In a company with five salespeople, it is not unusual to find five completely different ways of tracking opportunities. One person writes everything in a day planner. Another keeps it all in their head. A third uses an Excel sheet. A fourth files old fax copies in a folder. And the fifth does nothing at all. At the end of the month, the sales manager tries to put together a forecast but has nothing reliable to work with. Which deal is about to close? Which proposal is still floating? Who is actually following up and who is just waiting? Getting clear answers to these questions becomes nearly impossible.
CRM (customer relationship management) software is designed to fix exactly this kind of chaos. But installing the software is not enough on its own. The real work is getting the whole team to speak the same language. That starts with defining opportunity stages. An opportunity stage is a label that shows where a sales conversation currently stands. For example: first contact, needs assessment, proposal sent, negotiation, closed won, closed lost. These stages can vary from one company to the next, but what matters is that everyone uses the same definitions. If one salesperson considers a deal at the ‘proposal sent’ stage after a verbal price discussion, while another only moves it there after the customer has confirmed receipt in writing, you are looking at the same report but reading two different realities.
Once stage definitions are written down, the next step is setting required fields for each stage. A required field is a piece of information that must be entered into the CRM before a deal can move to that stage. For instance, before moving an opportunity to ‘proposal sent,’ the system might require the proposal amount, the proposal date, and the name of the customer’s decision-maker. Without this rule, salespeople advance stages arbitrarily and reports lose their meaning. Required fields may seem like extra work at first, but they also help the salesperson: they serve as a reminder of what information still needs to be gathered.
Once this standard is in place, the sales manager has a real tool to work with. The weekly review meeting no longer starts with ‘so where do things stand?’ The program is opened on screen, opportunities are sorted by stage, and the manager can ask directly: ‘This deal has been sitting at proposal sent for two weeks. What did the customer say?’ This meeting serves two purposes at once: it is both a forecasting tool and a coaching opportunity. The salesperson can see for themselves how things are going. Instead of getting defensive, the conversation naturally turns toward solving the problem together.
For the weekly review to work consistently, the meeting day and time need to be fixed. Every Monday morning or every Friday at noon, for example. Before each meeting, salespeople are expected to update the program. This expectation should be stated clearly: ‘Update your opportunities before you walk into the meeting.’ Otherwise the meeting turns into a data entry session and time is wasted. Some companies apply this rule firmly: an opportunity that has not been updated is treated as an unowned opportunity. This approach is a bit strict, but it does tend to create the discipline needed to make the system work.
In practice, the most common obstacle is resistance from experienced salespeople. ‘I have been doing this job for years. I know what to put in the program’ is a typical response. This objection deserves to be taken seriously. The salesperson may well be right about their own performance. But the issue is not individual skill. It is the ability to forecast across the whole team and to coach newer salespeople. If an experienced salesperson’s knowledge stays locked in their head, the company becomes dependent on that one person. The CRM moves that knowledge into a shared company record. Explaining this point directly tends to reduce resistance considerably.
Before investing in a CRM program, or after investing in one, three questions are worth asking: Are your opportunity stages defined in writing? Does everyone on the team use the same definitions? Is there a regular weekly review in place? If the answer to any of these is no, a large part of whatever is spent on the software will go to waste. The program is only a tool. Without a standard, the tool does not work. Write down the rules first. Then open the program.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on February 23, 2004 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.