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Zora

CRM and sales management

Custom CRM: pipeline management as you actually practise it

Every CRM on the market can store a contact and an opportunity. What none of them knows is your cycle: the stages that exist only at your company, the follow-ups driven by a business event, and the compensation rules that have no equivalent anywhere.

Where an off-the-shelf CRM gives out

A standard CRM models a funnel: contact, opportunity, stages, signature. As long as your business fits inside that funnel, it does the job, and it costs less than a build. The trouble starts when part of your cycle has no place in it.

It is almost always the post-signature side that gives out first. A contract that triggers in tranches, a service consumed over time, a renewal conditioned on usage, payment in instalments: the CRM records “won” and stops there, while for you the engagement is only beginning. Everything after that goes into a spreadsheet.

Variable compensation is the clearest case. A commission that only triggers on payment, split between an introducer and a closer, clawed back on a bad debt, tiered by volume: no generic CRM can compute it. So it is computed by hand, every month, by one person who becomes the only one able to reproduce it. That is an operational risk, not just lost time.

The real cost is not data entry. It is that sales management rests on a number nobody can recompute, and that a rep disputing their commission is right one time in ten — with no way of knowing which.

What the work covers

Your pipeline, your stages

The phases as you name them, with the transition conditions you actually apply: a quote does not become a signed deal because a box was ticked, but because what had to happen happened.

Variable compensation, computed

Commissions, splits between introducer and closer, tiers, clawbacks on bad debt, triggering on payment rather than on signature. The rule is written once, applied to everyone, and every amount traces back to the facts that produced it.

Follow-ups driven by the business

Not “call back in a fortnight”, but “call back when the invoice falls due”, “when the contract nears its end”, “when usage crosses a threshold”. What fires on its own does not get forgotten.

Life after signature

Contracts, payment schedules, renewals, amendments: the life of the deal once won, in the same tool that won it. This is the part that usually ends up in a parallel spreadsheet.

What each role sees

A rep sees their book and their compensation, a director sees the whole and the margin. One tool, two readings, and no file emailed around to make up for a missing permission.

Continuity with invoicing

What is signed feeds what is invoiced, and what is collected returns into the calculation. Without that loop, commission on payment stays a manual computation, however good the CRM.

The signs it is time to leave the generic CRM

Every one of these has the same origin: a commercial rule that exists at your company and not in the product you are using.

  • Commissions are computed in a spreadsheet, outside the CRM.
  • One person alone can reproduce the variable-compensation calculation.
  • Life after signature — contracts, schedules, renewals — lives elsewhere.
  • The CRM says “won” at a moment that does not match your reality.
  • Follow-ups depend on an event the CRM knows nothing about.
  • Revenue in the CRM and revenue in the accounts do not agree.

Frequently asked questions

Why build a CRM rather than configure one?
As long as your needs fit the objects the vendor anticipated, configuration wins: it is faster and cheaper. The tipping point comes when a calculation rule — a commission, a payment schedule, a renewal condition — has no equivalent in the product. At that point configuration becomes a stack of workarounds nobody can maintain, and building becomes the reasonable option again.
Can we keep our current tool for part of the work?
Yes, and it is common. A custom CRM can cover only the part the existing product cannot handle, and exchange data with it. The thing to settle up front is this: which tool holds the truth about which data. Two systems that both claim to hold revenue will always end up reporting two versions of it.
How are disputed commissions handled?
Every amount stays attached to the facts that produced it: the deal, the payment, the tier applied, the rule in force on that date. A dispute is settled by opening the breakdown, not by redoing the sum from memory. That is also what lets a rule change without rewriting history.
Can data from our existing CRM be recovered?
Yes. Accounts, contacts, deals, interaction history: migration is part of the work, including clearing the duplicates and inconsistent states built up over the years. Without migration the old tool stays open “just in case”, and the new one never gets adopted.
How long before the sales team really uses it?
Adoption does not depend on the delivery date but on what ships first. A CRM that starts by removing a real chore — double entry, a commission worked out by hand — gets used from the first version. A CRM that starts with reporting for management gets filled in grudgingly.

Related work

The engagements in the portfolio where this work is visible.

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