Using Drag as a Sales CRM
Sales teams often need to use a CRM + an email platform to manage their leads and convert sales. With Drag, you can say goodbye to losing time on context switching and stay right where the deals are closed: your inbox. This guide explains how to turn Gmail into your new lead management system with Drag.
Contents:
How to set up Drag as a Sales CRM
- Create Drag boards to manage incoming leads.
- Categorize and organize leads and deals.
- Turn the most used responses into shared templates.
- Create automated follow-ups.
- Create automation rules to save you time.
- Define where your communication will come from.
- Define where email replies will load on Drag boards.
How to operate Drag as a Sales CRM
- Control when and by whom things are getting done.
- Use notes and internal chat to access information faster.
- Rename cards for more meaningful titles.
- Know when leads read your emails.
- Get help on the perfect pitch or negotiation with shared drafts.
- Add new leads manually.
- Track your team's performance.
Pro tips
- Share deals across different teams.
- Manage leads coming from forms.
- Read a real case study on how customers use Drag for Sales.
Take these first steps to customize Drag according to your Sales CRM requirements.
The first thing to do is to create Drag boards to manage your leads. Whether you are running outreach campaigns and need to manage replies, receiving sales enquiries via forms on your website, or simply getting emails in a generic sales@ email address, you can plug these all into one or multiple Drag boards to track leads. To set up a Sales board:
Create a board.
Invite team members to the board.
Add incoming emails (i.e., choose which Shared Inbox or Google Group you want to assign to that board) or start with an empty board.
Here's a more detailed step by step to create a new board.
Extra tip 1: Create multiple Drag boards for different processes and teams within your Sales workflow. For example: an "SDR Board", shared with SDRs, with columns âProspectsâ, âContactedâ and âInterestedâ can represent your initial stages. Then a "Sales CRM Board", shared between SDRs and Sales Execs, can start from a "Demo Scheduled" stage, all the way to "Closed". Then the handover from SDRs to Sales Execs can be seamlessly done in 1 click, by just dragging a lead from a board to another, along with all history of communication with each lead.
Extra tip 2: If you want to move emails replies from an outreach campaign or a form submissions straight to a Drag board, just create an empty board and create automations to move those emails to the empty board in real time.
This is how a Sales board typically looks like:
In Kanban view:
In List view:
Here's how you can change between kanban or list views.
If you go for the Kanban view, don't forget to customize the width of the columns by dragging and dropping them like in a spreadsheet cell đ.
Sales work get much easier when you can organize your funnel visually, and get get an overview on what's going on without asking around or digging in for information.
You can categorize leads or deals in 4 ways using Drag:
Customize your columns (if you use Kanban view) or lists (if you are using list view) to adapt Drag to your Sales workflow. For example, you may want to split leads into the funnel stages:
Prospects
Leads
Opportunities
In Negotiation
Deals Closed
Deals Lost
To rename columns/lists, simply click on their titles (on the top left). There will be an inline editing input field, just type the desired title and click outside the input field. The names will be auto-saved.
Create Drag's shared tags to categorize your leads and deals based on crucial information about each of them. For example, you may want to tag cards according to the deal value, company size, probability of closing, or anything else that makes sense for your team. You will be able to look at this kind of information and know who the leads you will handle are.
You can easily filter your boards by tags, which is very handy when there is a mix of different leads/deals on a board.
You can also organize your cards visually with color coding. Each color can represent, for example, the timezone in which a lead is (so a salesperson doesnât call them at 5 am đ ) or something else. You can even attribute a color to cards that deserve special attention, for example.
Extra tip: Create a fixed card on the top of each column with instructions to be followed by your salespeople for that specific stage of the funnel.
Your sales pitch is not the same for every lead, but if you have several standard messages send over and over, why not keep them ready in hand? In Drag, you can turn them into a template and share them with your team.
It means once you have created all the necessary templates, you won't need to worry about spreading them around. They will be automatically available for everyone on your team.
Here's how to set up shared templates.
As a salesperson, you need to get answers. And as a salesperson, you know that many follow ups are often required until you finally get answers from leads.
To make your life easier, you can let Drag send email follow-ups for you so you can focus on what matters. You can just select when you want to schedule the follow-up emails, and Drag will send them automatically. These email sequences can also be shared with your team to keep consistency in your email campaigns.
