How to Use a CRM to Close More Deals + How to Set It Up

A Detailed Guide by Sales CRM Experts

The fact that you're here to read this guide is a good start.

Most people just get a CRM and use it without thinking things through. You've just positioned yourself ahead of at least 95% of other people.

I know this to be true because I've been building a new sort of CRM—as a co-founder of Salesflare—for over a decade now. I've learned a lot of things along the way and I've tried to condense them into this guide.

In truth, even though we started our company based on the belief that CRM systems CAN do a better job, we can only do so much to make CRM easier and more human. We can provide better tools, but you are the only one who can use them to truly make an impact.

That's why I wrote this guide. I hope it helps you a little along your journey.

In fact, I believe that if you follow this guide closely, you're on the path to success. All it takes is your dedication.

How to Start Using a CRM the Right Way

Googling "CRM," reading some websites, and trying out some sales CRM software—it's all super easy nowadays.

On the other hand, it still seems hard for most people to start using a CRM in a way that is sustainable and gets results.

Is it really hard? I don't think so. But you need to go beyond just "getting a CRM" and put in some thoughtful effort.

Based on many years of experience helping thousands of companies with their CRM, here's a simple step-by-step plan I recommend you follow.

1. Choose the Right CRM Together

Two questions usually come up when I say this:

1. What is the right CRM for me?
2. Why together? Is it necessary to involve the team?

Choose the Right CRM

First, the right CRM is the one you'll actually use to manage your customer relationships better.

I'm putting the emphasis on "actually use" because, according to many analysts, 30-70% of all CRM implementations resulted in losses or did not improve company performance. I'd personally estimate that of the remaining 30-70%, 90% did not see an improvement anywhere near what's possible or promised.

The core problem is usually that the CRM is not used practically to manage customer relationships in a better way.

This could be because:

• The company prioritizes other organizational goals
• The software is too complicated for its purpose
• The team does not like using the software, was not involved in selecting it, finds it too much work, and/or considers it a waste of time
• The team does not understand well enough how and why to use the CRM
• Etc.

On top of that, companies often select software that doesn't serve their core purpose for the CRM. In B2B sales, this could be as simple as "following up leads better" (this is different in other types of sales: some examples here).

Instead, many companies resort to selecting software that serves as many edge cases and nice-to-have functionalities as possible, completely losing their focus on what matters.

Choose the CRM Together

This brings us to the second question: why select a CRM together?

In short, because it maximizes the chance that you'll actually use the CRM to manage your customer relationships better:

• The team will be able to evaluate the CRM's core usefulness with you
• You'll have their buy-in as well, as you chose together instead of simply imposing your choice
• It also lays an important foundation for further thoughtful collaboration in and around the CRM

Your role is first to define what primary goal you want to achieve with the CRM (be utterly pragmatic), as well as any secondary goals that imply nice-to-have requirements for the CRM.

After that:

1. You or a team member makes a shortlist of CRMs that meet your primary goal.
2. You start free trials with the CRMs on that shortlist and invite your team members (if more than 3-5, you can keep it limited to core team members—note that it always helps to have one of the least digitally savvy team members in that core group for a realistic test).
3. Then—and this is essential—you all actually use some CRMs for a few days or weeks to manage customer relationships, so you can accurately gauge whether you see yourself using them on a daily basis and for the long term.

Don't skip any of these steps. It's tempting, but you'll regret it.

If you don't regret it, it's probably because you're convincing yourself that "no CRM is great," "enterprise software sucks," and/or "salespeople are simply too lazy to use a CRM." Stop thinking that. You’re setting yourself up for failure.

I promise: there is probably a CRM out there that will work for you and your team (provided you keep following the rest of the steps in this guide obviously).

2. Create a Solid Sales Process + Tracking Strategy

Finding software that you'll actually use to hit your primary goal is great, but you need more than the software: you need to clearly define the process it will help you streamline.

Without a sales process, it's hard to streamline anything.

If you don't have a sales process yet, you're definitely not alone. I talk to companies every day that have no clear idea of what it looks like for them.

But this should be a wake-up call: you need a sales process. How else are you going to manage potential customers at scale and get organized around it?

Define a Sales Process

Defining a sales process can be very simple. A typical B2B sales process looks like this:

• Lead: People (likely) have a need for what you're offering.
• Contacted: You've contacted them about it.
• Qualified: You've confirmed that they do have that need, budget for a solution, a definite timeline, etc.
• Proposal made: You've made a proposal for them that outlines how you'll solve it and what it'll cost.
• Won: You've come to an agreement.
• Lost: Anywhere along this process, it didn't work out.

