Question for people who’ve set up CRMs for teams under 10. The pattern I keep hearing is that reps update it for a month, then quietly stop, and by month 3 the founder is chasing updates in Slack. When you’ve seen a small team actually stick with it past that point, what made the difference?
How in the world does a sales org operate without a up-to-date CRM (either home grown or purchased)? If that’s happening you’ve got bigger problems. It’s matter of making it a daily practice for the sales people involved, if not multiple times per day.
Agree it’s a bigger problem, that’s kind of my point. At 40 reps there’s a manager whose job is making it daily practice. At 5, the founder is also the top seller, and nobody’s enforcing anything. So what actually makes it daily practice when there’s no one policing it? Have you seen a team that small hold the habit, and what was different about them?
Making it an non-optional, expected part of their job, and actually screensharing and reviewing it daily/weekly in stand-ups and sales review meetings, so that the stragglers are shamed into compliance.
That’s the useful bit for me: the screenshare. The CRM stops being a database you’re asked to fill and becomes the thing on screen when the team meets, so an empty column is visible. Closest thing I’ve heard to a mechanism rather than a rule. Thanks Zack.
I think there are two ways I approach it, the first is ensuring everything is logged automatically in the CRM, so ensuring emails are connected to the CRM and using tools that automatically sync. In our case using Hubspot, Aircall and TL;DV so no emails, calls or meetings aren't logged to a client. The next is tying commission payouts to CRM reports. If it's not in the CRM, it doesn't exist. Surprising how quickly this gets people using it. We also have a weekly deal surgery on Mondays where we go through the pipeline and a calendar invite the Friday before ensures that this is updated.
Ross D. The auto-logging point is the one I keep coming back to. If the email, call, and meeting are already in there, “update the CRM” shrinks to moving a card and typing a next step, and that’s a 30-second job on Monday instead of a chore. The commission rule is brutal, and I believe it works. Does it hold at a team small enough that the founder is one of the reps? That’s where I’ve seen the rule quietly stop applying to whoever wrote it. Quick one: how big is the team running the Monday surgery, and who owns the Friday invite?
I worked with a small sales team. We added enough required properties to keep the CRM on track at each deal stage. Like Ross, we log everything—emails, calls, etc.—directly in the CRM. I also created a “Clean Your Room” dashboard. It includes around 10 reports that help us identify missing information. For example, it flags deals that were created without a contact. It works really well.
Like the name “Clean Your Room,” bookmarking it. Which of the 10 reports catches the most? I’d guess deals with no contact and deals with no next activity, but curious whether something boring like a missing amount outranks both…..
Deals without a contact or company were the first ones. Then, deals without an amount in the pipeline after a certain deal stage. For example, after a discovery call. The CEO wanted better visibility into segmentation, so I also created reports for deals without segmentation based on custom properties. For this company, I also set up some automations to copy properties from the company record to the deal. That way, we could track those properties as well.
Company to deal property copying is clever too. I’d assumed that was a report problem and you solved it at write time instead.
Exactly! I wanted to solve it at the source rather than relying only on reports. But things can still go wrong pretty easily. Someone could delete the property from the company record, for example, and then there’s nothing to copy to the deal. That’s why I also built the “Clean Your Room” dashboard as a safety net.
Makes sense. Write time rules and a safety net for doing different jobs, because the rule only covers the path you thought of. This thread has given me more than a month of reading reviews did. Thanks, Dubray B.. If you ever want a second pair of eyes on something you’re building, happy to return the favour.
With regards to the just moving a card, we've set up the pipeline so at each stage certain fields are required which makes updating more involved that adding notes to a deal which is often forgotten, the added upside of this is it enables us to do cohort analysis and report back on conversion rates post certain objections, problems that led to the highest conversion etc. With regards to the deal surgery it is usually held by our Head of Sales or if he is away, held by me, but in situations where the founder is a rep I found it can be really useful to have it hosted round robin, it keeps everyone honest and stops a "Me against them" culture. Monday Surgery is split amongst Head of Sales, 3 AEs and 4 BDRs.
That’s a correction I needed. I’d been treating every required field as friction to strip out. You’re saying the structured ones pay for themselves because they turn into cohort analysis, which a notes box never does. Guessing the ones that work are dropdowns rather than free text? A required picklist is one click and reportable. A required text box is where I’d expect people to type “n/a”. Round robin hosting is the smartest thing in this thread.
Sounds like 2 things:
Leadership issue: the CEO should be the one making it daily practice.
Communication issue: are you making sure you're getting across the importance of keeping everything up to date?
