Common CRM Mistakes That Hurt Sales Tracking

A common tracking issue I see is mixing offers and channels together, whether in UTMs, campaigns, or lead sources. This leads to a headache when you try to look at your data in a standardized way to measure what’s working and which channels are working. Ultimately, it’s an organization and architecture issue. Here’s the difference and why you need to isolate (+ track!) both of them: Offer: The action the user did. (e.g., schedule a demo, sign up for a webinar, download content, come from a purchased list for outbound, attend an event, etc.) Channel: The avenue (or road) a user took to ultimately come to you (e.g., paid search, paid social, events, organic, direct, outbound, etc.) Under the channel, you want a channel detail (e.g., google paid search, Bing paid search, paid LinkedIn, paid Meta, organic LinkedIn, etc.) Typically, this level of tracking will come from storing UTM tracking in your CRM. Think of it like your Google Drive folder system. Without organizational consistency, it creates issues and headaches. Here’s a common view I see when trying to isolate a conversion campaign (what did the user do where we captured the demand to move them into the sales funnel): - Nurture email: post webinar - Paid LinkedIn - Demo Request - List upload - Content download - Paid Search In this view, it’s hard to know: - What did the nurture email do after the webinar? What did they do to convert? - What did they do from paid LinkedIn? - If channels aren’t stored separately, what channel (or road) drives that demo request? - What was the purpose of the list upload? Outbound list purchase? Event upload? - What action of offer did paid search drive? As you can see, this creates a lot of data inconsistencies because it’s not uniform. Which then leads to inaccurate insights and, ultimately, distrust in data. Then, when the teams are asked the beloved question of “What’s working?” it leads to an overcomplicated data dig and answer. FWIW - this tracking issue is VERY common, and you’re not alone here. And typically, it is inherited legacy work. However, you can still fix it for moving forward. Ideally, I’d recommend a few ops leaders to come together to decide and create naming and creative guidelines, along with strict UTM builders, so it doesn’t become a game of telephone through the various execution teams. However you name it (it’s unique to every company), decide which fields (which may need to be created) will define the following, and then document how they’re set: - First touch offer (locked field) - First touch channel, channel detail (UTMs) (locked field) - Conversion touch offer (locked field) - Conversion touch channel, channel detail (UTMs) (locked field) - Last touch offer (overridden field) - Last touch channel, channel detail (UTMs) (overridden field) Trust me, your future self + the company will be praising you for doing this! 🙌

I met a sales team that tracks 27 different metrics. But none of them matter. They measure: - Calls made - Emails sent - Meetings booked - Demos delivered - Talk-to-listen ratio - Response time - Pipeline coverage But they all miss the most important number: How often prospects share your content with others. This hit me yesterday. We analyzed our last 200 deals: Won deals: Champion shared content with 5+ stakeholders Lost deals: Champion shared with fewer than 2 people It wasn't about our: - Product demos - Discovery questions - Pricing strategy - Negotiation skills It was about whether our champion could effectively sell for us. Think about your current pipeline: Do you know how many people have seen your proposal? Do you know which slides your champion shared internally? Do you know who viewed your pricing? Most sales leaders have no idea. They're optimizing metrics that don't drive decisions. Look at your CRM right now. I bet it tracks: ✅ When YOU last emailed a prospect ❌ When THEY last shared your content ✅ How many calls YOU made ❌ How many stakeholders viewed your materials ✅ When YOU sent a proposal ❌ How much time they spent reviewing it We've built dashboards to measure everything except what actually matters. The real sales metric that predicts closed deals: Internal Sharing Velocity (ISV) How quickly and widely your champion distributes your content to other stakeholders. High ISV = Deals close Low ISV = Deals stall We completely rebuilt our sales process around this insight: - Redesigned all content to be shareable, not just readable - Created spaces where champions could easily distribute information - Built analytics to measure exactly who engaged with what - Trained reps to optimize for sharing, not for responses Result? Win rates up 35%. Sales cycles shortened by 42%. Forecasting accuracy improved by 60%. Stop obsessing over your activity metrics. Start measuring how effectively your champions sell for you. If your CRM can't tell you how often your content is shared internally, you're operating in the dark. And that's why your forecasts are always wrong. Your move.