Your sales process probably has some important nuances though. So, just sit down and define it in the clearest and most actionable way possible. Keep in mind that everyone in your team needs to be able to easily understand and follow it.

It's best to define the sales process in a shared document (Google Docs or a shared Word file) so everyone can re-read it if necessary. This also makes it easier for new joiners to get up to speed.

Define What You'll Track and How

A second essential thing to define well is what data you'll track and how.

Most CRMs offer you a ton of possibilities when it comes to what you can track in terms of data, but if you try to keep track of everything and it requires a lot of work and discipline, you likely won't track anything.

Therefore, you need to:

• Decide what data is essential to track vs. what is nice-to-have data.
• Clearly outline what the data means (e.g., if you have a dropdown with options).
• Define when you'll track it and how you can make this as easy as possible.

You'll want to optimize for using the CRM consistently and accurately, not for being 100% comprehensive. Always keep the primary goal (see above) in mind.

Again, it's best to write it all down in a shared document so the whole team has access to it.

Even better and recommended: discuss it with your team and write down your decisions in this document. The higher the team involvement, the more likely your CRM plans will work out.

3. Customize the CRM Accordingly

You've picked a CRM and defined a sales process and data tracking strategy. Awesome! You're ready to customize the CRM to your company and its unique way of working.

Configure Your Sales Pipeline

If you've gone through the steps, you should have defined a sales process with clear, actionable steps by now.

In a CRM, this is typically represented by a sales pipeline with stages. It's a visual representation of the sales process.

Most CRMs offer a default pipeline with default stages, so start from this and customize it:

• Head to the Settings (in Salesflare, this is Settings > Configure pipelines).
• Give the stages the right names.
• Add any stages when you miss them and place them in the right order.
• Customize things like "stage probability" (the average probability that a sales opportunity in that stage is won in the end), "color" (if the CRM visually assigns colors to stages), etc.

Et voilà, you have your very own sales pipeline.

It helps to have the stages well defined in a shared document, so it's clear to everyone in what case exactly a sales opportunity belongs in a certain stage. If you don't have it yet, do it now. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of misunderstandings and useless sales forecasts.

Thinking of creating multiple sales pipelines? My recommendation is to only do this if you have multiple sales processes—not for different salespeople, products, or business units, unless the process is different. Otherwise, you'll cripple your ability to create great sales reports and dashboards, at least if you're reporting or segmenting by stage.

Create Custom Fields

If you've previously defined what essential data you will track, there may have been data points that you can't fit in the standard fields of the CRM you've chosen. You'll have to create custom fields for those.

Simply head to the CRM's settings (in Salesflare, this is Settings > Customize fields), select the right entity (account/company/organization, contact/person, opportunity/deal, ...) and create a field.

It's important to select the right type of field, because it will help you keep things as organized as possible. If you select the wrong type, you may find it hard to filter your data or build great reports and dashboards. Plus, some types of fields may come with certain functionality (like URL fields may be clickable).

Set Permissions

If you're part of a bigger sales team, or part of a smaller sales team in a bigger organization, you may have tighter rules about who can see, edit, do, etc., what in the CRM.

That's why most CRMs come with a permissions system, usually on one of the higher pricing plans.

These permissions systems are useful, but they can be lethal if overcomplicated.

If you see a CRM with a complicated permissions system, run. Chances are almost 100% that it's full of mistakes. As a permissions system touches almost every software feature in a deep way, there is no way that the product team has thought it through correctly.

Also, for your own sake, keep it simple. If your team does not understand who can do what in the CRM and why, then they'll inevitably get frustrated. Frustration leads to using the CRM less. And a CRM that isn't used isn't just useless, it's a huge missed opportunity.

A few simple rules:

• Keep things limited to 3-4 different roles (like admin, manager, team member, viewer) and a few different groups (like business units, countries, ...).
• Define what scope of data and sales pipeline access each of those should have.
• That's it. Stop.

Many CRMs may go way beyond that, but I assure you, you'll get lost. And your team will get even more lost.

Configure Other Settings

Those were the basic settings, but there are probably a lot more settings available in your CRM.

I recommend going through them so you understand what's available/possible. Apart from some things like "Regional settings," don't set them just yet. Things are usually set a certain way by default for a reason, and it's helpful to get a little bit of experience before changing them.

Invite Your Team

If you haven't done this yet at the very start while choosing the CRM together, make sure to invite your team members now. It's time to get everyone fully set up on the CRM, plus you'll probably need to have them onboard to assign things to them during the data importing, which is coming up soon.

