Sales constantly evolves. As technology and tools change, we have new processes and strategies available to us. On today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, we hear from Alex Glenn about the new world for CRM and mirroring pipeline and how it can help us be more effective in our sales processes. Alex runs automateddata.af, a place where customers can grab working automations for their businesses. The platform crowdsources solutions and wraps them up into a usable format for those in sales, marketing, and customer success. DEVELOPING CRM CRM has seen a bit of a shift over the last few years. Instead of being software that costs thousands of dollars and requires a great deal of training, your CRM must be more agile now. [3:51] CRM must work with your existing tools as well as the dashboards you regularly use for work. It must be easily accessible and easily connectable. Most founders are also coming around to the idea that CRM should serve as all-in-one solutions. It’s very convenient for people to access the information they need without having to lead the dashboard they already work in. BEST SOFTWARE POSSIBLE The first issue must be finding the best possible software for each process. [7:46] You want to conduct outreach — either cold emailing, cold calling or LinkedIn prospecting. Then you want to manage that person or that prospect using CRM. You’ll need post-conversion like signup, demos, and other options, and you’ll need nurturing touchpoints like email, and phone calls. Then you’ll need post-sale drips and one-to-one messaging. The problem is that all of that can’t exist in one tool, but several tools are trying to accomplish all or 75 percent of it. The “all-in-ones” represent themselves that way because they cover most of these activities, though many of the components will be somewhat bare bones. [9:20] There are issues with each of them that limit your capabilities. AUTOMATION Customers need to have timely messages that are appropriate for their specific situations. All-in-ones won’t ever be the best solution because they won’t be able to give you everything you need at every step. Google Apps is global now, and many people in the tech and startup scenes are using it because there’s so much collaboration possible. [11:55] But if your cold outreach system isn’t talking to your CRM and talking to your website, then you can cause a lot of confusion because you might be messaging someone in LinkedIn while you’re sending emails at the same time. It can make your efforts seem disorganized. You need a tool that syncs your pipeline stages. (Click here to access the video of Alex navigating some of these tools.) [17:47] BENEFITS This capability allows small organizations to do really effective cold outreach. You may have gotten slapped for cold outreach before because you were sending too many emails or you got blacklisted. That doesn’t mean cold outreach doesn’t work. That may result because you weren’t using the right platform or because your setup was wrong. The second possibility is that you weren’t doing it well. Perhaps you weren’t nurturing them effectively. [33:18] If your pipeline stages aren’t in sync through the different outreach systems or the different tools that you’re using, you could create a poor customer experience. Whether you use a system like this or an all-in-one system together with a cold outreach system, make sure your pipeline stages are clearly outlined. Know what’s going on at each stage. Make sure each tool is being updated based upon where the customer is and how he interacted with your tools. “NEW WORLD FOR CRM AND MIRRORING PIPELINE” EPISODE RESOURCES You can connect with Alex at automated.af and email him at team@automated.af. Automated hopes to build out so that it will offer something for everyone. Check out the tools Alex mentioned in the episode: persistiq.com for sales engagement with a clean interface user.com for automation software to track customer engagement useorca.com to find and e