And since people are more inclined to buy from personalized emails, you can also use custom fields to add unique information to the email receiver, such as First Name, Last Name, and Company. These custom fields will be automatically inserted into email follow-ups, so you donât need to fill them manually every time.
Here's how to use Drag's email templates and email sequences.
Why do the same things over and over if you can automate them? Our automations allow your Sales team to put lots of things on auto pilot.
A few examples include:
Tagging cards as "Priority" if sent from that prospect that itâs almost closing.
Assigning new sales enquiries to a specific team member based on who sent the enquiry. For example, if a lead has negotiated with that same team member in the past.
Moving emails automatically to a specific board or column based on which alias they were sent to (e.g. sales-europe@ vs. sales-latam@).
With Drag, you can reply to emails from your own personal user@ email address or a shared email address such as sales@.
More than that, you can choose a "Reply Default" for your emails. If you define sales@ as your default reply email, all replies will come straight from sales@ (yes, even if you are logged in to your personal account!).
Read here the step by step to set your reply default.
When you receive replies to existing emails on Drag boards, you can choose whether those replies will stay on the same column where they were left or go back to the first column of that board. Drag's default behavior is to keep emails on the same column, just moving new replies to the top. Learn more about the different behaviors in this article.
If, for example, receiving a reply from a lead that is "In Negotiation" doesn't represent a change in status for that lead, you can just use Drag's default setting (keeping email replies on the same original column).
However, if your board is divided into "New Leads,â "Qualified,â "In negotiation," and "Deals Closed," and a customer that was under the "Deals Closed" column sends an email about expanding their account, this means they shouldn't be a "Deal Closed" anymore and instead should become a "New Lead" again. In this case, it can make more sense for you to change the board configuration to move replies back to the first column of your board.
You have set up all of your Sales CRM inside Drag. Well done! đ Now, it's time to learn the best way to operate it daily.
Now that you have your board all set up, emails start coming in. How do you know who is working on what deals and when? That's what assignments and due dates are for.
Use assignments to know who is working on what opportunity in your pipeline. With assignments, you always know who is working on what. Assignments will be showed visually on each card with team members pictures:
You can see what emails are assigned to you in 1 click with the "Assigned to Me" view under each board.
With your sales team needing to jump on demo calls, they will depend on keeping up with due dates. By assigning due dates to cards, they will also be displayed on each card, and the team can check the day and time that a proposal may be due or when a follow up needs to be done.
Due dates can also be integrated with Google Calendar, which means that Drag automatically generates events in your calendar to remind you of deadlines.
Drag allows you to add a series of extra information about a certain lead to add more context around a specific deal. An internal chat is also available in each card, allowing teams to have quick conversations within the context of a specific deal, without needing to copy + paste information into an external tool or to refer to a notebook to look for hand-written notes. Read more about all the information available on cards here.
1. Notes and ToDo Tabs
You can type all the essential information about a lead that can't be lost on the tab Notes inside the lead card. Itâs also possible to create specific tasks that need to be done to guide the lead through the sales pipeline in the "ToDo" tab. Both tabs can be found on the top of the email detailed view, next to the email title.
Example:
A lead is struggling to understand how your product can work according to their needs, and you already have jumped on two demo calls with them. You can give all the details of what youâve already explained and shown to them, so the rest of the team can identify how to help.
2. Internal team chat
There's an internal team chat inside each card where you can talk to any teammate about that specific deal. Instead of going to a chat app to talk to them and give all the context about a particular prospecting, you can simply mention them on the chatbox and start talking about that specific email or task.
Example:
If you are closing a deal, and you know your teammate Nick has closed something similar in the past. So you can go to the chat inside the deal email and simply mention @Nick and ask him for insights. Heâll read it and leave her notes to help you convert that lead into a new customer.
Sometimes leads send you new enquiries with a subject line that doesn't mean much. Worse than that, sometimes you are sending an outreach campaign and multiple replies come back with the same subject line. With Drag, you can easily rename your cards with more meaningful titles, for example, Organization name or lead name.
To do that, just click on the card title on the top left (while inside a card). There is an inline input field and auto-saves in real time when you edit it. Here's how to do it.
You can identify how often and when leads view your emails with email tracking. This way, you can always know when it's time to follow up or feel how interested they are in your proposals!
You can view this both from your Drag board view but also in your "Sent" folder in Gmail. Read more about email tracking here.
Rather than copying and pasting text and sending it through other channels to get help or approvals for drafts before sending emails, it's possible to share email drafts with colleagues simply. This feature offers collision detection to avoid misunderstandings while your team is drafting an email.