3 costly CRM mistakes: (Fix them before they hurt your revenue/cash flow) 1️⃣ Poor Lead Scoring & Qualification Without proper scoring criteria, high-value prospects get buried alongside tire-kickers. Your best closer's time is wasted on prospects who'll never buy, while golden opportunities slip through cracks. Create a 1-4 scoring system based on industry, company size, timeline, and pain points. 2️⃣ No Follow-up Automation Most leads disappear between booking and showing up for the call. Add an automated follow-up sequence (texts, emails, reminders) to keep them engaged. It will have a measurable impact on show rates and prime prospects for a productive call. 3️⃣ No Single Source of Truth When call notes, pipeline stages, and next steps live in different places (or worse, salespeople's heads), you can't make data-driven decisions. And if data is a pain in the butt to enter/read... your reps will continue to ignore it. Dials, connects, conversations, and bookings need to be tracked in one, easy-to-access place.

Sales leaders, if your CRM data is unreliable, it may be that you got what you asked for. In reality, your CRM data can be the least reliable source of information you have as a leader. The trouble begins with our focus and is articulated in our platitudes. I hear these from the sales leaders I work with regularly. Maybe these sound familiar: ❌ Your pipeline is a little thin. It should be 3X your goal. Why? How many opportunities does that represent? What data supports that? When salespeople hear this, they often inflate their pipeline with deals they don't expect to close, in an attempt to meet your expectations. ❌ Top salespeople have higher win rates. Top salespeople generate more revenue regardless of their win rate. Focusing on the win rate causes salespeople to only put opportunities into the system that they have high confidence in selling. 👉 The result in both cases: Revenue doesn't increase, your win rates now have no validity, and your ability to evaluate which sales process phases need improvement is lost. ❌ If it's not in the CRM, it doesn't exist. The problem, though, is that it does. You may not be aware of it or see it on a dashboard, but it does exist. A good source of information is your salesperson. They have the context and temperature of the relationship in their heads, but haven't put every detail in the CRM. 🥇 Your prospects are the best source of information. Are you talking to them? After all, they determine the outcome. Try talking to your prospects more and looking at your dashboards less. 🔔 Ring the bell on my profile to follow me. ♻️ If you like this, share it with others. #sales #salesleadership #makeprospectingsuckless

A VP of Sales told me they had 40 qualified opportunities worth $20 million. They were lying to themselves. This wasn't intentional deception. This VP genuinely believed his pipeline was strong.  His CRM showed 40 opportunities in various stages, totaling significant revenue potential. But when we dug into what "qualified" actually meant, the picture changed dramatically. I asked him to walk me through his top 10 deals. Here's what we found: Deal 1: "Great relationship with the buyer."  Me: "Who makes the final decision?"  Him: "The buyer has to present it to their board." Deal 2: "They've asked for references."  Me: "What's their compelling reason to change?"  Him: "They want to modernize their systems." Deal 3: "We're the preferred vendor."  Me: "When did your rep last speak to someone with budget authority?"  Him: "I'd have to check." By the tenth deal, it was clear this VP had no idea what was really in his pipeline. He was tracking activities, not information. What they thought they had: 40 qualified opportunities worth $20 million. What was really there: 8 deals that could actually close that quarter, representing about $5 million. And 3 of those deals represented 70% of their target. This is the pipeline lie most companies tell themselves. They count opportunities based on stage progression rather than qualification depth. Just because someone moved from "prospect" to "qualified" in your CRM doesn't mean they're actually qualified. It might just mean your salesperson had a second conversation with them. Real qualification means you can answer specific questions: What's their compelling reason to change? Who makes the decision? What's their process? What could prevent them from moving forward? If your salespeople can't answer these questions, you don't have qualified opportunities. You have conversations. The fix isn't better pipeline management software. It's better qualification standards and the discipline to enforce them. Stop measuring how many opportunities you have. Start measuring how much you really know about each one.