Who am I? Just a guy who really loves to help people witih business processes/systems. I've created and modified business systems for a decade and just NEED to share some information.
I'm in the process of making some educational material, but for now just know that less data is good.
Below is a super simple breakdown of core business data.
For a Sales CRM you really just need the following:
Accounts (Companies) / Where
Contacts (People) / Who
Opportunities (Sales motion) / What1
If we want a Service/Support CRM you just need to add one additional thing: Cases (Tickets) / What2
The Why comes is usually associated with the Opportunity or the Case. "Why do they want to buy something", or "Why do they need help". These will be data points related to those specific things.
The When, guess what, it's also associated with the Opportunity or the Case! "When will the Opportunity be closed won/lost" or "When did the case get resolved". This will also be data points related to those specific things.
Let's say you sell multiple things, then you will get a Sub-What1 which is the Products. It is a Sub-What1 because they are always going to be connected to an Opportunity (What1).Â
What if we need to go the Marketing route? What3 = Campaigns. Campaigns are just time boxed groupings of people for a reason. That reason could be an event, it could be an email blast, it could just be the people you got from searching for an industry. Campaigns can then turn the Who's into What1's (Contacts into Opportunities)
You might be asking yourself, "Where is the 'How'?". The How is your process. The How will be the steps needed to get a prospective customer to becoming a real customer or getting someone from having an issue to having a resolution. Keep your How simple. Below are some examples:
Sales How: Have sales do sales
Opportunity Stages: Qualifying, Needs Analysis, Proposal, Negotiation, Closed Won, Closed Lost [SIMPLE!]
Service How: Have support do support
Case Status: New, Working, Waiting on Contact, Waiting on Us, Closed
There is one last important What4 and that's Reminders, Emails, Etc. These are things that could be related to anything (You sent an email related to an Opportunity, you need a reminder on a Case for a specific date, you need to track how many actions have been taken by a sales rep on an Opportunity [calls and emails], etc). We will call this Tasks.
Almost everything else you could think of will just be additional Whats. Quick list below but you could see how it just grows:
Surveys after a case/ticket. What related to Cases
Assets that a customer owns. What related to Accounts
This is it. This is all of Business Technology consolidated. Heck, this also shows you how you could use biz tech solutions (like CRMs) for other use cases like nonprofits using Opportunities as Donation Trackers. Don't get me started how this is just basically databases 101 but it is that too.