You can read more about how to used shared email drafts here.
As you already know, when new opportunities come via email, they automatically load into your Drag board. But what if a new lead called you instead? In this case, you can manually add them to your sales board as well by creating and filling up a new card with their information. This way, you won't lose track of any leads.
Here's how to create new cards manually into Drag boards.
When you have all the data about email usage, you can measure your teamâs productivity, in a whole scenario or individually. Itâs crucial to have a better idea of how efficient the team is performing.
With Drag, you can have insights with the Analytics feature and generate reports across all of your boards' performance. Click here to learn how to use analytics and reports.
Many times, Sales teams require support from other teams in your organization (e.g. finance, tech support, etc) or simply need to handover information to other team )e.g. customer onboarding). Instead of forwarding emails around or creating a new task on a separate platform, Drag allows you to share information across various teams within your organization very easily.
You sell software and have an Onboarding team to help new customers. But you also want to help them with important information necessary to their implementation. Create a shared board with the Onboarding team and send them all the closed deals, with all the notes you need them to have.
You closed a sale, but now you need help with a prospect payment not getting through. Why not creating a "Payment Support" board, shared only with your finance team, and simply dragging the emails with this kind of issue to their board to ask for their help?
To do that, just create an empty board, invite the respective team members to that board and drag emails/tasks into that board when needed.
Once someone on your website registers for a free trial or anything that requires a form and turns them into a lead, you can send all the information you gathered as emails to your Leader board in Drag.
This tip requires setting specific automation. So if youâre not familiar with creating automations learn more about them here.
Wondering how all of the above works in practice? Read how CBH Homes, Idaho's #1 home Builder, saves 2 hours of each sales rep daily with Drag.
And there you are! You can now use Drag to manage all your leads and deals seamlessly đ¸.
Still, need help? Our Support Team will love to help at support@dragapp.com.
Contents:
How to set up Drag as a Sales CRM
- Create Drag boards to manage incoming leads.
- Categorize and organize leads and deals.
- Turn the most used responses into shared templates.
- Create automated follow-ups.
- Create automation rules to save you time.
- Define where your communication will come from.
- Define where email replies will load on Drag boards.
How to operate Drag as a Sales CRM
- Control when and by whom things are getting done.
- Use notes and internal chat to access information faster.
- Rename cards for more meaningful titles.
- Know when leads read your emails.
- Get help on the perfect pitch or negotiation with shared drafts.
- Add new leads manually.
- Track your team's performance.
Pro tips
- Share deals across different teams.
- Manage leads coming from forms.
- Read a real case study on how customers use Drag for Sales.
How to set up Drag as a Sales CRM
Take these first steps to customize Drag according to your Sales CRM requirements.
Create Drag boards to manage incoming leads
The first thing to do is to create Drag boards to manage your leads. Whether you are running outreach campaigns and need to manage replies, receiving sales enquiries via forms on your website, or simply getting emails in a generic sales@ email address, you can plug these all into one or multiple Drag boards to track leads. To set up a Sales board:
Create a board.
Invite team members to the board.
Add incoming emails (i.e., choose which Shared Inbox or Google Group you want to assign to that board) or start with an empty board.
Here's a more detailed step by step to create a new board.
Extra tip 1: Create multiple Drag boards for different processes and teams within your Sales workflow. For example: an "SDR Board", shared with SDRs, with columns âProspectsâ, âContactedâ and âInterestedâ can represent your initial stages. Then a "Sales CRM Board", shared between SDRs and Sales Execs, can start from a "Demo Scheduled" stage, all the way to "Closed". Then the handover from SDRs to Sales Execs can be seamlessly done in 1 click, by just dragging a lead from a board to another, along with all history of communication with each lead.
Extra tip 2: If you want to move emails replies from an outreach campaign or a form submissions straight to a Drag board, just create an empty board and create automations to move those emails to the empty board in real time.
This is how a Sales board typically looks like:
In Kanban view:
In List view:
Here's how you can change between kanban or list views.
If you go for the Kanban view, don't forget to customize the width of the columns by dragging and dropping them like in a spreadsheet cell đ.
Categorize and organize leads and deals
Sales work get much easier when you can organize your funnel visually, and get get an overview on what's going on without asking around or digging in for information.
