How to Use Custom Lists in Your CRM to Improve Sales Efficiency

By now, if you’re a salesperson, you already know the importance of entering (clean, accurate) data into your CRM. Whether you’re using Salesforce, Hubspot, or something else entirely, in order to make progress, your sales team needs to know who they’ve called on, and who they’re targeting in the future. 

It may sound simple, but many investment firms aren’t doing this in the most efficient way possible. 

At Dakota, we’ve always used Salesforce as our CRM, and have since 2006. In that time, we’ve established the processes and best practices needed to raise over $40 billion for our partners. 

How? Through a lot of time, trial and error, and clean data. Oh, and custom lists in Salesforce, which is what we’re here to talk about today. 

In this article, we’ll be highlighting the importance of clean and accurate data and custom list building for success in your CRM. By the end of the article, you’ll have a clear idea of the next steps you can take within your own CRM to create more efficiency for your sales team. 

First, we’ll jump into the importance of clean data. 

Does Clean Data Really Matter?

If you’ve been around here a while, you already know that our answer is an unequivocal yes. Without clean data, your CRM is rendered almost useless. 

Plus, if your sales team is constantly logging into a CRM and seeing stale, outdated data, they won’t be motivated to use it. 

So, it all starts with creating a culture of clean data within your firm. Motivate your sales team to put their meeting notes and data into the CRM right after they have them. In our experience, this is the hardest part, as salespeople are inclined to wait until the end of the week or the month 

For us, it’s Salesforce and Marketplace. For another firm, it could just be their CRM, and as we’ve said again and again, one of the most important things about a CRM is the ability to get a glance into the information that matters most to a particular salesperson. 

This brings us to our next point: custom lists.

What is a custom list and why does it matter?

One of the most effective ways to see the most important CRM data at a glance is to build custom lists. 

A Salesforce custom list view can help users to grab and segment data at a moment's notice – without the need for admin support. These lists allow you to display up to 15 fields of your choice on a list view, and these fields can be changed and rearranged depending on your needs.

To do this, you’re going to create custom lists in the report section of your CRM based upon the information that you want to see. 

For instance, say you just want to see a list in your database of all the hedge fund buyers, or a list of all the private equity buyers, or you want to see a list of all your RIA’s above $5 billion. 

You can begin creating all of these different custom lists by geography, by account type, by investment preferences, and by any other relevant fields depending on the goals of your firm.

This can help to double the effectiveness of a salesperson, because they can then focus their time on immediately just going in and seeing who they should be calling on and making their sales calls versus having to search around.

This creates extreme efficiency. 

You can create thousands of different custom lists so you can chunk information down into very digestible bites so you can focus. 

At Dakota, this is what we do for our members, because we know that one of the biggest challenges a lot of us face when it comes to a CRM is incomplete data. If it's not organized and up to date, it’s essentially useless. Marketplace provides that updated data, and allows for list views that empower your sales team to be incredibly efficient. 

To learn more about Dakota Marketplace and list building, we’d love to offer you a free trial of Dakota Marketplace, so you can increase the efficiency of your sales team without the hassle of constantly updating your data.