CRM

What it solves

A sale in progress usually lives in an email, a spreadsheet and a salesperson’s head. CRM takes it out of there: every opportunity has its amount, its owner, its stage and its closing date, and the pipeline tells you where each one stands without asking anyone.

And because the CRM lives in the same product as projects and invoices, a won deal is not typed in again: it becomes a project with the deal’s client, and you invoice from there.

Who it is for

For small teams that sell services —agencies, studios, consultancies— and want a clear pipeline without the weight of a big-company CRM. Also for anyone who needs to know where the business comes from before deciding where to invest.

How you work the pipeline

You open an opportunity with a title, amount, currency, probability and estimated closing date; the last two figures are what the summary uses to calculate the forecast. You move the deal by dragging the card to the next stage, and the probability sets itself to that of the stage it lands in.

When you close a deal you choose won or lost, and when you mark it lost you can write the reason —price, competition, no budget— to learn from it. If you get it wrong, you drag the deal back to an open stage and it is in play again.

You can have several pipelines at once if you sell in different ways, and an Analysis tab with the conversion rate, the value of the pipeline —gross and weighted— and where the leads come from.

Leads, clients and portfolio

A lead is someone who is not yet a client and has no open sale. You log them with their name and, if you have them, company, email, phone and source; when there is something to invoice you turn them into a client with one click and their data is copied over. The client’s detail keeps their tax ID, their billing address and their contact people, and the client portfolio can be sorted by what was invoiced or what is pending, to see who the business depends on.

What to keep in mind

Converting the same won deal twice returns the same project: it is not duplicated. A converted lead is not converted again. And a deleted client goes to the trash in the organization settings, from where it is restored.