You can categorize leads or deals in 4 ways using Drag:
1. Customize columns/lists for lead tracking
Customize your columns (if you use Kanban view) or lists (if you are using list view) to adapt Drag to your Sales workflow. For example, you may want to split leads into the funnel stages:
Prospects
Leads
Opportunities
In Negotiation
Deals Closed
Deals Lost
To rename columns/lists, simply click on their titles (on the top left). There will be an inline editing input field, just type the desired title and click outside the input field. The names will be auto-saved.
2. Use shared tags with key information
Create Drag's shared tags to categorize your leads and deals based on crucial information about each of them. For example, you may want to tag cards according to the deal value, company size, probability of closing, or anything else that makes sense for your team. You will be able to look at this kind of information and know who the leads you will handle are.
You can easily filter your boards by tags, which is very handy when there is a mix of different leads/deals on a board.
3. Use color coding for visual segmentation
You can also organize your cards visually with color coding. Each color can represent, for example, the timezone in which a lead is (so a salesperson doesnât call them at 5 am đ ) or something else. You can even attribute a color to cards that deserve special attention, for example.
Extra tip: Create a fixed card on the top of each column with instructions to be followed by your salespeople for that specific stage of the funnel.
Turn the most used responses into shared templates
Your sales pitch is not the same for every lead, but if you have several standard messages send over and over, why not keep them ready in hand? In Drag, you can turn them into a template and share them with your team.
It means once you have created all the necessary templates, you won't need to worry about spreading them around. They will be automatically available for everyone on your team.
Here's how to set up shared templates.
Create automated follow-ups
As a salesperson, you need to get answers. And as a salesperson, you know that many follow ups are often required until you finally get answers from leads.
To make your life easier, you can let Drag send email follow-ups for you so you can focus on what matters. You can just select when you want to schedule the follow-up emails, and Drag will send them automatically. These email sequences can also be shared with your team to keep consistency in your email campaigns.
And since people are more inclined to buy from personalized emails, you can also use custom fields to add unique information to the email receiver, such as First Name, Last Name, and Company. These custom fields will be automatically inserted into email follow-ups, so you donât need to fill them manually every time.
Here's how to use Drag's email templates and email sequences.
Create automation rules to save you time
Why do the same things over and over if you can automate them? Our automations allow your Sales team to put lots of things on auto pilot.
A few examples include:
Tagging cards as "Priority" if sent from that prospect that itâs almost closing.
Assigning new sales enquiries to a specific team member based on who sent the enquiry. For example, if a lead has negotiated with that same team member in the past.
Moving emails automatically to a specific board or column based on which alias they were sent to (e.g. sales-europe@ vs. sales-latam@).
Define where your communication will come from
With Drag, you can reply to emails from your own personal user@ email address or a shared email address such as sales@.
More than that, you can choose a "Reply Default" for your emails. If you define sales@ as your default reply email, all replies will come straight from sales@ (yes, even if you are logged in to your personal account!).
Read here the step by step to set your reply default.
Define where email replies will load on Drag boards
When you receive replies to existing emails on Drag boards, you can choose whether those replies will stay on the same column where they were left or go back to the first column of that board. Drag's default behavior is to keep emails on the same column, just moving new replies to the top. Learn more about the different behaviors in this article.
If, for example, receiving a reply from a lead that is "In Negotiation" doesn't represent a change in status for that lead, you can just use Drag's default setting (keeping email replies on the same original column).
However, if your board is divided into "New Leads,â "Qualified,â "In negotiation," and "Deals Closed," and a customer that was under the "Deals Closed" column sends an email about expanding their account, this means they shouldn't be a "Deal Closed" anymore and instead should become a "New Lead" again. In this case, it can make more sense for you to change the board configuration to move replies back to the first column of your board.
How to operate Drag as a Sales CRM
You have set up all of your Sales CRM inside Drag. Well done! đ Now, it's time to learn the best way to operate it daily.
Control when and by whom things are getting done
Now that you have your board all set up, emails start coming in. How do you know who is working on what deals and when? That's what assignments and due dates are for.
Assignments:
Use assignments to know who is working on what opportunity in your pipeline. With assignments, you always know who is working on what. Assignments will be showed visually on each card with team members pictures:
You can see what emails are assigned to you in 1 click with the "Assigned to Me" view under each board.
Due dates:
With your sales team needing to jump on demo calls, they will depend on keeping up with due dates. By assigning due dates to cards, they will also be displayed on each card, and the team can check the day and time that a proposal may be due or when a follow up needs to be done.