4. Integrate with Your Email, Calendar & LinkedIn

For some of our customers, the very first question they ask on the very first call is, "How do I integrate X?" with X being some sort of website form or an email newsletter software.

While I'm happy to help with integrating those systems, it's not truly essential in the grand scheme of things. And it's not even the most important integration.

The most important integrations are with:

• Your email inbox (like Gmail or Outlook): A lot of communication and information happens through there.
• Your calendar: All your meetings with customers are (or should probably be) scheduled there.
• Your LinkedIn (at least in a B2B context): Your professional connections and messages are mostly there.

So, if you haven't done this yet, make sure you and your team have these integrations fully set up. Especially if you're using an intelligent CRM like Salesflare, it will mean a quantum leap in terms of usefulness.

BONUS: While you're at it, take a moment for everyone to install your CRM's mobile app. It will help you access your customers easily on the go, may send you live notifications about them, and may synchronize your call history (at least if you use an Android phone).

5. Import Your Existing Data

You may have some existing data somewhere, such as:

• Existing customers in your accounting system
• Contacts in your email newsletter software
• A spreadsheet with leads or prospective customers
• Data from your previous CRM

Now is the time to import it.

In most cases, it suffices to export your data into a .csv file, which is a sort of standard table format with values separated by commas.

Because it's a table format, you may have to separate the sheets/tables into different entities (like accounts/companies/organizations, contacts/people, and opportunities/deals) before importing it. You can often also import the same file into multiple entities while mapping only the columns that relate to this entity.

If there is any important data you can't fit into standard fields, you can consider creating a custom field for it. As said before, however, don't just blindly create fields. Make sure they are essential and it's feasible for the team to keep them up to date. Otherwise, you'll just create issues.

6. Train the Team on Your Approach

You've got the key things set up, and—if you've done a systematic job—you've got it all documented as well.

Finalize the Documentation

If you haven't done that yet, now is your final chance—and it is a big one because you'll be training the team on how it all works.

I recommend documenting everything in a shared document (again: Word, Google Docs, Notion, ...), not in a presentation. It forces you to focus on writing clear and well-structured text, rather than focusing on the packaging and writing superficial slides.

New joiners will also much more easily be able to learn everything when reading a nicely written document rather than flicking through a presentation.

Train the Team

This training essentially has three goals:

1. Convince the team that using the CRM is crucial for them (and the company).
2. Show them what the CRM can do for them and how, so they can use it to its full potential.
3. Discuss how you intend to use the CRM as a team to streamline what you do so everyone can be working in the same direction.

If you do this well, you're golden. You're essentially laying the groundwork for success. So don't skip any steps and don't treat it as a necessary evil. This step is crucial.

During this training, it's good to use both the documentation and the software as a visual guide. This enables people to learn in the most effective way. It also gives them an anchor point for everything you're saying.

If you're doing it well, you'll need at least 60-90 minutes to explain everything. But don't make your explanations longer than one hour. People will start zoning out.

Reserve 30 minutes for questions and discussion, so you have ample time to address anything that comes up. If not, that's fine. They always have to digest it a little and they certainly need to feel what it's like in practice too.

That's why it's best to organize an interactive follow-up session about three weeks later. Ask people to send you questions upfront, check out what they've been doing in the CRM, and use that as the basis for discussion. Adapt the documentation if needed and show the CRM where appropriate.

7. Start Tracking Your Key Metrics

If you've taken all the above seriously, you've built the foundation for something powerful. And you've only just begun.

If your team tracks everything well in the CRM, the sales data they create will be a treasure trove for potential insights and improvements. Together, you may be able to 10x your revenue. Some of our customers massively boosted their sales using their CRM.

To start doing this, it's important to define some key sales metrics and track them. Common metrics include:

• Sales Revenue: How much money you’re bringing in.
• Sales Growth: How much your sales are increasing over time.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that become customers. It’s also interesting to analyze this on a stage-by-stage basis.
• Average Deal Value: The average value of each sale.
• Sales Cycle Length: How long it takes to close a sale.
• Amount of New Deals: How well you keep filling up your sales pipeline.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much it costs to get a new customer.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): The total revenue you can expect from a customer over their lifetime.
• Top Lost Reasons: Why you most often lose out on deals.
• Top Lead Sources: Where most of your potential customers come from.
• Activity per Rep: How many emails, calls, meetings, etc., every rep is having with their leads.

In Salesflare, most of those are measured by default in the "Insights." Some other metrics you may want to create custom reports for.

