Services
TAYA

They Ask, You Answer Mastery

A coaching & training program that drives unmatched sales & marketing results.

Sales

Sales Performance Mastery

Improve the competencies and close rates of your sales organization.

Web design

Website Mastery

Web design, development & training for your team.

HubSpot

HubSpot Mastery

Everything you need to get the most from HubSpot.

AI Mastery

AI Enablement Mastery

Unlock the power of AI in all aspects of your revenue operations.

Discover how IMPACT’s services can help take your business to the next level. Book a free 30-minute coaching session Book a free 30-minute coaching session
Learning Center
Learning Center

Learning Center

Free resources to help you improve the way you market, sell and grow your business.

Discover how IMPACT’s services can help take your business to the next level. Book a free 30-minute coaching session Book a free 30-minute coaching session

Free Assessment: How does your sales & marketing measure up?

Get Started
Close

Free Assessment:

How does your sales & marketing measure up?
Take this free, 5-minute assessment and learn what you can start doing today to boost traffic, leads, and sales.
Get Started
Kyle Bento

By Kyle Bento

Dec 12, 2016

Topics:

Inbound Sales
Subscribe
Join 40,000+ sales and marketing pros who receive our weekly newsletter.

Get the most relevant, actionable digital sales and marketing insights you need to make smarter decisions faster... all in under five minutes.

Thanks, stay tuned for our upcoming edition.
Inbound Sales

How to Setup Your Sales Process in a CRM

Kyle Bento

By Kyle Bento

Dec 12, 2016

How to Setup Your Sales Process in a CRM

Untitled-1-compressor.jpgHaving a CRM that’s fully integrated into your organization's sales process can be one of the most beneficial ways to understand and improve the performance of your marketing and, with all the incredible options on the market for free (or affordable) CRMs, there aren’t too many reasons not to leverage one within your organization.  

In this guide, we’ll cover how to start translating the process you’re currently using to monitor your sales process into a CRM. We’ll use HubSpot as an example, but the process can be applied to many different CRMs.  

Also, we’ll briefly cover what to do if you don’t already have a sales process defined.

End of the Spreadsheet Sales Process

If you’re not using a CRM to track your sales process, there’s a good chance you’re relying on spreadsheets or you have yet to develop your sales process.

Either way, you’re in the right place.

For those who have yet to define their sales process, I recommend getting started with this in depth guide on Lead Management. It includes the basics you’ll need to start defining a fitting sales process for your organization. This is an important first step to setting up a CRM that works well for you.

If you already have a process defined and are using spreadsheets (or maybe even pen and paper) to track and forecast your revenue generation, the benefits to moving to a platform like HubSpot’s CRM are massive.  Not only are they easier to use, but they provide tools that enhance your team's ability to perform.  We cover some of those tools here.

Getting Started with a CRM

To walk through the process, we’ll use HubSpot’s free Sales Pipeline spreadsheet template.  This likely contains similar information to what you currently are documenting and our goal is to get that same information into a CRM.

The first step is the easiest: sign up! If you’re planning on using HubSpot’s CRM, you can follow this link at the bottom of this page to sign up for the CRM.

CRM Setup

Step one is critical. We need to ensure that your CRM is setup to precisely follow your sales process. This is important for several reasons.  

For starters, we need to make sure your CRM is getting the right information from the reps that use it.  We do this by customizing the CRM with your own unique Properties, Pipelines & Deal Stages.

CRM Properties

how-to-setup-your-sales-process-in-a-crm-properties.png

Above, you’ll see deal properties common to most organizations like Deal Stage, Size, and Contact Name. These properties (among others) can be found by default within HubSpot.

When first setting up the CRM, I’d recommend looking at the default properties and thinking about how you can map information critical to your sales process to them.

CRM Contacts, Companies, & Deals

If you’re using the HubSpot CRM, it’s also important to understand the difference in how information is stored for contacts, companies, & deals.

Contacts can be associated with multiple companies and deals. For example, if a prospect is currently involved in two different purchases, that contact (and their assigned company) can be assigned to two separate deals.

This separation allows you to look at information from the contact, company, and the deal level, which is useful for understanding which companies you do the most business with, who is involved in the sales process, and how specific deals are progressing.

There’s a good chance that you’ll need to add some custom properties unique to your business.  For example, IMPACT uses the custom contact property “IMPACT VIP” to track who is a member of our VIP program.

Here’s how you add custom properties to the CRM.

