CRM 101 for Lightfield Customers

What is a CRM? And how is Lightfield different from a  traditional CRM?

Software companies typically use their CRM to keep track of customer relationships, manage deals, and monitor business performance.

Traditional CRMs can be thought of as an empty database, where you define all the things you want to track in your business, and you manually type in all of the updates you want to keep track of. 

The problem that many early-stage companies face with traditional CRM is the need for continual system admin in order to make this all work. This includes manual updates after every call, connecting the system to other business applications, and on-going system maintenance.

It can turn you from a seller into a system admin. Or, as one of our customers calls it, a “data hygienist.” 

CRMs like Lightfield eliminate this problem by doing the admin for you. In less than an hour, you can import all meetings and contacts from your inbox into Lightfield and define all of the data you would like for the platform to track. It uses an embedded meeting recorder to automatically update itself based on customer conversation. This gives you the power of a mature CRM, without the administrative overhead. 

When is the best time to start using Lightfield?

Lightfield is a fit for startups of any size, even those who are pre-revenue or haven’t found product-market fit. In fact, capturing those early conversations in a structured manner can help you get to product-market fit faster. 

Here’s why.

When it comes to tracking your conversations with potential customers, you’re probably working with some combination of your email, Notion, and Google Sheets. This only works when you have a small number of active conversations.

It breaks when you get to the point where there are too many active conversations over too long of a period of time to maintain and organize your notes, and remember where you’ve documented each of your conversations. It becomes virtually impossible to connect the dots between all the conversations you’re having and spot patterns across them.

Most startups get to this point within two to three months of starting conversations with potential users.

Lightfield makes sure none of the insights you collect or follow ups you commit to slip through the cracks. Think of it as an external memory for your company. The earlier you start using it, the more context that ‘memory’ will have and the more valuable it will be for your team.

How to work with ‘accounts’, ‘contacts’, and ‘opportunities’

Lightfield uses accounts, contacts, and opportunities to represent the interactions you’ve had with prospects and customers. 

When you first set up Lightfield and connect it to your calendar and inbox, it will automatically create accounts and contacts based on your history of past interactions. From that point on, it will automatically create new accounts and contacts whenever you have a meeting or email thread with someone new.

Accounts

An account is a company or organization.

• “Acme Corporation”

• “TechStart Inc”

• “Firstbite Restaurant Group”

Lightfield creates an account when it first sees a new company domain in your email or calendar:

• First email to sarah@acmecorp.com → account “Acme Corporation”

• Meeting with team@firstbite.io → account “Firstbite”

This account object is the home for everything about that company:

• Key facts (industry, size, tooling, etc.)

• People you’ve met there

• Deals you’re working on

• Emails, meetings, notes, tasks 

Contacts

A contact is a person.

• Sarah Chen, VP Sales at Acme

• Mike Rodriguez, Founder at TechStart

Lightfield creates contacts automatically when:

• You email with someone new

• You meet them on a call

Each contact is attached to an account:

• Sarah → Acme

• Mike → TechStart

Think of your contacts as functioning similar to a contact list in your cell phone or in your email client - but organized according to what company they work for.

Opportunities

An opportunity is a potential deal with a company.

Examples:

• “Acme – CRM subscription”

• “TechStart – onboarding + services”

An opportunity is linked to one account (the company). It can involve many contacts (champion, exec sponsor, procurement). It includes all the information need to know what you’re selling, how much you’re selling it for, and what needs to happen to close the deal. 

Most companies name opportunities by using a combination of the account name and the product being sold. There’s no ‘perfect’ way to name an opportunity, but we recommend adhering to a consistent naming format.

Using ‘Tasks’ to track and manage follow-ups  

Most founders adopt a CRM for one main reason: they are dropping balls.

Tasks in Lightfield turn the commitments you mention in calls and emails into concrete actions.

Task objects contain:

• A clear action (“Send updated pricing deck to Sarah”)

• With a due date (“by Thursday”)

• Linked to an account and (usually) an opportunity

• Owned by a specific person

Tasks in Lightfield came come from a variety of places, including

• Meetings. Lightfield will listen for commitments made in call recordings and automatically convert them into tasks (e.g. “I’ll follow up with an order form by Friday.”)

• Emails. Emails to external parties are scanned for commitments made to prospects or customers (e.g. “I’ll check with our co-founder to see where that’s at on the roadmap.”)

• Chat. You can use the chat interface to create individual tasks, or to create tasks in bulk (e.g. “Create a ask to follow up with each of our closed beta customers after the launch.”)   

• Manual entry. You can navigate to the task menu and manually create any task in addition to the ones automatically created by Lightfield.

Managing your sales pipeline

If tasks tell you what to do today, your pipeline tells you where you’re going.

A pipeline is a list of opportunities, grouped by sales stage. A sales stage represents a discrete, repeatable step that must occur in order to close a deal. 

For example, a typical start-up’s sales stages may look something like:

• Lead

• Meeting booked

• Demo

• Technical validation

• Trial

• Closed won

You can access your sales pipeline in the “Opportunities” view in Lightfield, organized by stage in a Kanban view. 

To update opportunities, you can drag and drop between columns on the pipeline board, or let Lightfield suggest changes when it sees certain steps have been completed in your process.

Customizing Lightfield

Lightfield has a schema-less memory architecture, so you don’t have to get the data model perfect on day one. Everything you say and write is captured in transcripts and emails. Structure is layered on top and can change over time based on what you learn is most important to keep track of.

Default vs. custom fields

On day one, start with the default fields for accounts, contacts, and opportunities. If there is something not present in the default data model that you know is critical for your business to track, you can easily add it. 

After a few calls, you’ll start to see patterns that will suggest the need to add additional custom fields. If there’s something you find yourself writing over and over again in notes, or something that you find yourself always asking for in calls that isn’t captured in your records, that’s a good sign that it should be part of the data model.

New fields you add will be retroactively backfilled based on past customer meetings.  As you learn more about your market, you can always update the model, knowing that when you do, you’ll have consistent data you can query 

Learn more

This covers everything you need to know to get started with Lightfield as your first CRM. 

If you’d like to dive deeper into some of the specific capabilities that makes Lightfield different from other CRMs, check out our 201 Guide on what makes Lightfield different.