No need to go crazy on the reporting at this point, but it's good to start measuring some key metrics. When you keep an eye on those, investigate how they perform and evolve, and try to figure out why, you'll inevitably stumble upon some big opportunities for improvement.

And that is what a good CRM should be able to do for you. It should help you manage your customer relationships in a better way... and then to keep finding ways to do it even better.

How to Use a CRM to Close More Deals

If you've rigorously followed the above steps, you're already better off than 95-99% of other companies.

If you haven't, please go back now. What I'll explain below is just empty words if you haven't laid the foundation. We can't take it to 11 if you haven't taken it to 10 (or at least 9) first.

While every CRM homepage will tell you that they'll boost your sales, very few actually will. And that's usually partly their fault and partly yours. So make sure you do your part of the job. It's not rocket science, but simply an appeal to go about things in a thoughtful way.

With that being said, let's explore some ways to maximize your chances of closing more deals by using your CRM.

1. Make Sure Using the CRM Stays Frictionless, So It's Actually Used

I've made the point above, and I'll make it again: a CRM that isn't used isn't just useless, it's a huge missed opportunity.

A CRM that isn't used can't help you manage your customer relationships better. It also:

• Doesn't create any sales insights
• Doesn't allow you to forecast your sales and hence cash reserves (quite essential if you’re leading a consultancy, agency or startup)
• Doesn't create transparency and collaboration in your team
• Doesn't enable proper coaching
• ...

It's the basis for everything.

If you have followed the steps above, you started off well. But you can't let it slip.

You need to keep making sure:

• Your CRM effectively helps your team to manage customer relationships better
• They actually believe that it helps them do a better job, so they use it
• Everybody understands what the sales process looks like and brings up issues with it if needed
• They understand what data is essential to track and what it means
• They are not frustrated by an abundance of fields, required fields, extensive
• Everyone has the necessary integrations set up and apps installed
• They know how the permissions work, what metrics are tracked, etc.
• New joiners are also brought to the same level as the others

It's an ongoing commitment to keep things running smoothly. Because as long as that's the case, you'll be able to keep pushing the accelerator. And, to follow the analogy further, it also avoids a sudden breakdown.

2. Get the Sales Team on the Same Page

It must be clear by now, but I can't stress it enough, so here it is again: using a CRM is a team effort.

Getting the whole sales team on the same page has so many advantages:

• If everyone interprets and tracks data the same way, the data has a consistent meaning, so it effectively becomes a communication medium between team members as well as with your future selves (so it also becomes a reliable memory in the CRM brain).
• This consistent meaning across the whole sales team also makes any data analysis across the sales team make sense.
• It allows for good coaching, insights, improvements, and so much more.

What does it take? A regular discussion with the team that is transformed into a written but living playbook (did I already say “shared document”?).

I cover many important discussion topics above, like what the sales process looks like, what key data to track, how to collaborate, etc., but on a regular basis, it's also just good to:

• Review the past period: write down what went well and what didn't go so well
• Find solutions for what didn't go so well
• Extract learnings from what did go well
• Maybe demonstrate some cool new things you worked on

This can be a bottom-up way to empower your whole team to find ways to improve together.

You can do this sort of meeting every two weeks or every month. It can be, for instance, called a "retrospective" (if you're into agile methodologies) or a "sales team meeting" (to emphasize the team aspect).

It's usually good to separate this meeting from any "sales pipeline review," as it's more about taking a step back and less about the concrete sales pipeline, which requires a significantly different mindset.

3. Use Sales Insights to Improve Continuously

While encouraging collaboration and bottom-up involvement is a great thing, it's also good to dive into the sales data from the top down to identify opportunities to improve.

Of course, it all doesn't work if the sales team doesn't fully and consistently use the CRM. You can't extract valid insights from data that is incomplete and incoherent. (If this is the case and you haven't read this guide fully yet, go back and restart at the top.)

If you can, it's a powerful thing to do. Some teams are able to double their revenue based on one simple insight they extract from an analysis of their sales funnel.

Now, it really becomes powerful if you do it systematically on an ongoing basis. That's when your company can live up to its fullest potential.

It's hard to give you great pointers because opportunities are to be found everywhere, but it's good to ask yourself questions like:

• Why is my conversion from this stage to the next only x%?
• Why does it take so long in this stage of the sales process?
• What are the types of customers I have the most success with?
• What lead sources bring me the most new leads... and new customers?
• Who has the highest success rate and what are they exactly doing?

Dig through the data. Ask yourself questions. You'll be surprised by what you'll find.

4. Streamline and Automate Routine Tasks As You Go

Why is automation only mentioned now? Doesn't it have high potential to improve things?