Pipelines, Deal Stages & Probability

The last thing we’ll get set up are your deal stages.  Deal stages allow you to track how opportunities progress through your sales process.  Each stage is also assigned a probability which helps you forecast what’s more likely to close.

The stages live within pipelines which are useful for separating different sales processes. This could be for different product offerings or deal sources.

IMPACT uses two pipelines, one for creating new opportunities and one for existing opportunities.

If your process has defined steps, I recommend creating a deal stage for each major step.  It’s important, however, to keep this simple.  Choose only the stages which, at a glance, give you an update on the progress of a deal.

For example, your deal stages may look something like this:

how-to-setup-your-sales-process-in-a-crm-pipeline.png

Each of IMPACT’s pipelines have about 8 stages.  I wouldn’t recommend exceeding this number unless you’re sales process is exceptionally long!

Once you’ve solidified which stages you’ll build within your first pipeline, you can follow the process here to get them set up in the HubSpot CRM.

Next steps

In the next article, we’ll cover introducing your team to the new tool & how you can ensure their successful adoption of the CRM in the process.

Before then, I recommend importing your data as discussed here.

Making the Case for a CRM

As you can see, getting set up in a CRM is a relatively simple process that yields some serious benefits.  Not only does the tool itself help increase productivity, close rate, and accountability of your sales team, the act of setting up a CRM forces you to define your sales process.

Once that process is defined, you’re on your way to improving it both inside and outside of the CRM.

Free Assessment:

How does your sales & marketing measure up?
Take this free, 5-minute assessment and learn what you can start doing today to boost traffic, leads, and sales.

Related Articles

The Best Sales Enablement Tools for Your Team in 2024

November 16, 2023
John Becker John Becker

Sales vs Marketing in 2024: What’s The Difference?

October 8, 2023
Marcus Sheridan Marcus Sheridan

The 6 Most Common Sales Problems — And How To Solve Them

October 5, 2023
John Becker John Becker

4 Common Assignment Selling Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

August 14, 2023
Tom DiScipio Tom DiScipio

A Sales Presentation Is Not What Your Buyers Want

July 26, 2023
Chris Duprey Chris Duprey

HubSpot CRM Review — Pros and Cons

July 24, 2023
John Becker John Becker

Your Buyers Want to Control the Sales Process; Here’s How to Let Them

July 12, 2023
Marcus Sheridan Marcus Sheridan

The Best Sales Training Programs Check These 4 Boxes

June 8, 2023
John Becker John Becker

My Best Sales Reps Haven’t Hit Their Quotas All Year: What Do I Do?

June 7, 2023
Marcus Sheridan Marcus Sheridan

How to Run a Revenue Team Meeting (+ Example Agendas)

June 5, 2023
Chris Marr Chris Marr

How To Improve Your Sales Process

May 28, 2023
John Becker John Becker

How To Create a Sales Process That Closes More Deals

April 3, 2023
Ramona Sukhraj Ramona Sukhraj

5 Ways to Get Your Sales Team Excited About Creating Content

March 23, 2023
Ramona Sukhraj Ramona Sukhraj

5 Real-Life Sales Scenarios Where You Need Assignment Selling (+ Templates)

February 16, 2023
Tom DiScipio Tom DiScipio

What is Assignment Selling? Using Content to Close Deals Faster

February 13, 2023
Ramona Sukhraj Ramona Sukhraj

The Lazy Sales Technique Your Buyers Hate? Scoping Disguised as Discovery

February 8, 2023
Chris Duprey Chris Duprey

4 Tried-and-True Tips for Using Video in Sales Prospecting

January 19, 2023
Melissa Prickett Melissa Prickett

4 Videos That Will Streamline Your Sales Process — And Don’t Require a Videographer

January 18, 2023
Zach Basner Zach Basner

Here's Why You Keep Getting Garbage Inbound Marketing Leads

December 19, 2022
Jessica Palmeri Jessica Palmeri

How Does They Ask, You Answer Benefit Sales?

December 7, 2022
John Becker John Becker

What Is a Revenue Team?

December 5, 2022
Ramona Sukhraj Ramona Sukhraj

24 Essential Questions for Understanding Your Ideal Customer (+ Infographic)

December 1, 2022
Dia Vavruska Dia Vavruska

What Is a Buyer Persona (And Do You Really Need One)?

November 21, 2022
Chris Marr Chris Marr

How to Make Role-plays Actually Valuable for Your Sales Team

November 10, 2022
Ramona Sukhraj Ramona Sukhraj

Want to Win More and Improve Company Culture? Do More Role-playing

November 9, 2022
Marcus Sheridan Marcus Sheridan