Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling

11

Own Your Database

Why the CRM Is Your Most Important Sales Tool

The most expensive thing you can do in sales is spend your time with the wrong prospect.

—Jeb Blount

I hate writing about or talking about CRMs. It's boring and tiresome. It is also a turnoff because I know salespeople have no love for the CRM. Honestly, it pained me to include this important but tedious subject. But, this is the brutal, and often ignored, reality:

There is no weapon or tool in your sales arsenal that is more important or impactful to your long-term income stream than your prospect database. Nothing. Your database of prospects is what helps you make a living now and in the future. It does not make a difference what you sell; a well-managed, living, breathing prospect database is a golden goose that keeps on giving.

Your CRM is the most important tool in your sales arsenal because it:

• Allows you to manage the details and tasks related to many different contacts without having to remember everything.
• Keeps you organized, manages your pipeline, and saves your deals and relationships from getting derailed. It makes life easier by doing work for you.
• Allows you to segment and sort your prospect database and build prospecting lists based on any field or group of fields in the database. This makes you exponentially more effective and efficient in your prospecting activities.
• Helps you systematically qualify prospects so that you move them up the prospecting pyramid.

When you peel all of the technology ...