It definitely has a high potential to improve things, but:

• You need a strong basis first, with solid processes and consistent, quality data.
• Most gains from automation are cost gains, not revenue gains... and the biggest potential gains in small to medium-sized businesses are usually revenue gains.

An exception to the rule is CRM data automation because it helps build that basis with consistent, quality data. If you don't automate most of the data, then salespeople have to manually input it... which—despite some sales directors' wild hopes—is a pipedream.

Once you have that strong basis and things are running smoothly, you can start streamlining and automating routine tasks as you go.

A good approach is to build an automation reflex that kicks in when things become seriously boring. When anything starts feeling like factory work, then it may be ripe for automation.

The advantages of this approach are that it:

• Leaves space for experimentation before you automate something and more or less set it in stone.
• Leads to a more human result than when you automate something from the get-go, as you first apply your empathy to a lot of individual cases and only then look for a repeatable, standard way to automate it.
• Allows you to continuously automate more and more of your sales tasks.
• Starts from what makes sense in the process, not from what makes sense in theory.

The only thing you need to do is build that automation reflex.

A common automation process may look as follows over time:

• You start looking for leads on LinkedIn in your own network.
• You find out that some react better to your outreach and you define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
• You start filtering out lists for that ICP and contact them manually, researching each of them individually and crafting a compelling email message.
• You start to find some email messages that work. You turn them into email templates. You may leave a line for some unique personalization per lead. Any follow-up happens manually.
• You start building an automated email sequence. You write the personalized line in Excel, then import the list of leads and set the sequence live.
• You find a way to prompt AI to write that personalized line for you.
• ...

I'll stop here because this process can still go on for a while. At some point, you either only still do the meetings, or you're completely automated away by an AI salesperson or an AI CRM. It all depends on where efficacy levels start dropping because an essential human feel or interaction is lost.

If you don't automate gradually, chances are that the human feel is lost very quickly because it's very hard to create this sort of experience out of the blue.

Allow me to summarize: build an automation reflex and automate gradually when you feel that it makes sense and doesn't degrade the human feel of the process. It's the best way to get a great result.

5. Clean Up the Sales Pipeline Regularly

Making more sales by using a CRM is a story of continuously going forward. But it's also a story of continuously not going backward.

A CRM needs regular clean-up. And the part that gets the dirtiest the quickest is the sales pipeline.

Why the sales pipeline? One word: hope.

When you start using a CRM it's a clean slate. You start filling it with lots of potential customers. You work through those and some of these opportunities make it to the "won" stage. Many of them don't. But your hope that they will eventually make it can be much stronger than it should be.

The result of hope is that you'll quickly end up with a pipeline full of dead opportunities. This has many disadvantages:

• Your sales forecasts are inevitably off.
• You fool yourself into thinking you don't need to create new leads, which sets you up for future failure.
• You spend too much time on opportunities that don't deserve it while spending too little time on opportunities that actually have a good chance.
• You lose the overview of what's actually going on.

What's the remedy? Simple: a regular clean-up.

Many teams use their "sales pipeline review" meeting as an opportunity to move dead and disqualified opportunities to the "lost" stage. It's a good fallback mechanism, but I'd argue that your primary approach should be based on realistic discipline and a few good saved filters.

If you're using Salesflare, a good saved filter can be a combination of:

• Close date more than x days ago
• Last interaction/email/meeting date more than x days ago
• Last stage change date more than x days ago
• And maybe a filter on certain stages (at least excluding won and lost)

You can build a filter like this, try it out, and save it if you like it. Then return to it on a regular basis.

You can even combine it with a bulk edit of the opportunity stage to move everything that matches the filters to "lost" at once.

Cleaning up your pipeline is not optional. If you don't do it, your pipeline will become a mess, it won't be useful to you anymore, you'll stop using it, and you'll gradually go backward again instead of forward.

Using a CRM Actively & Thoughtfully is Key

If I'd have to summarize everything I've shared above, it's to use your CRM actively and to do it thoughtfully.

It's not complicated. Just (re-)read the guide above. There is nothing crazy in there.

All it asks is a little dedication to the craft. Not all at once, but a little commitment every day to making things better and not worse.

Sales is a daily struggle, but it is much less of a struggle if you understand that part of that struggle lies in staying organized, thinking things through, and communicating well with your team.

If you're still looking for the right CRM partner, send me a message. We understand your struggle and we build software that makes achieving the above as easy as possible.

And if you need advice, don't hesitate to reach out either. We're here for you!

I hope you liked this post. If you did, spread the word!

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