Big or small, all B2B sales teams using a CRM share a common goal: to save time on tedious data entry and follow up with prospects/customers with ease.

Salesflare makes it easy to accomplish this with its calendar and email sync, automatic data enrichment, and its ease of setup and use. However, the size of your team may influence your specific use case for Salesflare.

Therefore, after observing and interviewing teams both large and small, we have detailed a list of best practices and recommendations to guide you as you go.

In this case, we define a larger team to be a team of 5 or more active daily users in Salesflare. This could consist of all salespeople and their sales manager, or a mix of the sales team, marketing team, and other admin such as assistants and higher-ups.

For larger teams, we will discuss pro-tips that touch on the following:

Key needs: We have found that the most important factors for larger teams include transparency, accountability, and consistency. Below we will cover how to ensure these needs are met throughout the process of setting up your account.

When setting up your account, it’s important to determine if you want full visibility and access for all users, or if you’d like to restrict some access using the permissions feature. Upon the initial invite to team members (in Settings > Manage your team), you can easily create groups to segment your team. Then using the Permissions feature, administrators can dictate who can see and create/edit/delete certain data and which groups can access specific pipelines. This way you can ensure that everyone stays on task while giving admins a complete overview of the progress of the team.

As a large team, the ability to manage communications in one place without having to track down other teammates to ask them for updates is a major benefit. With one look at the account timeline, team members can see who followed up last, what was talked about, and whether or not their emails were opened/clicked. This creates transparency and allows for admins to hold their team accountable. Be sure to add all relevant team members to an account in order to see their communications with the contacts on that account.

Whether you are migrating from another CRM, starting fresh from an Excel spreadsheet or coming from another form of data management, custom fields can help keep everyone on the same page. Likely, your team has some data that is unique to your own company. Whether this is order numbers, subscription types, user IDs, etc., custom fields can help establish consistency across the board. Create custom fields BEFORE importing to make the process much smoother. We also recommend sitting down with your team and creating a guide on what each custom field means. That way everyone agrees on how to input data, which will make sure that your CRM data becomes much more orderly and your collaboration much more streamlined.

Pipelines allow you to visualize the progress your team is making in closing deals/making sales/finishing projects. How you set up your team’s pipelines can contribute to their success. First, choose how to split up the pipelines. With unlimited pipeline creation, you can make a pipeline per sales region, per project type, per product/service, etc. If the sales process is different (needing different stages) or it's for a different business segment (needing a clear separation), then it’s best to split these into different pipelines. Otherwise, we recommend keeping everything in one pipeline and using advanced filters to view smaller chunks of opportunities at once.

Saved filters allow you to easily find and apply filters that you frequently use. Team members can, for example, save a filter that shows only opportunities in which they are the assignee/owner of, in which there hasn’t been an interaction on the account in more than x days, and that has a value of at least X amount. This saves time and allows team members to focus only on what is most relevant to them at that moment.

Importing data correctly can set your team up for success. With all of your accounts, contacts, and opportunities pre-loaded in bulk, you’ll save your team time and be able to retain that consistency across all entities. Be sure to determine which data is the most important to have on each entity. For example, do your opportunities need owners/assignees? Do they need unique names? If so, create these in your import sheet along with your custom fields. Want data migration done for you? Check out our enterprise plan and contact us for more information.

The Insights tab provides an overview of how your whole team is performing. You can view insights by group or individual, switch between all pipelines or one pipeline, change the date range, and create reports yourself. Check out this post on 7 amazing dashboards you can view or create in Salesflare.

For smaller teams/single users, we will discuss pro-tips that touch on the following:

Key needs: The most important factors for smaller teams include simplicity, ease of use, all-encompassing when it comes to sales features, and the potential to evolve over time. Whether you are a startup with a small sales team or just a single user, it’s important to be able to get started with a small learning curve on a system that can handle all or most of your sales needs in one place. It’s also important to believe that as you grow as a business, your CRM will be able to grow with you and continue to meet your needs in the not too distant future.

If you are a single user, the account timelines can help you organize all of your existing data. If you’re constantly finding yourself losing emails, forgetting when you last followed up, or not remembering details about the companies/contacts you are speaking with, the account timeline will become your best friend. In one place, you can find everything you need from communications history to internal notes that jog your memory. Small teams benefit from sharing account timelines as it makes collaboration and open communication much easier. To automatically add every team member to every account (new and existing), admins can switch this on in Settings > Manage your team. Then, turn on notifications to make sure you never miss an email, link click, website visit, or task assignment.

By connecting your website’s contact form to Salesflare via Zapier, you can capture all of that data and create accounts, tag them, and trigger email sequences all in one place. Salesflare also helps you manage your leads through email tracking and website tracking. By installing the website tracking script in Settings > Applications and Integrations, you can be notified in real time about visitors on your website (after email tracking has been established).

The tasks page not only pulls in your calendar items and allows you to create manual tasks, but in the Settings > Task settings, you’ll find automated tasks that can be used to help you stay on top of things. Salesflare can automatically suggest tasks to remind you to add notes to a meeting after the fact, reply to an email once you receive one, and prompt you to follow up with accounts if there has been no activity in X days. Never miss a follow up again!

Pipelines help you visualize how you’re performing and at which stages your deals and projects are currently sitting. By creating pipelines for different processes - be it sales, project timeline, or customer life cycle - you are able to have a clear overview of what the next step is towards closing the deal for every opportunity you're working on.

The workflows feature gives you the ability to create and send mass emails at scale or email sequences that look personalized. You can trigger them on a change in pipeline stage, or via a tag assigned to the contact when they’re added from your website form. You can use this feature to automate your outreach, invite contacts to events, or even just wish your customers a happy holiday. Note- Salesflare is great for personal emails at scale, but not made for email newsletters.

As a smaller team or a startup just beginning, rest assured that Salesflare will continue to grow with you. Some of the features added in the last year alone include: workflows, permissions, customizable dashboards and reporting, and more. Have feature requests? Submit them to [email protected] or ping us on the chat.

Head to our blog for more pro-tips, to learn more about our recent releases, and to see what's to come.