You will be able to set up a CRM, or a spreadsheet, with only the fields that change what you do next.
Most CRMs fail in one of two ways. Some are so bare they are just a phone book: names and numbers, and no idea who needs what next. Others are so detailed that updating them takes longer than the calls themselves, so nobody updates them, and within a month they are fiction. Either way, the seller ends up running their pipeline from memory and a few sticky notes again.
A CRM, short for customer relationship management, is just a place that remembers your prospects for you. It can be expensive software or a spreadsheet. What makes it useful is not the tool but the fields, and the rule for fields is simple: keep the ones that change what you do next, and drop the rest.
The first group of fields describes the prospect. Name. Company or household. Persona, using the personas from lesson 1.2, so you can see at a glance whether this is a founder or a co-founder who signs off the money, a parent who books the meeting or the partner who decides.
Then two fields from module 5. The source field records where this contact came from. The consent note records what they agreed to, through which channel, and when, along with the date of any Do Not Call check. Lesson 5.2, PDPA basics for prospecting: consent, purpose and records, explains why these matter. In the CRM they also do practical work. The source field feeds your scorecard from lesson 2.4. The consent note tells you, before you pick up the phone, whether you may.
Contact details go in too, of course. But every field beyond these should earn its place by changing a decision.
The stage field shows where each prospect is in your pipeline. Keep the stages few and clearly defined:
Identified: on your list, with no touch sent yet. Contacted: at least one touch sent. Replied: they responded in any way. Meeting booked: a real conversation is in the diary. Proposal: you have sent a proposal or quote. Won: they bought. Lost: they said no, went silent after the full sequence, or turned out not to fit.
Each stage should have a clear rule for moving in. "Replied" means they replied, not that you feel the call went well. Clear rules mean your counts are honest, and honest counts are what you need for the pipeline maths in module 7. If you count a prospect as "meeting booked" when they only said "maybe next month", your numbers will flatter you right up until the month you miss your target.
This is the field that does the most work. For every open prospect, write the next thing you will do and the date you will do it. "Call to follow up on email, 9 Oct." "Send closing message, 20 Oct." "Check back after the outlet opens, Jan."
Deals do not usually die from a firm no. They go quiet. A prospect who replied warmly gets no follow-up because the seller got busy, and two months later neither side remembers the conversation. A next step with a date stops this, because each morning you can sort or filter by date and see exactly who needs you today.
Darren's rule is that no open prospect may have an empty next step. If he cannot think of one, the prospect is either lost or needs a closing message, and he records that instead.
The last field gets the least attention and pays back the most. When a prospect moves to lost, record why in a few words: "no budget", "chose a competitor", "no reply after sequence", "not a fit, single stall", "timing, revisit after new outlet".
One lost reason tells you little. Thirty of them tell you a lot. After a quarter, Mei read through hers and found that most of her "not a fit" losses were businesses with only one outlet, which matched one of her warning signs from lesson 1.4 but kept slipping onto her list. She tightened her profile. Over time, lost reasons are how your profile, your messages and your sources improve, because the evidence comes from your own pipeline instead of guesses.
Keep the reasons short and reuse the same phrases, so you can count them later. Fifteen different ways of writing "no budget" are hard to add up.
Everything else is optional, and most of it is noise at this stage. Fields for industry sub-category, lead score, preferred contact time, social media handles and birthday look useful when you set them up and are empty three weeks later. Add a field only when you notice you keep needing a piece of information to make a decision. If you have a field you have never used to decide anything, delete it.
The activity below asks you to list the fields you track now, delete the ones you never use to decide anything, and add whichever of the core fields you are missing.
List the fields you track now, delete any you never use to decide anything, and add any of the core fields you are missing.
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