Dates! The key to making your sales reps happier?

This is such an overlooked and simple way to improve your CRM and sales process.

Most people only have the out-of-the-box Date fields that came with their CRM. In this video I cover some things you need to check to make sure your Date fields are working right, some new Date fields you NEED to create, and some simple reporting tweaks to save your sales reps a ton of time.

Content is below, but here is a video if you’re more of the watch or listen type:

Check out my video

It’s all about the Last Activity

Imagine you’re a sales rep with a list of 400 Accounts you are working. How do you sort them and prioritize them?

Nearly ever rep sorts by a date field at some point during their day, and if they don’t sort by a date they are definitely looking at them to inform whether it is time to work an account or not.

But… what if the date was misleading?

First - let me define what I mean by a Last Activity Date. It is a roll-up field that looks at a list of Activities and shows the most recent date. So if I’ve made 7 phone calls out to an Account and the most recent one was on 4/15/2024, that would be my Last Activity Date. Last Activity Date fields should NEVER be manually entered - they should always be some sort of roll-up or automation derived field.

Hierarchy actually matters sometimes

You probably have Accounts (or Companies if you’re a Hubspot fan), and nested under the Account are all sorts of other records: Contacts and Opportunities at the very least.

Chances are you have one or more Last Activity Dates - but do you know how they work?

I’ve seen a Last Activity Date on an Account NOT include dates from child objects. So if you logged a call under an Opportunity that is under your Account, the Last Activity Date on the Account wouldn’t update… MAJOR PROBLEM in my book.

My first rule of thumb is that the Account should have a Master Last Activity Date that covers activities or tasks logged under all child objects.

This is critical just to make visibility much easier.

You need to see the details!

Sometimes, companies don’t even have a Last Activity Date field on their Contact object.

So add one, then add it to the Contact Summary Layout on the Account page.

This is so important because it saves your sales reps time, and allows them to see when they last worked a Contact without having to click into the Contact record.

Getting fancy with it

Here are some other ways you should split out Last Activity Dates:

• Next Open Activity Date - looks at open tasks that are in the future and shows the date of the next scheduled activity.

• Next Meeting Date - same as above, but only looks at event records.

• Last Marketing Activity Date - if emails that marketing sends are in your CRM mixing with activities your sales reps are logging, this is critical. Create a LAD that only looks at Marketing Activities.

• Last Sales Activity Date - same as above, but looks at the Role of the User who logged the task to filter down to only sales reps.

• Last Phone Call Date - use the type of activity to break it down as well. Maybe a sales rep has logged 5 activities, but hasn’t made a single call. This will show you (and them) that immediately.

Automations

Now that you’ve built all sorts of amazing automated dates… you can automate stuff!

Here are some ideas of thing’s I’ve done, or thought about doing:

• When an open opportunity doesn’t have an open task and the last activity is more than 2 weeks old; you could:

  • send a slack message yelling at the sales rep

  • have those filters on an automated CRM report, and have it email a copy of the report to your sales manager every day that the report has records in it

  • Automatically create an open task assigned to the sales rep, telling them to update the Opp or create a next step action item.

• When a Client Account doesn’t have a phone call logged for 6 months, auto create an open task for your Customer Service/Success Team to reach out to them and give them some updates on new things your company has done.

• When a Decision Maker Contact in a Qualified Account that does not have an Opportunity and does not have any open activities goes 90 days with no activity, auto create a high priority task for the assigned sales rep to call them.

Dates are cool.

Check out www.findrevops.com to find more info and to get in touch with me. Let me know if this has generated any good ideas for you to use in your business.