Today’s subject will be about strategies for creating statuses in your CRM or dialer. Beau Bratton, founder and CEO of Speed to Contact, describes the advantages and disadvantages of how you set up your CRM status codes for your sales team. Can you have too many? Yes, but you can also have too few… Find out what the trade-offs are and how you can get more from your systems and sales effort.

Maybe you’re thinking about switching over to a new CRM or dialer and you want to how to start. Or maybe you’re looking to retool what you already have. There are really just two main strategies to think about when making that decision.

Number one is creating more statuses. What are the advantages of creating a wide variety of statuses? And, on the opposite end of the spectrum, number two, what are the advantages of creating fewer statuses? Let’s dive in…

Advantages of Many Statuses

One of the pros to having many statuses in your CRM or dialer is that it’s great for hyper-targeted marketing. If you have a status of “just contacted” versus a status of “contacted and scheduled meeting”, you know that a consumer is already scheduled for a meeting with you. So then you could trigger an automated email when you disposition or status that record in your system. You could either send out a message that is basic, knowing that they contacted them, or send out a message that’s more targeted, knowing that you contacted them and you’ve already scheduled a meeting.

For marketing purposes, having more descriptive statuses is advantageous. It’s also great for the sales reps because when they have more descriptive statuses, they know better where their pipeline is. And managers also can get a better feel for where the pipeline is. That makes your entire database more segmentable. If you’re ever going to switch over or integrate with a third-party system, you’ve got a very segmented data set, instead of having a simplified data set.

Disadvantages of Many Statuses

The downside of having many statuses is it can be complicated to find the statuses on the list; for example, if you have 25 statuses and they are are in no particular order. Even if they’re all alphabetized, they can actually take your sales reps a little bit of time to find the status that best meets that criteria because you’re hyper-defining your statuses. And that can slow down the calling process. If you’re dialing out or even if you’re just marketing or sending emails out to consumers or clients, after you send it out or after you talk to somebody, you want to change the status or you want to make another phone call or send another email. It takes a while and the time that it takes to find the perfect status adds up.

Finally, having more statuses creates additional workflow management… If you’re going to set up a CRM with a bunch of statuses and you’re going to do marketing automation, dialer campaigns or something else on top of that, it’s going to take more effort to set up all those different marketing campaigns for each status.

Those are the main pro’s and con’s of creating many statuses in your system. Now let’s look at having fewer statuses.

Advantages of Fewer Statuses

Some of the pro’s are it’s easy for less sophisticated sales teams. If you have a sales team and, depending on the level of sophistication, if there’s very few statuses, it’s going to be a lot easier for them to pick a status that meets their particular description of the event. If you contacted and all you have is “contacted”, you know your status it as “contacted’.

That’s going to make for a faster setup and configuration of your system as well: very few statuses, very few configurations and marketing triggers that you need to implement. And that speeds up the calling process. If you have a call center, and your business is all about dialing through leads quickly, you know if you implement something like hot buttons as well on top of this, you can get through calling leads in a very fast manner, calling one lead after another after another. So it speeds up the entire calling process. Again, even if it’s just simple, like you’re emailing leads or you’re going through leads and clicking to dial them, the time it takes to look up and disposition adds up over time.

Disadvantages of Fewer Statuses

The con’s of having few statuses are less triggers and controls for marketing. For example, you don’t know that you also scheduled a meeting with that person off of the status if it’s just “contacted”. You don’t know if that person already received documentation from you or had a demo, so you’re not going to be able to be as targeted with your marketing that goes out.

It’s also less descriptive for managers. If you’re a manager and you’re looking at the pipeline, all you see is the basics of what status those leads are in. You can only segment it so much. You don’t have as much insight into the overall performance of your sales reps and the pipeline of where your leads truly are. Finally, it’s less segmentable, and it lowers the ability to really break up your data into pieces.