How to Get Your Team to Use Your CRM – In Just 7 Minutes with Jeroen Courthout

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• Discover the importance of learning and using CRM as a team and as a business
• Find out why discussing as a team and collaborating is crucial in handling CRM
• Learn more on why guideline and training are important for team collaboration and development

Resources/Links:

• Check out Jeroen’s Website: www.salesflare.com

Summary

Is your team struggling with CRM? Are you struggling to achieve the level of collaboration needed when handling CRM? Do you want to know the steps on how to maximize the use of your CRM? Do you want to know the secrets that can guarantee you better team cooperation in sales?

Jeroen Courthout is the Co-Founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM built for small and medium businesses (SMBs) selling B2Bs, mostly popular with agencies and SaaS companies.

In this episode, Jeroen shares his ideas on how to simplify and make CRM easier for you and your team to handle. He also talks about how you can get your sales team to work and cooperate for better collaboration and maximize the use of CRM.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:19 – Jeroen’s ideal client: “It’s small and medium-sized businesses selling B2B, mainly agencies and tech companies. It’s a bit broader than SAS companies only, but it’s a lot of agencies and quite some tech start-ups and tech companies.”
• 01:36 – Problem Jeroen helps solve: “Most of these companies have a CRM or they have a spreadsheet or they have something but they don’t really use it, and that’s because the software usually comes with outsized expectations of how they’re going to fill out the software to make it work.”
• 02:23 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Jeroen: “The symptoms are mostly symptoms of them not using the CRM. Its leads slipping through the cracks. It’s, for me, number one, that’s why most people start using a CRM.”
• 03:34 – Common mistakes that people make before they find Jeroen’s solution: “The main mistake is probably they look for a solution, which is good, but they don’t look for a solution that will solve their problem. They just figured they need a system.”
• 05:04 – Jeroen’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): “find something they want to use. Secondly, make sure they understand what it does that’s obvious. So training is usually aimed at making sure that the team knows how to use the system, like what functionality is there.”
• 06:06 – Jeroen’s Valuable Free Resource (VRF): Check out Jeroen’s Website: www.salesflare.com
• 07:21 – Q: How does our software solve the problem of people not using CRM? A: We made it very easy to use, which is obvious. Then the second thing is we automate most of the data input that you normally have to do in a CRM by pulling the data from all the places where it already is.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:09
Greetings everyone and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. I’m Tom Poland beaming out to you from Little Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia, joined today by Jeroen Courthout. Jeroen, very good morning, I believe, it would be for you. Welcome.

Jeroen Courthout 00:23
Yeah! It’s morning here in Antwerp, Belgium.

Tom Poland 00:25
Antwerp, Belgium. Perfect. Our hands around the world. You’re on top. I’m underneath. Let’s get rock and rolling! So, for those of you who haven’t heard of Jeroen, he’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Salesflare, which is a very, very cool, and very intelligent CRM built for small and medium-sized businesses selling business-to-business services and products. Very popular with agencies and very popular with SaaS companies! So, if it sounds like you, if you’re selling business-to-business, and you just suspect that some of those leads are falling between the cracks, you’re in the right place, and you’re listening to the right person! So, our title today is, “How to Get Your Team and You to Actually Use Your CRM” and Jeroen is going to show us how to do that, and just tell us how to do that in just seven minutes. Our seven minutes starts now, sir. Question number one is, who is your ideal client?

Jeroen Courthout 01:19
You already said it, but it’s small and medium-sized businesses selling B2B, mainly agencies and tech companies. It’s a bit broader than SAS companies only, but it’s a lot of agencies and quite some tech start-ups and tech companies.

Tom Poland 01:32
Perfect. Thank you, sir. So, what’s the problem you solve for them, question number two?

Jeroen Courthout 01:36
Well, most of these companies have a CRM or they have a spreadsheet or they have something but they don’t really use it, and that’s because the software usually comes with outsized expectations of how they’re going to fill out the software to make it work. And that doesn’t happen. And then you know, people end up not using it, and then the whole system falls apart with which they try to actually follow up their customers.

Tom Poland 01:59
Yeah, so true. So true! Question three, and six minutes left. Tell us about some of the typical symptoms that- you’ve mentioned, one of them already, the team’s not using CRM. But what else is happening in the agency or of a business of your prospective ideal client that would give them kind of a heads up and go, “Yep, that’s us! That’s happening in our business.” So, symptoms that they would need what you’ve got?

Jeroen Courthout 02:23
Yeah, I think the symptoms are mostly symptoms of them not using the CRM. Its leads slipping through the cracks. It’s, for me, number one, that’s why most people start using a CRM. It’s the sales manager not knowing what the salespeople are doing, not knowing how to replace them when they’re sick, not knowing where to pick up when they leave-

Tom Poland 02:45
Right.

