How To Keep Your Customer Relationship Management Platform Clean

As a Hubspot Certified Provider, we help convince people that they need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system). Even if it's not Hubspot, a business has to turn to one place to accurately know what's going on with sales, marketing, operations, etc.

However, even if you've made the initial investment of time (and maybe money), a CRM is not doing much for you if you don't use it.

It's even worse if you're haphazardly using your system:

• Making a social gaffe because you forgot to log a whole email thread to your database

• Having a hot lead fall through the cracks and they remember forever that you ignored them

• Getting really productive on a Monday and then overwhelmed on Tuesday and follow through on nothing: two days wasted

Instead, give yourself grace today: if you're learning any new system, you're not going to start on Day 2 having all the habits, workflows, procedures, and double-checks in place to make sure you're doing everything perfectly.

You need to incrementally build the habits for good CRM hygiene.

Habit Connoisseur James Clear says you need at least 66 days to solidify a habit. That's at least two months, for those of you playing along at home.

Because of that longer-than-you'd-think habit horizon, a lot of CRMs don't grow into a single source of truth: they are a single source of falsehoods.

No wonder there's good business in cleaning up CRMs.

If you're looking to build some healthy long-term habits for your CRM, here are a few workflows that we think are important for any business to invest 66 days into:

• Logging every prospect email (and if you're using Hubspot, their email extension does that for you!)

• Documenting every call with a quick summary that someone else can understand

• Regularly reviewing deals to ascertain if any actions can be taken (Always Be Closing)

• Conducting retros on sales calls as a team to highlight good practices and generate strategies for improvement

• Reflecting on KPIs to reconfirm alignment with quarterly/annual goals

Making habits like those above actually stick takes a choice. Habits aren't a wish, an intention, or a dream, but a tactical and scripted series of actions, trigger criteria and success criteria.

It's pretty simple to build a good habit:

1. When do I start the habit? Time, conditions, etc.?

• After I hang up a Zoom call with a prospect-

2. What do I specifically do? Make this pretty dead simple.

• -I open up my CRM, navigate to the contact record, and write down three observations and one call to action from the conversation-

3. What goal or reflection will I do to make sure I'm sticking to my habit? Plan that you'll fail or make a mistake: what's the safety net?

• -and at the end of every day at 5pm, I will make sure I've logged notes from all my prospect calls.

To help you kickstart your good habits, Learn to Scale is going to be your 66 day Accountabilibuddy. Fill out the short form below and we'll follow up in 66 days to see how your habit formation is going.

It can be whatever you want! Perhaps you want to write down three gratitudes a day. Perhaps you want to review your KPIs with more regularity. Perhaps you want to replace one cup of coffee with tea.

What do you want to be able to do?