Be in the Know with Sales Notes

Sales notes give every deal a timestamped history anyone can read. How to use them, a note format that works, and why they matter when you share deals with partners.

August 23, 2023 · By Joseph Lamoureux

Ask three people where a deal stands and you’ll often get three answers, because what each of them knows lives in a different place: one person’s inbox, another’s call recording, a partner’s spreadsheet. Sales notes fix that by giving every opportunity one running history. If it happened on the deal, it’s in the notes, and anyone can read them.

What goes in a sales note

A sales note is any information about an opportunity worth keeping: notes from a meeting with the customer or a partner, something you learned on an internal call, research on the account, a change in timing or budget. The notes on an opportunity are the one place people need to look to understand what has happened on it.

Adding a note

Each note has a title and a description. When you save it, Recordbook records the note’s owner and a timestamp. Over time the notes build a dated timeline of the deal, attributed to the people who wrote them, which no one has to reconstruct later.

Sorting by notes

Click the sort icon, to the right of the filters icon, and choose Notes (Newest). Your opportunities reorder by the timestamp of their latest note, so the deals with the most recent activity rise to the top.

That sort is more useful than it sounds:

Weekly updates write themselves. Asked what you worked on this week? Sort by notes and read down the list. Every update is already timestamped.
Quiet deals stand out. Scroll to the bottom of the sort and you’ll find the opportunities nobody has touched in weeks: the ones most likely to be slipping.
Managers see activity without a meeting. Anyone can review the timestamped work across every deal in a few clicks.

A note format that works

Notes are only useful if someone else can read them quickly. A simple structure helps:

Title: the date, the event and who was there. “Oct 14 call with Acme CFO and partner AM.”
What happened: two or three sentences on what was said or decided.
What changed: stage, close date, amount, stakeholders or risks, if any of them moved.
Next step: what happens next and who owns it. Then add it as an action item so it gets a due date.

Thirty seconds after a call is enough. Waiting until Friday is how details get lost.

Notes when you sell with a partner

On a co-sell deal, the most valuable information often comes from the other company: what the cloud provider’s account team committed, what the partner heard from the customer’s IT lead, why procurement slipped. When that arrives as an email to one person, it rarely reaches the rep walking into the next customer meeting.

Recordbook connects your CRM and your partner’s to one shared workspace, so notes on a shared deal sit on the same record for both teams. Your partner’s update is on the timeline the next time you open the deal, with their name and the time attached.

Timestamped notes also settle a familiar argument. When it’s time to decide who sourced a deal and who influenced it, a dated note showing you were working the customer before anyone else engaged is evidence, not opinion. For AWS co-sell this is exactly what keeps an ACE submission from being downgraded from Sourced to Influenced; the AWS ACE guide explains how to use it.

What not to put in notes

Data that has its own field. Close date, stage, confidence and revenue belong on the product or service line, where they drive the pipeline. A note that says “pushed to Q3” without the close date changing leaves the forecast wrong.
To-dos. Tasks belong in action items, with an owner and a due date, where they’re color-coded and sortable.
Anything you wouldn’t want the customer or partner to read. Shared deals are shared. Write notes as if everyone on the deal will see them.

The payoff

A deal with good notes can change hands without a handoff meeting. A new rep, a manager covering a vacation or a partner joining late can read the timeline and know what happened, who said what and what’s next. That’s the difference between a CRM record and a deal history.

Try it on your own pipeline

Recordbook is free to start. Every feature is on every plan, and adding your team or your partners costs nothing extra. Create your free workspace.