Finding a faster & more efficient way to prospect has been bugging me for years and when i sat down with Eric (our new head of sales) to talk sales an old problem surfaced.

The problem

Here’s the issue I always face, i call it “fixing the spreadsheet”. This is now saving me a load of time and making my prospecting much more streamlined and hopefully it will translate to more closes.

There’s a ton of good CRM products out there that i can use for managing prospecting. I prefer Highrise because it is a more streamlined version of Salesforce and a much cheaper.

Even with Highrise there’s a big problem. It handles the management of prospects very well once i’ve created a Contact entry and i have on ongoing dialog going with the person; it doesn’t handle the first step of prospecting well which is the “mass prospect list”. Virtually, every sales guy/girl i talk to still uses a simple spreadsheet to gather the initial giant list of prospects.

There’s no point uploading this huge list to Highrise because it bogs down the database with a lot of Contact entries that i dont want in my CRM. I also want to see a list view of all prospects in a tabular format. Once a prospect has been qualified and i start a dialog, i want to move it from the spreadsheet to Highrise and create a Contact entry.

It would be great if Highrise offered an early funnel feature that helped with this but it doesn’t. In my ideal world, there would be a big green button called “Create Contact” next to every prospect on my spread sheet.

Once i was ready to migrate the prospect from the spreadsheet to Highrise, i’d click the button and it would create a new contact in Highrise.

Problem solved

I solved the problem by creating a connector between my google spreadsheet and my Highrise account.

Now, when ever i want to move a contact from the spreadsheet to Highrise i can do it in seconds (without having to export the entire sheet and import it to Highrise). I use a product called Zapier to connect my Google account and my Highrise account.

Here’s how you can do the same.

Step 1: Create a Zapier account (it’s free)

Step 2: Make sure all your prospects are on a Google spreadsheet (the columns should be labelled as my example below)

Step 3: Create a new tab on your spreadsheet called “Send to Highrise (any prospects moved/copied will automatically be sent to Highrise where a new Contact record will be created.

Step 4: Login to Zapier and follow the easy set up steps to create a Zapp OR use my Zapp by clicking here.

Note – If you use a free Zapier account it takes 15 minutes to synch your data and you get 100 record updates per month. You can upgrade you plan to make this work batter for you.

 

You can set up Zapier manually to do this by pairing “Google Docs” and “Highrise” or you can clone the Zapp that i use and add your own Google and Highrise account information (quickest way).

Click here for my Zapp