You will have a working CRM with your current prospects loaded and a written sequence ready to run.
Plenty of sellers have bought a CRM subscription, imported a thousand old contacts, opened it twice and gone back to their notebook. Usually there was nothing wrong with the software; what was missing was a short list of prospects worth tracking, the handful of fields that matter, and a sequence ready to send, so that opening the CRM on a Monday morning tells you exactly what to do.
This exercise builds all of that in one sitting. You will choose a tool, set up the core fields from lesson 6.3, load at least thirty prospects, write a five-touch sequence and give every prospect a next step, which takes about forty minutes.
The best CRM is the one you will actually open each morning. For many solo sellers and freelancers that is a spreadsheet: free, flexible, and already on their phone. A free tier of a CRM product, such as HubSpot or Zoho, adds reminders and email tracking, at the cost of some setup. If your employer already gives you a system, use that, even if you would have chosen differently, because your manager and colleagues can see it and your data stays in one place.
Do not spend this session comparing tools. Pick one and move on. You can switch later, and a spreadsheet exports to almost anything.
Mei uses a spreadsheet with one row per prospect. Darren uses his firm's system, because his firm requires client records to be kept there.
Create the fields from lesson 6.3, The minimum CRM fields worth tracking: name, company or household, persona, source, consent note, stage, next step, next step date and lost reason, plus phone and email.
If you use a spreadsheet, make stage a dropdown with the seven stages: identified, contacted, replied, meeting booked, proposal, won and lost. A dropdown stops you inventing new stages on a tired day, which keeps your counts clean for module 7. Make the next step date a real date column so you can sort by it.
Load at least thirty prospects who fit your profile from lesson 1.4, Write your ideal customer profile on one page. Your ten names from that lesson are a start. Your network list from lesson 2.1 and your best sources from lesson 2.4 give you the rest.
Fill in every core field as you load each one, especially source and consent note. It is quick now and painful later. Then run your compliance checklist from lesson 5.4 on the whole list before anything is sent. Anyone who fails and cannot be fixed does not go in.
Set every new prospect's stage to identified.
Mei loaded thirty-two cafe groups: ten from her one-page profile, twelve from job ads, six from her point-of-sale contact's introductions and four from website enquiries she had not followed up properly.
Write the whole sequence now, as templates, using the cadence you drew in lesson 6.2, Cadence: spacing touches without nagging. For each touch, save the channel, the day it goes out, the text, and a note of the one new thing it adds.
Mei's five templates follow her cadence: the four-part email for day 1, a call script with a one-sentence voicemail for day 3, a LinkedIn note for day 8, a useful-resource email for day 14 and a closing message for day 21. Each email template has a gap marked for the personalised first line from lesson 4.3, and each one includes her line telling people how to stop hearing from her.
Writing everything first matters for two reasons. You will write better touches when you can see the whole sequence and make sure each one adds something new. And on a busy day, sending a ready template takes a minute, while writing a fresh follow-up from scratch is the kind of task that slides to tomorrow and never happens.
Finally, fill in the next step and date for all thirty. For a new prospect, the next step is touch one, and the date is when you will send it.
Do not start everyone on the same day. If thirty prospects all begin on Tuesday, then two days later you owe thirty calls, and the following week thirty LinkedIn notes, on top of everything else, so stagger the starts instead. Mei started ten prospects in each of her first three weeks, so the work spreads out and new prospects enter the sequence while earlier ones are finishing.
As each touch goes out, update the stage if it changed and move the next step on to the following touch, with its date. When someone replies, the sequence stops for them and the next step becomes whatever the conversation needs.
When you finish, your CRM holds at least thirty prospects, each with every core field filled, a stage of identified and a next step dated for the first touch. Your five touches are saved as templates, each with its channel, day and the one new thing it adds. When you sort by next step date tomorrow morning, the top rows tell you who to contact first.
The activity below asks you to set up the CRM, load your thirty prospects with all core fields filled, and save your five-touch sequence as templates ready to send.
Set up the CRM, load thirty prospects with all core fields filled, and save the five-touch sequence as templates ready to send.
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