There are some amazing CRMs available on the web. A lot of great innovation has happened in that space. Some are specialized to industries and some try to be everything to everyone.
Sometimes you don’t need a full CRM. Maybe your sales team is small (or only you) so you don’t need need all of the lead splitting and pipeline graphs. Or maybe your industry is fairly old-school so social media integration isn’t a need. But, no matter what you can’t be having potential business fall through the cracks by not being on top of things.
If you don’t need the bells and whistles then Trello is something you could look at to manage your sales pipeline. It free as well as being dead simple to use.
Start by creating a new Trello board for your sales pipeline.
Add your sales team.
Create lists for each stage of your sales pipeline.
I use the following lists:
- Leads
- Follow Up (1 week out)
- Follow Up (2 weeks out)
- Follow Up (3 weeks out)
- Proposal
- Closed (Won)
- Closed (Lost)
Rather than use a list for when to follow up you can also add a due date for a card and then get notifications for when you need to act on it.
When you get a lead you create a new card for it.
Tip: You can forward emails to Trello to have cards automatically created.
Once you have created a card you can assign it to a member of your sales team.
You can use labels to keep track of either the probability of the deal or the size of the deal.
Every time you interact with the prospect you should add a comment to the card. Trello will have the full history of those as well as any movements between each.
Move the card between lists depending on the stage of the deal.
Hopefully you’ll be moving many to “Closed (won)”.
With Trello you can get much deeper into the sale process as well. You can create checklists under each card if you want to track more. For example you could create a checklist for the actual proposal with a item for each stop of the process.
If you’re a small business I urge you to not automatically go with the first CRM that comes up in your Google search. Do some research and find the one that best fits your needs. If your needs aren’t complicated then maybe Trello would fit the bill for you. And you could redirect the cash you would have spent on CRM software on something else.
