# 8 - Reverse engineering for CRM
How to turn existing prospect into clients
Read time: 3 min.
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Summary
Cracking the code: The art of reverse engineering
Facing the truth: The ugly reality about your CRM
Navigating the Stages: Understanding Lifecycle Stages & Leads Status
Unleashing the Potential: How to Act as a Computer with Your CRM
Cracking the Code: The Art of Reverse Engineering
When I ask my clients about their priorities, they always answer: "Get more customers to generate more revenue."
I then systematically ask: "What is your current process for achieving that?"
I usually receive a reply involving a complex stack and many strategies involving marketing and sales executives, but rarely something around the CRM.
I would love to hear something like, "The first thing I did was clean my CRM, extract data from it, and try to understand a pattern from previous closed-won, closed-lost, and common characteristics between them.”
Let's dig into reverse engineering to improve that.
Reverse engineering is dismantling an object to see how it works.
So, instead of starting from scratch and making complicated stuff, you should consider your CRM history if you have one.
The global idea is to ask yourself what has happened to your pipeline, starting with your closed-lost opportunity, Sales Qualified Leads, and Marketing Qualified Leads.
An excellent way to do that is to follow this process:
Extract your CRM contacts (with n8n or simply CSV).
Analyze past advanced leads with the 5-why methodology.
Facing the Truth: The Ugly Reality of Your CRM
This is a fact: CRM management causes friction for the sales team.
For me, CRM should be the single source of truth regarding lead management.
I can observe a common problem while auditing clients’ CRM: everybody is attributing a different mapping.
“I had a call with a lead three weeks ago. Great business opportunity.”
Wait a minute, is that a lead? A sales-qualified lead or just an unqualified lead you have over the phone and will never buy from you?
As a result, there is massive confusion about the real lead stage.
This is why there is a need for education to speak the same language.
I’m proposing my definition in the section below.
Navigating the Stages: Understanding Lifecycle Stages & Leads Status
I’m using two properties to map the properties of the lead.
Lifecycle stage: What is the maturity of the prospect
Lead status: Used to track the lead progress in the pipeline
This mapping allows us to understand the precise status of the prospect at any given time.
Disclaimer: This may not be the pure literature definition. It’s based on my own experience and transferred to outreach purposes.
Lead: The lead has been identified. Engagement still needs to be completed.
MQL: The lead has replied
SQL: Qualification call performed
Opportunity: Validate the BANT criteria.
Budget: The budget exist
Authority: The identity of the decision maker has been defined (Who has the authority of pushing to the “BUY” button)
Need: The need is defined, and we can satisfy it
Timeline: Understand the degree of urgency
Unleashing the Potential: How to Act as a Computer with Your CRM
Now that we have a first sense of what kind of stage could be the lead in his buying journey, it’s still not sufficient because there are a lot of scenarios between each trigger.
Think as a computer. Think binary. GO vs. NOGO. Always think about the next step.
A) Reply
If the reply is positive, the lead is in progress and needs to be moved to a discovery call and marked as “In progress.”
If the reply is negative, we can disqualify the lead and mark it as “unqualified.”
B) No reply
If we get an OOO notification, we need to relaunch later and marked as “bad timing.”
There is a chance that the lead has not seen the message or just lacked of time (Often the case with C level). In this scenario needed to be marked as “in progress.”
If we realize afterward that the lead is not the right person to talk to or not sticking to the right ICP or BP (that may occur), mark it as “unqualified” No need to spend more time on it.
The last scenario could be that the lead may not have expressed interest. This is hard to find but could be interesting to nurture through the nurturing campaign and adapt the status over time.
I hope you find this content helpful.
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