Adam Sand shows why most CRMs have broken deal stages and how to fix them. Stages must be buyer-centric and factual, not anecdotal like "hot leads" or "waiting until spring." He walks through a full pipeline with stage-based blocking: a deal can't advance to "all trades complete" until every ticket reaches its required stage.
If your CRM feels confusing, hard to report on, or constantly out of sync, it's probably built wrong. Let me show you step by step how a well built CRM actually looks like and how deals should really flow. So I just want to talk a little bit about like how deals kind of flow through a well built CRM. So picture this like a timeline. And on this timeline we want to think of every stage of it. There's kind of a rule set for how we name deal stages. And this will all make sense in a second. But it's birf, so this should be buyer centric. So it should be about what the customer is doing, not what the salesperson production manager is necessarily doing. Then it should be inspectable. Whatever deal stages we name, we should be able to inspect it and see why it's in that stage. Like if we're going to create a stage, we should be able to see in the CRM exactly why it's there. Usually based on properties and data, notes and emails and calls, then it should be required. So every deal stage in your CRM should be required as part of the buyer's journey. And that includes like your ticket stages or your claims stages. Because the common culprit of this, the bad one, is this deal stage waiting until spring. Right? A lot of people create a bucket like this in a job nimbus when we migrate data, the problem is that's not required. Right? It's buyer centric. It's what the customer is experiencing. If we have a close date of April 24th and it's August 26th, yeah, they're waiting until spring. The close days there's inspectable, but it's not like required. It's not a required stage of our buyer's journey. Every customer does not go into a waiting until spring stage. So we use other properties or data to filter. We don't use buyer's journey stages to do that because it screws up reporting. So the other one is factual. So hot leads, that's not buyer's journey stage, it's not customer centric. And it's not really factual, it's anecdotal. It's based on the opinion of a sales guy. And so whenever we name stages in a CRM, we want to make sure it matches those kinds of things. So we're going to have these stages. And now let's say this is all the way from when we create a deal, all the way to close one and we've been paid. So now this is our deal. So this is an object in your CRM. So in a deal, right, you're going to have several stages, right? So you're going to have the inspection complete and then you're going to have the contract sent and then you're going to have the contract signed and then you're going to have job files, you got to complete your job files and then you're going to have an approved deal. And then once you get an approved deal, well then there's a separate timeline that exists. And so I'm going to create another timeline and this is going to be your ticket of which there could be one or there could be many. And that ticket is going to go through more stage, have its own set of stages, right, because you're going to have the production intake and then you're going to have to schedule it and then you're going to have your WIP so work in progress and then you're going to have install complete and so it's going to have its own journey that exists. And so this kind of exists within this. But we have a stage called all trades complete. Because what it's basically saying is if we have multiple tickets that have the same stages, but this one is for the roof and this one is for the gutters, in the context of the deal, we really don't have to do anything or shouldn't do anything until all trades are complete. That's the next buyer centric or inspectable required and factual deal stage. A required stage is that all trades have to be complete. But if you had some like silly stages in here, like a roof's complete, gutters complete. Well, not every time are you going to have a gutters complete stage. That's the issue that a lot of people have with job progress, is that you only have one timeline and you have to kind of fit your insurance claim time stuff in here. And so sometimes you have to move it through these stages and it'll say completed on 8 26, but you never actually did that. So then you get bad data because it moved through a stage that never should have even existed on this deal pipeline. Not talking smack on the product, I'm just saying that there's limitations to certain things because the other thing that happens is on say an insurance pipeline, you have another timeline that's going to exist, which is your claim, because you're going to have to file a claim, then you're going to have to get your scope determination, then you're going to get your paperwork and then you're going to have to get do front end supplementing. Once you pass this line, the job is allowed to go into work in progress, right? Which is a middle stage whip. So once you pass this line, they say basically, the deal pipeline will not allow this deal to move from here to here unless this is moved from here to here. So when this claim moves from here to here, this unblocks this block from going that way. This is how you can kind of keep things organized. Because one person is working on your claims, another person is working in production, but you want kind of a total record of truth that happened with the deal. And so certain things on block. For example, you can't go to all trades complete until all of these associated tickets have moved to this stage. So if you have multiple tickets, well, your roof has to go first because you don't want to bang up your brand new gutters. So you cannot go forward. You can have this one be in scheduled stage, that's allowed. But it cannot go into work in progress until this one is install complete. Just because this one is install complete and is considered to be green, we cannot move from work in progress to close one and start invoicing until such time as this one is also green. So the idea is that the production manager playing this Tetris game has to try and keep all this organized. So this is a large place where the production manager lives.
