I am working on a new sales project and I am sharing what is happening, hoping that it may help you in your selling.
I’ve gotten to the point in this project where I need to start building a list of prospects. I need some quick wins in this project, so I’m looking for ways to leverage companies my client has spoken to before. To find these types of companies I’ve been fishing around in my client’s CRM.
CRM fishing
Like every CRM I’ve ever encountered, my client’s CRM data has plenty of issues. There is data missing and there are duplicate records. Trying to build the prospect list that I need within the CRM would be too time-consuming, involving manually updating thousands of records and tens of thousands of fields. There would be no quick wins this way and probably no project for me soon! What the CRM is useful for is running searches on historic data and pulling out various lists of accounts and contacts that I can use to build a new prospect list.
In this particular project, I am looking for medical practices. There is an “industry” field in my client’s CRM that has as an option the value “doctor” but when I ran a keyword search on company names that included the word “MD” I found hundreds of records that were not tagged as “doctor”. To work around this had to run two reports, one using the “industry” field with the value “doctor” then a second report on the company name field to find all company names including the text “MD”.
The next step is to merge these two lists and then dedupe them. Enter Excel. So my next step was to export these two CRM reports into a CSV (Comma Separated Values) for some spreadsheet work.
Clean up starts
I merged both CSV files together and then I used my favorite Excel function “Remove Duplicates”. On my Mac version of Excel that function hides out under “Data”, see screen shot below.
When you run that function you need to be careful what you choose to dedupe on. Usually this is the column that contains the company name (in the screen shot below that field is called “Customer” in my spreadsheet) if you are trying to get a list of unique accounts, as I am here.
After following this process, I had a pretty good list of all the accounts that are actually doctors in the CRM (not a perfect list but a list that passes the “80/20 rule”, which is enough.) This prospect list is a good start but it is missing data that will help me take a smart approach to prospecting. I will need to append information to this initial list. More on that in future emails.
Summary
- When looking for quick sales wins, one great place to look is in “dusty” old CRM records.
- Most CRM data is a mess but the “nuggets” are in there. Be prepared to do some spreadsheet work to find them.
- Don’t rely on colleagues tagging the accounts, or contacts, you need accurately. Most salespeople hate this kind of data entry work and will skip this step if they can. Cross check the data a couple of ways to see if you’ve really found the data you need.
- Fixing fields and records in a CRM can be super-slow. Use Excel (or Google Sheets) initially to do mass clean up and data appending. You need to get on to the selling part quickly!