sales
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Software that tracks every customer and prospect interaction in one place.
Definition
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) is the database of every contact, conversation, deal, and follow-up. HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive are the common choices. Without a CRM, founder memory becomes the bottleneck - leads fall through cracks, follow-ups don't happen, sales rep handoffs lose context. A CRM is not a productivity tool, it's a memory and discipline tool. The smallest service business benefits from a free-tier CRM the moment it has more than 20 active conversations.
In your business
- →Adopt a CRM before you 'need' one - retroactive data entry is painful
- →Define 5-7 deal stages, not 15 - too many stages = no one updates them
- →Run weekly pipeline reviews from the CRM, not from spreadsheets