The sales academy The noCRM.io Academy

Becoming a better saleperson

You Don't Need a CRM! An incredibly simple and efficient web based software to help your sales teamstrack to track and close their deals without spending hours filling out forms.

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Table of contents

  1. 1Organizing your sales activity
    1. Our philosophy
    2. Prospects vs. Leads
    3. Prospecting Lists, Leads & Client Folders
    4. Status vs. Sales Steps
    5. Defining Key Information on Leads
    6. How to Categorize Leads, and Why It's So Important
    7. Contacts Management: How to Manage Multiple Contacts in the Same Company
    8. Admin, Team Manager & User
    9. Customizing Your Account Interface
    10. How to Develop the Right Sales Process to Close your Deals
  2. 2Organizing Your Daily Activities
    1. How to Build a Sales Process
    2. Every Morning, Know Exactly What Leads You Need to Work On
    3. Follow Up the History of Your Exchanges & Bcc Email Conversations
    4. Set Reminders and Synchronize Your Account with a Sales Calendar
    5. Sort Activities for a Better Understanding of Your Leads
    6. Extended, Compact & Pipeline Mode
    7. Create Several Pipelines to Analyse Different Sales Processes
    8. Make your Most Important Leads Stand Out
    9. Find Leads by Using Filters
    10. How to effectively prospect and qualify leads on LinkedIn
  3. 3How to Win at Cold Prospecting
    1. How to Organize your Cold Prospecting
    2. When and How to Use Propsect Lists
    3. Only Turn a Row into a Lead Once the Contact is Qualified
    4. The Importance of Using Column Names
    5. Magic Columns
  4. 4Working on the Go
    1. Mobile Sales App
    2. Using the Speech Recognition
    3. Scan your Business Cards
  5. 5Adding Leads from External Sources
    1. By E-mail
    2. From your Partners
    3. From a Contact Form
  6. 6Follow up your Business Activity - Understanding How it Works and Collaborating
    1. How to Successfully Manage a Sales Team
    2. How to Implement an Activity-Based Selling
    3. Analyzing Sales Activity by Category or by Salesperson
    4. Sales Performance Analysis: Get Total Insights
    5. Find the Leads That Have Been Pending for too Long
    6. ROI of Specific Actions, or of a Specific Month Activity
    7. Using the Activity Feed to Manage your Team
    8. Follow Activity Every Morning Thanks to the Daily Sales Activity Report via Email
    9. Exporting your Data for Reporting or Marketing Purposes
    10. Activity Based Selling: The Best Technique To Reach Your Business Goals
  7. 7Manage your Existing Customers
    1. Following up on your Won Clients
    2. How to Manage Upsells and Renewals vs Post-sales Process
  8. 8Connect noCRM.io to Other Apps
    1. How to Connect: Zapier, API & Direct Integration
    2. Send Notifications or Fire Actions Based on Events
    3. How to connect noCRM to your own Information System
  9. 9Rolling out noCRM in your company
    1. Framework for a successful rollout
    2. Guide to a successful onboarding of your team
  10. 10Additional Sales Resources
    1. The Sales Expert Directory
    2. All there is to know about SPIN Selling

Managing multiple contacts in the same company

When prospecting, you often interact with large companies, and the question of how to manage several contacts inside the company arises. It's essentially contacts management 101. With classical CRM systems, there is usually a company object in which there are contacts. It seems simple and natural but in reality, it generates lots of admin works to maintain and does not necessarily help to close a deal more efficiently. noCRM, as the name suggests, is not a CRM; its focus lies on the lead. So, how should multiple contacts be managed in a lead-focused system?

The first question that you have to ask yourself is: are those contacts concerned by the same sale or do you want to sell them different things on separate deals?

The golden rule of a lead management system is:

1 potential sale in real life = 1 Lead created in the software.

Big sales case

So if you’re trying to sell a Boeing 777 or an Airbus A380, you'll need to have several contacts inside one lead. You can add a new contact to a lead description at all times. When you do that, try to keep the most important contact at the top of the list so you can access his contact info more easily.

New contacts can also be added in the comment section of a lead. At the moment, they appear in the process, but if the sales process is long we clearly recommend to add it to the description of the lead in order not to contact the wrong person when you follow-up after a long time.

If you often try to close complex deals with several contacts involved, the best thing to do is probably to directly define default fields for your leads with several contacts. Typical default fields could be:

  • Main contact name:
  • Main contact email:
  • Main contact phone:
  • Contact 2 name:
  • Contact 2 Job Title:
  • Contact 2 email:
  • Contact 2 phone:
  • Contact 3 name:

…

Numerous smaller sales

If you're selling to different people in the same company - for example selling training to different teams of the same company - then you should have several leads grouped together in the same Client Folder. The contact in each lead will be the person that can make the decision for that precise lead. You should not add contacts not related to that precise sell even if they are in the same company.

Grouping all those leads inside the same client folder will help you get the context of a lead and will allow you to easily find references of previous deals to help you conclude the current ones with the right actions. You can access leads by going to the client folder's main page and also access client folders by their lead.

Specific cases when there is a buyer between you and the final customer

For example, in the advertising business, when you sell ads to a customer such as Coca-Cola, you can sell the ads directly to Coca-Cola but most of the time you sell it to its media agency like MediaCom or Carat. So here the question you have to ask is slightly more complex, as the final customer is not directly the one involved in the selling process. In this case you should of course only have one contact in each lead. But the question would be what is the client folder? Do we group the leads under Coca-Cola or do we group them under Carat?

There is no absolute rule about this and it should depend on your own experience, but if the number of buyers (media agencies in this case) is low, our recommendation would be to group the leads under the Coca-Cola client folder and to add a Carat tag to each lead. Like this, if you want to have access to all the leads with one media agency, you can easily filter it based on the correct tag and if Coca-Cola moves to another media agency or start to buy directly from you, you still have access to the full history of your deals.

Upsells and renewal

When you need to resell the same product or service to the same person you will of course use the duplicate function of the lead so you will keep all the contact info that you need. To discover more about how to manage to upsell, renewal and also how to manage a customer from an operational perspective when the lead is won please have a look at this other post here: here

Next read: Admin, Team Manager & User