRM is not a set it and forget it task it’s like truly what’s the state of your business to now now and how do I optimize that interface to serve those needs um I I don’t know are there other other thoughts on customization that comes to mind that best practices that either of you have used I mean if there’s automation that can be done by a specific bill I can’t think of a specific example now sorry I know what you mean though Ping it’s like if you can find two things that are always true together then like make them linked and find a way to fill things out on someone’s behalf I think that’s really good I also love the point you made about very simple language changes that can actually be a mindset shift for people who are in the CRM so that’s a takeaway for me like that’s a really good way to make sure that you are using words that you want your team to use and you know kind of adopting that mindset as they get into their conversations for sure you know I think oh by the way Gina has mentioning that she had launched a poll and so hopefully if you’ve saw the poll pop up please take the poll we’d love to get your feedback on it um I’m gonna move forward here to our fifth point so you know one of the things that causes Strife in CRM is if you have anyway garbage data going in potentially by people who don’t belong in there or people with uh maybe not the right level of permissions that are changing Fields um so how do you go about keePing it simple and safe and limiting data access and how do you think through the permissions for your company Mallory admit I think this often comes a lot later in life cycle of a business number specific Target Chip you might remember this um we had filed our IPO and we were entering into the quiet phase we were doing all this like sarbanes-oxley compliance and all of a sudden it mattered a lot who could see what and we actually maintained a list of people who had like the burden of being able to see everything about the numbers in the CRM so anybody who could see every single thing was on this documented list that went to like the government so you were listed as someone Who Knew Too Much basically um you know thinking about it now if I want to be part of a company that is scaling up and getting ready to grow a lot and we have those Ambitions of going public it would be great to clean those types of things up early you know start out with that framework where only certain people can see the things that they need to see um you know it’s it’s very easy when you’re growing fast and you’re a startup and you’re not that worried about it to just give everybody everything and wait and see what happens but I do think this is one area where working ahead and getting some of that like that access control in place early on will benefit you later it’ll be a smaller job later yes would you felt sorry Chip no I was just going to say well maybe I can ask this question to you Ping I mean would you recommend you start like with fewer permissions fewer people in there with with rights and then expand as needed I mean I know it’s difficult when a company is relatively young because you don’t really know yet and probably not trying not to spend too much time on the infrastructure from the get-go and you want almost everybody to have access to everything um however you know if you’re selling it especially certain federal government divisions the information can be so sensitive that you cannot afford to have multiple people without clearance and access to the information there was one company I was at where we actually I actually own a spreadsheet it was on a switching Excel sheet not even on a Google sheet because that could easily be shared it will store it on my laptop and make me a little bit nervous because only I had access so that basically had the actual name of the government agency with the fake name that I would create just to pop into the CRM however one thing I realized was that’s not exactly uh because we also had tools that captured emails so if you capture emails you can see who you’re talking with um so things like that that you may not realize so I really like what Mallory suggested earlier if you know you’re going to go down that path do what you can to limit the data access and the mission sets um so not everybody can see what they shouldn’t be seeing and I think a piece of that might be even the UI once once the permissions are there to your point you’re not going to show them things that are irrelevant to them um it’s it’s interesting too it’s you mentioned when we were going public Mallory but it’s like even Beyond sarbanes-oxley right I think there isn’t a company out there that I’m aware of that’s uh not concerned about security you know and I think it’s it’s now a big piece of all of our lives and you know like so I know that sock 2 is something that we take very seriously every year because security is just so important to us and our customers so um let’s let’s move on you know a big piece of getting value out of your CRM is using your CRM and you know your sales team your go to market team won’t use it if it’s hard to use but also if they feel like hey you’re just wasting my time you know so you know automations was talked about before so how do you think about using workflow automations or notifications Mallory effectively to help eliminate time-sucking tasks I’m a big fan of pre-filling anything that I can um so for example if you are clicking a button and creating maybe an opportunity whatever data you can pre-fill in from the account level to surface it on the opportunity but make it very clear without them having to go type things in multiple times that’s great um you know things like order forms and quotes and ways that you’re starting to create paperwork anytime you can automate the flow of data onto that paperwork I think is really valuable not only is it easier for everyone but you reduce the risk of people just tyPing it in wrong or you know misspelling something whatever um you know and I I do think that that sales reps and csms and and everyone using the system they appreciate the assistance of Automation Way more than what we realize and um I’ve actually seen so many times where people say thank you for something really small like wow thank you for automating this it makes my life way easier and it’s something that seems really little to you and your team who are in there executing it but it makes a big difference in their day um just in you know allowing them to go faster sell more be more efficient get more done so I think any time that you can make that happen for people um the better off you’ll be so anytime they’re not spending updating a CRM they are focusing on the providing great customer service or customer experience and any like I know we talked about it earlier as well like any automation for sure and you know I’m a big fan of certain tools where it just takes the Putin and feels just put it front and center they