More Stuff On CRM: Know In Advance What You Want to Do.

by Chris Johnson

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

You can use Google Docs as a more effective CRM than most people do.  I know, for a while, I did. It’s better than what most CRMs do which is to hide you from your people.

Complexity is not your friend.  Also, having permanent storage is not that useful either, unless you’re in the business of collecting names.   FACEBOOK can more or less be permanent storage for your longterm loosely tied contacts.  Anyway.

Every time I add someone in, one of a few things needs to happen:

1. I need to get more data on the guy TO call him.
2. I need to call him/her.
3. I need to assign an activity series to him.

These are separate events.  I can’t be doing all of them at once, so I seperate out the #1 part of the activity series.  I do my ‘who the hell am I gonna call’ research basically a couple of times a week.  I start with:

1. People that Add me on twitter (I’m about 400 behind right now)
2. People that I find in a couple of LinkedIn Groups that add me.
3. People with truly shitty websites with no title tags, and a flash intro.

Because I practice a half assed version of GTD, I’ve got the ubiquitous capture habit down.  (Mac users: K-notes plus Dashboard is a winning combo for ubiquitous capture.  PC users:  My friend Amy from Twitter wrote a script called CunningNote)  So these people all get brought into something.  For me, it’s a sheet in a spreadsheet.  I put name, email, where I found ’em, twitter handle, phone number, industry and website.    Alt-Tab and I’m in, Alt-Tab and I’m out.  Takes 10 seconds and it’s good mental exercise to try and get it right without going back to look. I do this when my mental energy is sapped.  This is something that I intend to eventually have someone else do, but I need my revenue to triple before that can happen.

So, the next thing I do is make sure I have an inventory of about 150 people to call at the moment.  That way I never procrastinate calling and start doing ‘research.’  I batch ’em into groups.  My ‘calling’ that I talked about in my last post had very little to do with lead follow up–that’s a separate topic for a separate post.  I do lead follow up, and it’s not part of my 90 minutes a day.  Takes about half an hour a day, and that’s done via email, phone twitter etc.  I need to be more compelling with lead follow up and more valuable.   Nametag Scott convinced me of that.  “Hey, um where’s my money,” is hideously repulsive, so I need to plan in advance what VALUE I can give.

So when someone becomes a LEAD, that is to say that in my judgment they have genuine interest and can benefit, pay and might do so, they go into my database.  Currently it’s Daylite.  Daylite stopped me from BUILDING my own CRM, but it’s not the end all be all in its current iteration.  Anyway, neither here nor there.   What’s important is that I can create a contact quickly and assign a category to them.  My cats are:  Old Jag, Lead, Customer, Personal, Designer, Coder, Sphere.   That’s it.  Nothing more is needed for it, I could endlessly parse them, but look, once I get to about 1,500 high quality contacts?

So when someone becomes a LEAD (about what, 10% of my attempts)?  They go into my database.

They all start out on a follow up series I called “2 Weeks.”  A lot of people that are leads don’t quite make it into the database, they get closed anyway…and I  was between CRMS until I decided (along with Phil Hodgen, International Tax Law Guy) to just use Daylite.

They get:

1.) 4 articles on how to convert leads from blogging and social media (one every 3 days).

2.) I do a google alerts search for their industry and pass it along (takes 1 minute, and nobody uses alerts that’s not here, and people love it).

3.) A call every 3 days while in process (Right now it’s the lame-o ‘hey where’s my deal,’ but I’m gonna improve that process tomorrow).

4.) My video on how to find leads on Twitter using TweetDeck.

Just for being a lead.  I want more automation of my sales process, but not at the expense of sales opportunities.  Automation junkies are obsessed with not touching anyone.  I wanna touch, I wanna ask and answer questions.  Mark Green said the power of CRM is the belly to belly intimate contact.  I agree.  People ain’t gonna buy a house based on an autoresponder.  Trying is for morons.  Use auto responders to demonstrate commitment, virtuosity…not to sell for you.