Consider a Savinja valley furniture maker producing kitchens and made-to-measure interiors for retailers and architects across Slovenia, Croatia and Italy. Leads trickle in from the contact form, plain email, Instagram DMs, regional agents and a stack of business cards brought home from an international fair. Each job involves drawings, finish samples, pricing that goes stale as timber and fittings costs shift, and several rounds of revisions, so a deal can take a season to close. Who looks after Instagram is anyone's guess. Proposals are buried in individual reps' inboxes, and after a price change nobody can say which of them are still valid. Meanwhile the prospect signs with whichever competitor answered quickest and looked most organised. We rebuild that route inside a CRM. Every lead is assigned to a person with a dated follow-up, proposals live in one place, marketing consent is logged with when and where it was given, and the managing director opens a single view each week showing how many projects sit in which phase.
A CRM is a tool, not a salesperson. What matters is that leads hear back fast and that a signed proposal becomes an order without being typed in a second time; the configuration follows from that.
Submissions from the website, messages to the sales address, WhatsApp Business via its official API, Instagram DMs and cards scanned on a phone at a fair each create a CRM record on their own. Every record shows where it came from, so manual copying disappears.
Leave a fresh lead unanswered past the agreed limit and the assigned person, plus their line manager, receive a reminder. Leads that arrive at night or over the weekend get a friendly holding reply we write in your tone.
Between five and seven phases, and for each one a concrete condition for moving forward, such as dimensions in hand, proposal issued or samples signed off. Verifiable facts decide progress, not optimism.
Branded templates, proposals sent from inside the deal record and an alert as soon as the prospect opens the document. Anything nearing its valid-until date is pushed up the list.
A won deal carries the client and order data across to Pantheon, Minimax, Metakocka, Business Central or Odoo automatically, with company tax details and addresses checked beforehand.
For each contact we keep when consent to direct marketing was given, through which channel and in response to what wording. Mailings reach only people who said yes, and an opt-out takes effect in all connected tools simultaneously. Exceptions for existing customers and the handling of company addresses should be confirmed with a lawyer.
Proposals per phase, average hours until a new lead gets its first answer, sources that actually turn into contracts, and the expected pipeline for the quarter.
Historical contacts are imported only after the new process has proved itself on live leads, which spares you a messy clean-up of a CRM built on wrong assumptions.
Two hours on video with field sales, office sales and the design staff. You come away with a first draft of the phases and a shortlist of tasks to automate.
Once the CRM is configured, a few genuine leads are handled entirely inside it while we iron out whatever gets in the way.
Contacts from spreadsheets, Outlook or a previous tool are deduplicated and brought in, each tagged with its correct consent state.
Brief sessions for small groups, real work in the system, and a shared review of the early numbers roughly four weeks later.
Leads cool fast, and warm ones go to the quickest responder. Whether it is a custom kitchen, a heat pump or production machinery, prospects contact several suppliers in parallel and tend to stick with whoever responds first and clearly. A DM noticed after two days can undo a superb proposal. So response time is what we put a number on before anything else, and the very first automation we build is the reminder that guards it.
A business card is not permission to send marketing emails. Following up on the specific topic you talked about is fine, but a regular newsletter needs consent, logged with its date and origin. The CRM keeps such contacts out of mass mailings until that consent exists. For company addresses, ask your lawyer about the details.
They come in via the official WhatsApp Business API. Each conversation is linked to the contact, the colleague handling it is visible, and if someone leaves the firm their chats remain on company record. Conversations on private handsets are outside the scope.
Keep the required fields to an absolute minimum. Leads arrive as records automatically, emails and proposals link themselves, and all the rep adds is the next action. When they notice in week one that the system saves rather than costs them time, objections usually fade.
The one matching your process, be it HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Odoo CRM or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, or the tool you already have if it suffices. We lean towards vendors hosting in EU data centres; the vendor must also be listed in your privacy notice and bound by a data processing agreement.
Our time is charged at €50 per hour plus VAT, and a written quote follows the mapping session. Licences for the CRM and the WhatsApp API are registered to your company and paid straight to the vendor.
Explain how sales work today, how big the team is and which channels leads arrive through. We will design the phases around what your people really do.
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