You're getting leads.

You're getting deals.

But suddenly things start getting messy.

• You forget a deal because nobody reminded you.

• You check every active deal manually just to see what's due tomorrow.

• Your database gets crowded with old deals and completed projects.

• You know follow-ups matter, but keeping track of everything takes too much time.

• Calculating your real pipeline value manually becomes impossible.

And yes...

You could build your own CRM.

But most agency owners should be spending their time getting clients, not building systems.

That's why I built this.

✅ Automatic weighted pipeline value

✅ Deal health tracking

✅ Follow-up visibility

✅ One-click Won / Lost organization

Instead of manually cleaning databases and moving things around.

If you're running a small agency or service business, I'd love to hear what you currently use to track deals.

TL;DR scroll to the bottom where I have a —- that is where my question begins

I have had an interest in developing business systems as a software developer since early 2000

Back then my first contract job as a software developer was building a backend business system, which consisted of LMS, a contact manager with some sales reports .. they offered coaching and consulting for insurance agencies

I called that a BMS or business management system. That was my lingo almost 30 years ago. :p

Since then I’ve built a dozen BMS type systems for a variety of businesses from coaching and consulting, knowledge management and education, manufacturing across multiple industries (environment controlled systems, aerospace/MRO, distribution, industrial coatings, agriculture, heavy equipment, transportation, and railway most recently).

These are fairly complex systems typically would take about 3 to 5 years of full-time development. One of them turned into a full-time contract or gig that lasted over 12 years. :p

Over the last decade I’ve since renamed what I do “custom ERP developer for midsize markets who have unusual business requirements due to regulation, certification, etc”

Every single one of my clients just had off-course, albeit complex or sophisticated (I don’t know what the word is?) domain model requirements.

For instance, a project that can have one or more crew teams, each team can have one or more members - not totally unusual but wouldn’t work for MRO or industrial coatings or insurance.

Each of those three levels of hierarchy can have one or more associations like equipment .. and equipment can have consumables and/or tools which can be assigned to crew members or individuals or projects

Expenses that can be applied to projects or crew teams, or crew members

And on and on and on .. the list goes on .. the unique requirements of niche markets .. means that there is very little likelihood of finding an existing off the shelf piece of software that does what my clients need and that’s where I have entered the picture

Most of these systems have somewhat generalized versions of a PO .. sometimes a work order .. it’ll have a contact module with some minimal or limited version of what I would call a CRM with pipelines, kanban boards, etc.

—-

So here in lies my question. I see a CRM as a simple version of a sales tool that ties into a Contacts module of some sort simple SAAS apps like pipe drive I think it’s called or other simple CRM‘s where it’s literally a contact manager with some towing for sales people to keep track of sales pipelines and may be issue tracking at the most

But I’ve seen people talk about CRM’s like what I would call an ERP which if you didn’t know stands for enterprise resource planning

That is a blanket term for a piece of software that does everything .. it’s your God app.

So I’m curious if I start to market myself as this contract, I’m working on right now begins to wind down. Am I best to use language like ERP or CRM or custom software development?

I’ve always been very fortunate and capable of somehow finding contracts every year or every couple of years sometimes they overlap sometimes there’s a gap between projects

But I’m really starting to think I need to change that .. I need to bring in more work that I’m capable of doing solo, so I can actually build a business-ish :p

Regards,
Alex

Hi everyone! I'm looking for a public (or open-source) CRM/ERP dataset that contains a realistic sales pipeline with opportunities, quotes/orders, invoices, and ideally several years of historical data for revenue forecasting.

Does anyone know of a benchmark, sample database, or anonymized dataset that resembles a real B2B sales workflow? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone! I'm currently researching CRM and donor-management tools used across the nonprofit sector, and would love your input if you have 5 minutes. The link will be posted below

If you know anyone else in fundraising, ops, or database management at a charity who might be willing to fill it in too, I'd really appreciate you passing it along.

Thank you!

I am a development associate at a midsize nonprofit. We use Raiser's Edge as our CRM. I have been tasked with helping my department decide if we should switch from WealthEngine to ResearchPoint or iWave for research and prospecting. ResearchPoint is fully integrated with Raiser's Edge and would save time for staff. However, it's expensive and doesn't have the research capabilities like the other two do. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is there a tool that you could recommend to make the import/export process easier if we decide to stick with something outside of the Raiser's Edge ecosystem? Please help! I am new and a little in over my head here :)

Disclosure at the top since it's relevant: I work at Veridion, we do company data, and I mention one of our tools at the bottom. The method below works with any registry source and I've named a free official one too.

Most CRM dedupe runs on company name and fuzzy matching. It half-works, which is worse than not working, because it merges genuinely different companies with similar names while leaving obvious duplicates alone. Acme Inc, Acme Incorporated, ACME INC, and Acme Inc. survive as four records. Meanwhile two unrelated firms both called Meridian Consulting get merged.

The reason is that a company name is a description, not an identifier. Companies change names, trade under names they aren't registered under, and abbreviate inconsistently. There's no rule that makes them unique.

What actually works is deduping on jurisdiction plus registry number. Every registered company has a number issued by the registry it's incorporated in. It's unique within that jurisdiction and it doesn't change when the company rebrands. Store it as a field and dedupe becomes exact instead of probabilistic, and it works retroactively across records you already have.

Two other things fall out of it once the field exists:

Dissolved accounts become visible. Registries publish status. Companies dissolve, get struck off, or restructure into new entities, and none of that reaches your CRM. Most databases contain accounts that legally stopped existing years ago, and the only symptom is that outreach quietly never lands. With registry status as a field, that's a filter instead of a mystery.

Inbound gets validated at entry. Free-text company fields produce whatever someone types. A lookup at submit tells you whether the entity exists, so junk gets flagged before routing.

The trap to avoid: legal name isn't trading name. "Google" isn't registered anywhere; "Google LLC" and "Google Ireland Limited" are. First-pass match rates are lower than people expect. Treat no-match as "needs review," never as "invalid" - auto-rejecting on no-match is how teams quietly discard real records.

Getting the data: UK-only, Companies House has a free official API and it's good, use that. For multi-country, ours is at [registry-lookup.com] - searching on the site is free with no account, and there's an API at 5,000 lookups a month free if you want to automate the dedupe. Any registry source works, the method is the point.

Curious what percentage came back dissolved, because the numbers I've heard vary enormously and I don't trust my own sample.

It's finally time for us to get a proper CRM instead of running our entire business on Google Sheets. It's just getting to be more hassle than it's worth, and we're ready to invest in something that'll be able to grow with us.

Wondering what everyone recommends for a smaller business with a smaller budget?

We don't have Salesforce or Hubspot money. I'm considering building something out on Airtable, but would really prefer a dedicated CRM. Most of what we need it for is call and email tracking, sales automations, pipelines, etc. Nothing too crazy imo

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