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 :)

Maybe I need to be talked out of this - but all roads keep leading me back to building our our solution. For context, we have built custom internal tools/platforms over the past several years, (automated showing scheduling, lease template + Make RPA for rent roll entry into our ERP, Work order management with field service/inventory/tenant comms, After hours Ai agent with n8n routing etc) so I do have access to a small dev team, QA etc.(but they don't have CRM experience - so that's an issue) I'm trying to talk myself out of this build as I know it's probably a beast to undertake, but I just can't find the right solution to our use case. At the moment we're using Follow-up boss (FUB) - reason was a strong mobile app for our rental agents in the field, real estate based. The mobile app has had issues lagging, poor ability to search contacts by tags/type. Fine for searching by name or phone number, but when you have 1,500 leads in a 3 month span - how would this even work? It didn't, we had to change their last names to the tags we wanted to search. We also have a custom scheduling platform we built that the rental agent selects their properties they want to show (similar to Google Cal) the next day and notice goes out to all tenants. This transaction lives outside the CRM so we could't track showings for that lead unless manually entered by the agent back into the CRM, well that turned out to be an administrative nightmare. So we lost visibility on which leads saw what properties & when.

Then if the lead wanted to rent, the agent would need to manually move them to a different stage and again, visibility would be lost as we moved to our lease template builder, which again sits in
another siloed platform we built with API to Pandadoc. Again this lead would need to manually be pushed through each stage from Lead to Lease. If this was forgotten, well you know how this starts to look. Our company pushes a decent leasing volume in a 4-5 mnth timeframe (peak season)

So my thought was to even create a basic CRM, remove the bloat, we use like 30% of FUB features. Then link leads to showings > follow-up > application submitted > deposit
> lease signed etc with full visibility along the way. We have an ultra clear view of what we need to do at each step and it's quite difficult to find a platform that will accomplish this.

The other layer was an Ai native first approach - I feel this is where the gap in the market sits (or
maybe just from the ones I've seen). It would be great to mine data about your leads in natural language. For eg. "all 3 bed leads looking for Downtown" and the platform could surface all of these active leads for you - not something buried behind smartlists & filters. At the moment in FUB we have to use smart lists, and like they say "garbage in, garbage out" - these lists got messy very quickly, we spent more time trying to make sure these leads were sanitized and up to date then it was worth. A lead would email they wanted a 3 bed, Downtown with 2 parking spots, and each one of these data points would need to be entered as a separate tag - but tags were not searchable in FUB. So they we have to place this lead in smart lists, but now we have 20 smart lists for all of the variations... etc etc

Anyway if you made it this far I appreciate the time you took to read this. Not sure if I need to be talked out of attempting to build something like this or is it worth to effort?