Visual pipeline, complete client record, a report in one click. What this application does, and why the CRM problem was never the software.
by Nadia Maar ·
Almost every company I meet has a CRM. Almost none of them updated it last week. The real deals live in the salespeople's heads, in a personal spreadsheet and in an email thread; the CRM holds a photograph from some months ago, and management looks at it knowing it is not true.
The convenient explanation is that salespeople are reluctant. The useful one is different: a CRM asks a salesperson for ten minutes a day and gives back, in exchange, a report somebody else will read. No sensible person feeds a system that only takes. This article shows what one that gives something back looks like — and which therefore stays up to date without anyone having to insist.
Three things, and nothing else: it keeps deals on a board you can read in three seconds, keeps everything known about a client in a single record, and produces the report without anyone filling it in. The rest of the features found in general-purpose products — campaigns, tickets, marketing automation — stay switched off in a twenty-person company almost every time.
Very often that is the right choice, and I say it before you ask: if your sales process is standard, a subscription product costs less and somebody else maintains it. Custom starts to pay when the stages are nobody else's, when pricing depends on your own rules, or when the CRM has to read from and write to the ERP rather than sit beside it.
You know your sales stages better than I do. The interesting question is a different one: what the system should ASK in each, and above all what it should GIVE BACK. Tap a column to see both halves.
The lead has arrived — The most neglected stage, and where most value is lost: a lead sitting here for ten days is almost always a lost lead, and nobody notices because nobody looks at this column.
What it asks for: Name, company, where it came from. Three fields, filled in almost entirely by the system when the lead comes from the website.. What it gives back: History: if that company already wrote to you two years ago, the record says so immediately. Whoever calls back already knows what was discussed.
We have spoken — Here the risk is not losing the deal, it is forgetting it. Deals at this stage die of silence more often than of a no.
What it asks for: What the client needs and when to get back to them. Two lines, not a form.. What it gives back: The reminder at the right moment, and the alert when a deal has been still for longer than average. It is the feature salespeople use most, because it protects them from forgetting.
The offer has gone out — The stage where precision matters: what was offered, at what price, valid until when. It is also where the CRM should talk to the quote configurator, if there is one.
What it asks for: The document sent and the validity date. If the offer comes from the configurator, it asks nothing: it links itself.. What it gives back: The review: it tells you when an offer is about to expire, and shows previous versions if the client asked for changes. Nobody has to remember who asked for what.
Closed positively — The handover almost no CRM handles well: from here the deal becomes an order, and it must reach whoever fulfils it without anyone retyping it.
What it asks for: The confirmation and the final terms. One click, if the terms are the ones in the offer.. What it gives back: The order created in the ERP, and client onboarding starting on its own. The salesperson transcribes nothing and moves to the next deal.
Closed negatively — The column everyone treats as a graveyard and which is in fact the most informative on the whole board, provided you ask for one single thing.
What it asks for: The reason, picked from a short list. Not a free-text box: five options, one click.. What it gives back: After six months, the answer to the question worth most: whether you lose on price, on lead times, on a missing feature or because you arrived late. That figure changes the product and changes the price list.
A CRM gets updated when the subtraction between what it asks and what it returns favours the person filling it in. It is a sum you can do before building anything, in minutes a day per salesperson.
Per day: +28 min — a day for each salesperson. That margin makes any insistence from management unnecessary: someone who gains half an hour updates the system on their own, and someone who loses ten minutes stops doing it whatever they are told.
These are illustrative numbers, not a promise: yours depend on how many deals each person handles and how much time they spend searching their inbox today. But the shape of the sum is that, and it is worth doing before choosing any tool — including a subscription one. If the subtraction comes out negative, that CRM will not be updated, and it will be nobody's fault.
The reason management wants a CRM is almost always one: knowing what the quarter will close at. And the reason the number it produces is unreliable is always the same: it comes from records nobody has touched.
The same rule as the other custom tools applies: it gets built in layers, and each layer must be useful before moving to the next.
Board, records and reminders run between twelve and twenty-five thousand euros; with connections to the ERP and the configurator it goes up, and that depends almost entirely on how many systems must talk to each other. But if your process is standard, I repeat what I wrote above: a subscription product costs less and somebody else maintains it. Custom is justified by your own rules, not by the wish to own something.
In the audit we take a real salesperson and reconstruct their day: how many deals they follow, how long they spend hunting for information in emails, what the system you have asks of them today. From there the balance fills in with your minutes rather than my examples.
If the sum comes out negative even with the best tool — which happens when deals are few and long — I will tell you, and you save yourself a project. If it comes out positive, you know by how much, and that number is the only argument needed to get it genuinely adopted.
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Because for them it is a cost with no return: minutes of data entry that feed someone else's report. A CRM gets updated when it gives something back to the person filling it in — the customer record ready before the call, the quote that generates itself, the history that saves asking a question twice. The CRM problem was never the software: it is the balance between minutes asked and minutes returned.
An off-the-shelf CRM is fine as long as your sales process resembles the one it was designed for. Custom makes sense when the real stages are not the ones it assumes, when pricing follows rules the product cannot express, or when updating it means re-typing data that already exists elsewhere. The practical signal is simple: if the team keeps a spreadsheet next to the CRM, the CRM is describing a different company.
Not by multiplying value by a probability someone typed in. A forecast holds when the probability comes from the real state of the deal — what happened, when, and what is missing to close — and when deals stalled for too long drop out of the total instead of staying in to keep it from falling. The check arrives in the first quarter where the forecast and the cash resemble each other.
An entry condition and an exit condition, both verifiable without asking anyone. A stage you can pass through without anything having happened is not a stage, it is a label: it colours the dashboard and predicts nothing. That is why in the article every stage states what it asks of the person filling it in and what it gives back — that ratio decides whether the system is still used after month three.