Jeroen Courthout 02:45
Not knowing how to coach them. It’s the marketing team, not knowing what the sales team is doing. No insight into what’s coming in the sales pipeline, so you don’t know you’re like your cash flows, how they’re going to be. All these kinds of things are symptoms of people not using CRM.

Tom Poland 03:01
Thank you, sir. And question four, five minutes left, we’ve got these agency heads, these business owners, they’ve got a team and all those things are happening, you just described or some of them. They’re intelligent people, and they generally want to have a very successful business. They’re going to try things and you will have seen some of the new clients, they’ll either talk to them, and they will describe to you some of the things they tried, the mistakes they made before finding the Salesflare solution. So, what are some of the mistakes that people make before they sign up with Salesflare?

Jeroen Courthout 03:34
The main mistake is probably they look for a solution, which is good, but they don’t look for a solution that will solve their problem. They just figured they need a system. They either don’t figure out they need a system that their team will use because somehow, it’s ingrained in people that you just have to make the people use the thing. And salespeople are lazy, and you just have to force them. Now, it’s really important to find something that your salespeople want to use, so go with them on the lookout. Don’t do it alone. Don’t find something and then enforce it on them. Like there’s something together, make sure they are involved. Make sure they feel involved. And make sure that you find something that they actually want to use because it all starts from there.

Tom Poland 04:18
Yeah, so they have a sense of ownership and buying into the idea of using it the 100% more likely to actually want to use it and I think you hit on a key point there. If people want to use it, they’re going to use it. And trying to fit a square peg in a round hole by getting to use something that’s complicated or difficult or it doesn’t have the graphical interface that your beautiful platform has, would be difficult. Thanks for that sir. Three and a half minutes left. Want to give someone, someone listening to this, whether they end up working with you or not, an idea and a free action they could implement this, not going to solve the whole problem, but it could take them in the right direction? I’ve already mentioned getting your team involved in the decision of which CRM but what’s another free action they could take? Three minutes left. That was question five, by the way.

Jeroen Courthout 05:04
Yeah, so first of all, find something they want to use. Secondly, make sure they understand what it does that’s obvious. So training is usually aimed at making sure that the team knows how to use the system, like what functionality is there. For the next thing, I would advise which the companies that are more successful, but our software is also figuring out together how they’re going to use it. Like within the team, make some guidelines on how you’re going to use a CRM because it can do a lot of stuff, so you need to sort of make decisions there. And it’s only when you do that, that the data in a hole will make sense. That collaboration will be possible building segments of customers, and all this kind of stuff is only possible when you just- it’s not difficult, you just sit together, and you’re like, “Okay, when we’re going to do this and that, how are we going to insert the data? How is that going to flow through the process?” These things just align on that. Put it in the documents. Revise it sometimes.

Tom Poland 06:04
Right.

Jeroen Courthout 06:04
But it will make your collaboration so much better.

Tom Poland 06:06
This is just one of those things when you say that it sounds obvious, but so few people do it. You know, common sense, but not commonplace, perhaps. So going a step further after the decision to buy or invest in a certain platform, getting a team together and discussing the best way to use it at that level of collaboration rather than sort of being a bit like Moses coming down off the mountain with the 10 commandments would really empower people to want to use it. So, question six, and we’ve got 90 minutes left still, we want to direct people to a valuable free resource where they can find out more. Now, I’m going to give the audience the answer to this just for the sake of time. Folks, go to www.salesflare, that’s F-L-A-R-E.com, because there’s a free trial there. And I think once you hit that landing page, and you just look at the graphical interface there, you should be quite rightly tempted to have a look at that free trial. This is not an affiliate promotion at all. We’re doing this simply because it appears to be a terrific product that’s nice and simple and intuitive for most B2B owners to be using. So, question seven now, is the one question that I should have asked you but didn’t, and your own- we’ve got a whopping 35 seconds to answer that. Please.

Jeroen Courthout 07:21
Yup. Maybe the question, we focus on this issue of why people don’t use a CRM, but you didn’t ask me how our software solves that. In very short, it’s- we made it very easy to use, which is obvious. Then the second thing is we automate most of the data input that you normally have to do in a CRM by pulling the data from all the places where it already is.

Tom Poland 07:40
Beautiful. Gosh, music to my ears! What a great answer to a trivia question. Jeroen, thank you so much for your time.

Jeroen Courthout 07:47
Thank you. This was fun.

Tom Poland 07:49
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.