know exactly what they have to do to make those changes and and keep the fields as as many piglets as possible where possible um having said that there is one field that I have always love and will continue to love as long as I’m in this industry I think it’s a it’s not just next step but mutually agreed upon Next Step you know it’s a field where you have to keep it open text where it’s not what you think will happen as Next Step but what you have you truly agreed upon with the prospect or with the customer um both of you said yes we agree these are the next steps do you have a next step and the mutual one or do you just the very first time I did that I actually built the custom field to then learn with other tools the custom field made it a little tricky to do the integration so next company I just kept with the next step but made it really clear is actually mutually agreed upon the next step and put a day so it’s a running history so to speak so you can go back and see what happened before did you Last Hope to come two months ago that was a long time ago come on mm-hmm when so would you would you summarize especially if it’s important to rev Ops into leaders you know if there’s something you could automate it automate it and so that might be data entry emails could be task assignments could be could be something else I mean is there anything else that comes to mind that’s that I didn’t mention already I’m a big fan of trying to find ways to automate the creation of contacts so a lot of times that will depend on what your integrated tools are and kind of what your own Tech stack looks like but if you have a separate CS tool like a separate support tool and if you can find a way to go ahead and create the contact for the person who created that ticket and just put it into the CRM as easily as possible or even automatically I think that’s a huge Time Saver because one thing that I come across the most is just not having the right people in there and you know you’re sending an invoice but who are you sending it to like who’s the person that needs to be the main contact you might have a email thread with them that’s like 85 emails long but they’re not even in the CRM and so you’re missing out on the ability to like see that engagement score that engagement Market to that person you know get them involved in like company events if they’re a mystery person no one even knows that they exist it kind of goes back to you know the first thing we talked about is if you want support for this customer that you’re talking to put them in the CRM and anything I can do to help get those contacts created automatically I think is a big one for people at the beginning or 20 emails again I think that’s a huge awesome tip Mallory so you know as a and we’re gonna move on to point number seven here but um you know as a CMO I mean a lot of the time I spend an rcrm is not entering data I spend a lot more time in dashboards and reports and things like that and that’s how I consume a lot of CRM information and so making uh your real-time data and at a glance reporting strong is is a great way to make your sales leaders stay sane and so you know I think the opposite of that would be having a bunch of junk reports or dashboards that are outdated that type of thing so I mean the first thing I’m going to go to Ping here so how do you go about building dashboards that mean something to your business I love dashboards I love real-time dashboards it makes the last year of Dakota so much more exciting um I have always had a dashboard that is the current quarter status the top one is always when you’re at quarter to eight and you know broken up however the company wants to see things and then the rest of the for the most part it’s kind of going backwards right you have these are the revenue numbers the target of the numbers these are your key opportunities or opportunities that are at the much later stage but you will close this quarter and then going down um all the way through to like mql or for marketing for sure um it’s like a one good snapshot I think of do your targets here’s where you are at you might be looking good for this quarter but it’s also always time to look at next order do you have enough to support and exporters Target and so on and so forth and I see the dashboards that act as actually not a static dashboard it’s used by people they give you feedback they make changes as things happen and things change um but I love how you mentioned the real time real hand data it’s key to me I think it’s sort of expected in this day and age right is that things are kind of up to date you’ll be surprised to hear that some people don’t have real-time data it’s 24 hour delay like no not good enough I know the second deal closes you want to know right away you want everybody to know right so well I mean how about the types of reports that you find work best for sales leaders Mallory it’s so hard to get this right I think the reason that I still have a job is because this is like never perfect and never done um you know for myself I just try to make sure we’ve got the right information but I also try to think about the timing that it’s getting delivered and some people I think would refer to this as like you know your cadences like your rev-ops Cadence your forecasting Cadence um if you guys are paying a lot of attention to your forecast on Mondays email out that report on Monday morning so that everyone has it in their inbox they’re kind of reminded of it they see it before the meeting you know you’ve got the right thing at the right time that is something that um I think is is easy to it’s like a quick win you know if you can get it to people at the right time that’s a big benefit it’s easy to do um I’ve also had experiences in the past where you know maybe my cro wanted to visualize something in a certain way and it’s totally different than the way that I would visualize it and so you can either do it their way or you can try to get them to see your way or you can try to land somewhere in the middle but at the end of the day I think people do need to be able to see data in the format that they’re comfortable with it’s like what they’re used to what they need the way their brain works and so I’ve seen too many rev-ups people who kind of want to stand firm and say no you’re looking at it wrong like look at it my way and sometimes that’s a losing battle so um the way it’s presented and and how often you see certain things I think is a little bit more important than what people can give it credit for sometimes and I think in in 101 going podcast called make it clear to the reds or the sales leaders what the CEO or the CFO or you know robots what we are looking for um if it’s the sales manager doing one-on-one for their web if they’re looking at a specific dashboard that has everybody on their team maybe build a filter so that the AES themselves can just get filtered to their own deals their own information and they