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

Status vs. Sales Steps

When managing your leads there are several aspects that you need to know, two of which are important ones: where is a lead in the sales process (sales funnel) and what’s its status (closed or alive)? Knowing these elements will help you optimize your sales process.

The main difference between these two elements is that the sales process is variable from one company to another, whereas statuses stay unchanged.

In every sales team out there, the statuses are: either I have something to do with the lead right away (To-Do), I will have something to do at some point (Standby), I closed the deal (Won), I lost it against a competitor (Lost), or the sale dropped for some reason (Cancelled). The status *canceled often doesn't exist in other software, but we believe there's a big difference between losing against a competitor and not closing the deal because the project ended up not going through.

On the other hand, it’s not possible to create an exact list when it comes to sales steps because, not only do they vary from one company to another, but also from an individual product or service to another.

Inside noCRM you can define each step of your own sales funnel so that it corresponds to your company’s needs, and it’s the same for every salesperson inside the company. For example: To Qualify > Contacted > Visited > Quotation > Closing. However, statuses can’t be changed. To-Do / Standby / Won / Lost / Cancelled always stays the same.

We suggest that you don't create too many sales steps. Above 7 or 8 and it becomes difficult to visualize and manage. Most importantly, do not create sales steps that replicate the statuses, you need to clearly define the difference in these before you set up.

If after your sales cycle there's another process of follow-up you need to start, then you can create a sales step such as "after sales" or "follow-up".

Read also: Defining your sales steps inside noCRM.io

Next read: Defining Key Information on Leads