Due dates can also be integrated with Google Calendar, which means that Drag automatically generates events in your calendar to remind you of deadlines.
Use notes and internal chat to access information faster
Drag allows you to add a series of extra information about a certain lead to add more context around a specific deal. An internal chat is also available in each card, allowing teams to have quick conversations within the context of a specific deal, without needing to copy + paste information into an external tool or to refer to a notebook to look for hand-written notes. Read more about all the information available on cards here.
1. Notes and ToDo Tabs
You can type all the essential information about a lead that can't be lost on the tab Notes inside the lead card. Itâs also possible to create specific tasks that need to be done to guide the lead through the sales pipeline in the "ToDo" tab. Both tabs can be found on the top of the email detailed view, next to the email title.
Example:
A lead is struggling to understand how your product can work according to their needs, and you already have jumped on two demo calls with them. You can give all the details of what youâve already explained and shown to them, so the rest of the team can identify how to help.
2. Internal team chat
There's an internal team chat inside each card where you can talk to any teammate about that specific deal. Instead of going to a chat app to talk to them and give all the context about a particular prospecting, you can simply mention them on the chatbox and start talking about that specific email or task.
Example:
If you are closing a deal, and you know your teammate Nick has closed something similar in the past. So you can go to the chat inside the deal email and simply mention @Nick and ask him for insights. Heâll read it and leave her notes to help you convert that lead into a new customer.
Rename cards for more meaningful titles
Sometimes leads send you new enquiries with a subject line that doesn't mean much. Worse than that, sometimes you are sending an outreach campaign and multiple replies come back with the same subject line. With Drag, you can easily rename your cards with more meaningful titles, for example, Organization name or lead name.
To do that, just click on the card title on the top left (while inside a card). There is an inline input field and auto-saves in real time when you edit it. Here's how to do it.
Know when leads read your emails
You can identify how often and when leads view your emails with email tracking. This way, you can always know when it's time to follow up or feel how interested they are in your proposals!
You can view this both from your Drag board view but also in your "Sent" folder in Gmail. Read more about email tracking here.
Get help on the perfect pitch or negotiation with shared drafts
Rather than copying and pasting text and sending it through other channels to get help or approvals for drafts before sending emails, it's possible to share email drafts with colleagues simply. This feature offers collision detection to avoid misunderstandings while your team is drafting an email.
You can read more about how to used shared email drafts here.
Add new leads manually
As you already know, when new opportunities come via email, they automatically load into your Drag board. But what if a new lead called you instead? In this case, you can manually add them to your sales board as well by creating and filling up a new card with their information. This way, you won't lose track of any leads.
Here's how to create new cards manually into Drag boards.
Track your team's performance
When you have all the data about email usage, you can measure your teamâs productivity, in a whole scenario or individually. Itâs crucial to have a better idea of how efficient the team is performing.
With Drag, you can have insights with the Analytics feature and generate reports across all of your boards' performance. Click here to learn how to use analytics and reports.
Pro Tips
Share deals across different teams
Many times, Sales teams require support from other teams in your organization (e.g. finance, tech support, etc) or simply need to handover information to other team )e.g. customer onboarding). Instead of forwarding emails around or creating a new task on a separate platform, Drag allows you to share information across various teams within your organization very easily.
Example 1:
You sell software and have an Onboarding team to help new customers. But you also want to help them with important information necessary to their implementation. Create a shared board with the Onboarding team and send them all the closed deals, with all the notes you need them to have.
Example 2:
You closed a sale, but now you need help with a prospect payment not getting through. Why not creating a "Payment Support" board, shared only with your finance team, and simply dragging the emails with this kind of issue to their board to ask for their help?
To do that, just create an empty board, invite the respective team members to that board and drag emails/tasks into that board when needed.
Manage leads coming from forms
Once someone on your website registers for a free trial or anything that requires a form and turns them into a lead, you can send all the information you gathered as emails to your Leader board in Drag.
This tip requires setting specific automation. So if youâre not familiar with creating automations learn more about them here.
Read a real case study on how customers use Drag for Sales
Wondering how all of the above works in practice? Read how CBH Homes, Idaho's #1 home Builder, saves 2 hours of each sales rep daily with Drag.
And there you are! You can now use Drag to manage all your leads and deals seamlessly đ¸.
Still, need help? Our Support Team will love to help at support@dragapp.com.
Updated on: 10/06/2021
Thank you!