Why you should create tags in your CRM (and how it can improve your sales and memory)

Do you have a hard time remembering people’s names?

According to psychological scientists Lisa Abrams and Danielle K. Davis, “The ability to learn and remember proper names, particularly people’s names, is notoriously more difficult relative to other types of words.”

It’s no different for salespersons. Remembering a prospect’s or customer’s name is one of the most common difficulties salespersons have. Especially when they deal with a large number.

Here’s a scenario. Let’s say you meet prospects at your conference booth in New York. Once you’re back in the office, would you be able to remember every prospect you met at the conference? Most likely not. Unless you’re someone like Ron White, a two-time national memory champion who once memorized 2,300 names of fallen US soldiers, and the fastest to memorize a deck of shuffled cards in 1 minute and 27 seconds.

Although you may not be able to recall names, you may have vivid memories of the people you met— few alumni from NYU, Knicks fans, etc. But, none of this helps you identify the exact leads to follow-up. For one, they’re in your memory and you need a place to store this data, like a CRM system. Next, you need to identify this group of leads amongst others in the system.

So, here at Freshworks CRM, we tend to get creative. We find a way to remember people’s names by associating them to something else.

We call them Tags.

There are a lot of prospects in your sales funnel—and you don’t know most of them. But you may have a personal connection with some; they may be from your referral sources, events, campaigns, etc. Ideally, you should personalize your conversations for each group, instead of sending out a blast email to everyone in your funnel.

If you’re well acquainted with CRM, I can hear you say:

“I have custom fields to segment groups. Why do I need tags?”

Fair point.

Custom fields are without doubt an invaluable benefit to users. They allow you to capture information that’s necessary and unique to your business when fields are not already present in the CRM. You can customize field types- text, date, number, drop-down, etc., that allow you to control the field property and help your business maintain data accuracy.

Custom fields are unique to individual records and less easily changed. For example, birthday, purchase date, phone number, etc. You can also use them to create segments. An example would be to capture the source of your inbound leads. For this, you’d create a drop-down field named “Source” with a list of options like your website, Facebook, Google ad, and LinkedIn.

But, here are a couple of limitations:

> The power to control and modify custom fields resides with the Freshworks CRM Admin. If a source type is not available in the drop-down, you can’t modify the field to add one on the fly. You have to request your account admin to make this addition.

> If salespersons can’t find a contact’s source in the drop-down list, they either pick an incorrect one or entirely avoid filling in this field if it is not mandatory, costing data accuracy.

Now all this is not to say that custom fields are inconvenient. They offer customizability on an account-level rather than user level. Admin-only access helps keep your CRM data clean by restricting users from creating too many custom fields and protects important fields from getting accidentally deleted by users.

But, there comes a time when salespersons need a little more flexibility with their CRM. Those one-off cases where adding a contact’s personal information on the fly in the CRM help refresh your memory and build better relationships. Like, create tags—NYU Alumni or Knicks fan, and use the custom field: Source as NY Conference to improve your selling strategy.

“why can’t I use notes instead of tags?”  

Notes are great too. Sure you can go to a contact’s landing page and add quick notes about them, NYU Alumni or Knicks fan. No harm, no foul. But there’s a limitation to this method. Here’s why.

Thanks to your Uncle, you received two Knicks tickets for the season and some really good seats too. Now’s the time to win some of the Knicks fans in your funnel, and build a relationship with them. Except you can’t remember their names to reach out. Without knowing who they are upfront, you can’t locate this note. Unless, of course, you have a very good memory, and are already on your way to the game with the prospect.

For the rest of us, Tags are a godsend. Once a tag is created, all you have to do is search for the tag in Freshworks CRM, and all records tagged with the search term will be listed. You can also find records by tags using the filter option.

As for Notes, you can use it to add more detailed information about your contact, say their experience at the game. Heck, you can even add voice notes in Freshworks CRM!

“that’s it, i’m sold. Now how do I tag records in Freshworks CRM?”

Good call. There are four ways to tag your records in Freshworks CRM.

#1 manually tag a record when you create them

#2 go to the record landing page to add tags

#3 tag bulk records in the list view

#4 tag records during data import

Tags offer quick reference to help you sell better

Because Freshworks CRM allows every user to create tags as needed, you get the benefit to add any contextual information on a record that enables you to quickly refer to by narrowing down your search.

Through tags, you can create a personalized and segmented email and SMS campaign to more effectively sell your services.

For example, you are a salesperson in a paper sales company. You want to send a golden ticket to your new small business customers to be eligible for a special 10% discount for a year—an old but ingenious strategy to retain customers.

The smart choice is to rely on your CRM to segment and target this group of customers, so you don’t make matters worse for your sales by mistakenly offering the golden ticket to all your customers. Start by applying two filters, Record Owner and Tags. Select the list of displayed records, and choose the bulk action you want to perform—Bulk email, Bulk SMS, or Add to sequence. Remember that you can personalize emails in Freshworks CRM to tailor your message to each customer.

Tags can also improve your memory  

Memory is a skill. And just like any other skill, it takes practice and techniques to improve your memory. Our brains like to create connections by associating what we’re trying to remember with something else. This association is what we refer to as tags.

How you choose to attach tags is up to you. The best part is it actually works. You just need to put it to practice to tag quickly and effectively to improve your memory and help you recall names faster.

Here’s a technique from TV’s greatest salesman and world’s best boss Michael Scott. In an incident, Michael is asked to go to different branches of their company to lecture about the success of his branch. In one of his lectures, he speaks highly of his skills to remember people’s names. To quote Scott:

“I don’t know you. But I need to know you in order to sell to you. That is why I have asked you to go around and tell me your names. I have an amazing mnemonic device, by which I have memorized all of your names. I have taken a unique part of who you are, and I have used that to memorize your name. Baldy, your head is bald. It is hairless. It is shiny, it is reflective like a mirror. “m” your name is mark.”

There’s a method to the madness here, but Michael actually gets Mark’s name right. Although, he probably shouldn’t have said it out loud.

Here’s the truth—sometimes tags can be absurd, and in cases like Scott’s, inappropriately funny. Which is why we leave it up to you to attach your tags in Freshworks CRM. Whatever works best for you to sell, but don’t go too crazy. After all, it’s your CRM; let’s keep it clean.