can have a I I think more productive on the ones that way instead of trying to Second you guys oh my manager cares about this where do I find that um and and the filter is nice where if you have the permission set already set up you know the the different levels of folks can see different information hopefully exactly through what they need and want to see because not everybody necessarily cares about the same thing and and also reports that look forward I know I mentioned that a little bit earlier like two too often people are focusing on current quarter but then building opportunities that pipeline takes time right you need to be planning ahead and if you need to Pivot if there’s more time that you have the better the chance of success will be I think oftentimes you’re managing against answering the question of Oregon hit the number this quarter and that is very well suited for you know a moment in time like here’s what we’ve done so far this quarter here’s the goal here’s our progress to that goal um but that often actually is lacking the context that people would like to see of you know is that trending up or is that trending down and does it fall off a cliff in one month from now to your point like being able to see past and future sometimes is really valuable for pipeline or for like the opportunity creation flow or demand gen um certain things you know you can only Look Backwards up until today but having that context of how it has changed I think is a really good way to show people not just where you are but you know how you’re doing 100 and pipeline specifically that rolling pipeline it’s so helpful to know no question and I think to me the the best reports are reports that I can use with my sales leader also like we have like one set of shared reports doesn’t mean I’m not gonna have my own marketing reports or he’s going to have his own sales reports but and a lot of those will look and share at in in meetings when we get together but having a shared dashboard is often really really helpful to have the single source of Truth and by the way I just saw that Gina chatted in and we provided a resource here which is an e-book that we’ve done last year based on some research which is how to choose the right CRM to align teams and it’s really fascinating data because we had I think 500 different professionals across sales marketing Ops and service fill out this survey and we found that the companies that were growing the fastest also we’re also providing the best customer experience and were the most aligned they judged themselves to be most aligned and I think it’s your CRM that brings you together around customer data and that’s why I think that research is so so fascinating so you can click that little thing that looks like a document you can pick up a copy of that PDF we’d be happy to show that to you and and Gina how can you pop on and tell us how to see the poll results because I don’t know how to do it we got we have 51 percent in the meh 36 say their CRM is a home run home run and 12. in the insane asylum for one this is a session for you so thank you for voting that’s super helpful um hey so those are the seven we covered the seven the last one like I said I think is one of my favorite just real-time data at a glance is so so critical and data hygiene everything leads up to that so what else comes to mind mail or your Ping that you want to share and then our next five remaining minutes [Music] get the feedback from the Reps from the users from the CMO from the CEO what do they want to see that they’re not seeing it’s a it’s fluid it doesn’t have to be set and you know done and forget kind of thing key getting my feedback just sitting next to someone and watching how they work you know that’s not the easiest thing to do now that we’re very remote but get on a screen share look at how your people run through the system where they get stuck where they’re looking where they’re clicking um really great way to try to incorporate better user experiences and you know I think that in operations whether it’s sales Ops or marketing Ops or revocs like we really are a very service oriented group and we do want to make everyone’s lives easier so we can sell more and make more money um so as much as we can give people you know the benefit and the the carrot of hey look at all of this data that you gave to me I analyzed it I figured out that if you do this you have a 10 times better chance of winning the deal this is from data that you gave to me so it tells people why you’re asking for the data it gives them insights back out on the other side I think that’s the most important part of closing the loop because they will not feel like it’s such a Time suck if they are a little bit more invested on you know getting the insights back out um so making sure you’re doing things with the data you collect I think is probably you know top of my list as well help me help you I love that close the loop kind of bring them involve them bring them along for the ride and and prove that you actually use the data by showing it back to them those are phenomenal tips well Mallory Ping it was so great having your expertise on this call today thanks so much thank you so much and and thanks to everybody for joining us really appreciate it and Gina thanks for having us add Insightly on the Rev genius uh webinar here we we loved it so um if you want to learn more about Insightly we’re Insightly.com and we hope you check us out um Gina any final words before we we sign off or am I signing off right by now and by doing this we do have one final thought and question from Brian um Davidson he said aside from reinforcing the why the hygiene thoroughness timeliness Etc is important or coming across as a heavy-handed task master what are some creative or tactical best practices you’ve seen effective in making the CRM a daily or hourly habit with teams I think if you make it the thing that facilitates your one-on-one with your manager that’s really kind of the ultimate way to make sure that everything is in there um I don’t know if that’s as creative as maybe what you’re looking for but you know I think sometimes it’s just good old-fashioned management and you can do everything right in the CRM and there’s still going to be some squirrely guy who refuses to use it he’s probably been at the company for like 15 years and he makes the most money out of everyone we’ve all met him before he’s supposed to post about guy that I talked about and if it might be I think I found it helpful to have reminders on the calendar right maybe it’s the sales manager sending a reminder for a Friday okay not a Friday Thursday afternoon at 4 pm that says hey reminder to update your opportunities or your forecast so that we’re ready to go the next day um very similar to what you said now all right well we’ll leave it there thank you all and thanks to everyone who joined us have a great day thank you everyone bye now foreign [Music]