CRM
Automation
What a working CRM needs to do
Capture the activity
Check the record
Create the next task
The CRM stays current without repeated data entry.
This is the map, not the route.
These are the five things we're looking to achieve with your CRM. How you achieve them will vary by business.
Leads can be tracked back to their source. Duplicate contacts/companies are checked and handled. Leads are allocated to the right rep/segment based on criteria. Alerts are raised if leads are not actioned within a service level, such as responding to all new enquiries.
Data is kept up-to-date by syncing with trusted data sources, enriching contact/company profiles, flagging uncertain matches for review, and retaining marketing preferences during merges.
Marketing activity across email, SMS, and LinkedIn is synced to contacts/companies, stopping on customer replies, alerting account owners via Slack notifications, and using call notes to create personalised follow-up drafts.
Call summaries are ingested from Gong, Fireflies, or similar tools, creating follow-up tasks and logging common objections/themes as tags for future campaigns.
Reporting is easy, reliable, and transparent. Lead scoring logic, stale-deal alerts, and other definitions are documented. Sales forecasting uses agreed-upon pipeline stages.
If your sales, marketing, and operations teams are using your CRM inconsistently, we can help.
We'll dig into the details with the relevant teams to align on best practices and identify opportunities for automation. Automating a broken process just breaks it faster.
How we approach CRM projects
We'll dig into your CRM to identify where it isn't meeting the above requirements, then agree on priorities and implement them.
Audit: We'll explore how teams are using the CRM today, review the CRM and any connected tools like LinkedIn and Slack, and develop an understanding of what's working and what's not. We'll produce an audit of the condition of your CRM including stale data, number of duplicates, gaps in process ownership, and a prioritised list of suggested improvements. This is charged as a fixed fee.
Choose one thing to own: Pick one process to prioritise based on the audit's recommendations. Ensure it has a designated owner who is accountable for commercial outcomes. Identify a single metric to demonstrate progress such as lead response times, hours spent, or record quality.
Sort out your database: Agree on duplicate resolution criteria and update your data accordingly. Start with companies. Tidy up company records so there is one record per company, not multiple entries spelt different ways, enriching with useful data such as industry and number of employees. Add any missing data to contacts/companies as much as possible. Attach marketing preferences to contacts.
Start automating the basics: Look at lead capture and allocation. Ensure leads are being captured from all sources and allocated appropriately, such as by customer type, territory. Set up alerts if leads are not actioned. Agree on a kill-switch, that is, an easy way to undo automation for internal leads.
Get fancy with AI: Look at ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness of sales and marketing using AI. Start with summaries of sales calls being uploaded to the CRM, creating follow-up tasks. Look at personalised follow-up drafts being created from notes, such as those uploaded by sales reps from their outbox.
Hand over: Agree on a single point of accountability, train them in CRM admin and agree on a written process for troubleshooting, such as a runbook. Set up a dashboard for the status of the CRM implementation and a way to raise requests. Agree on whether/when we should be available for future reviews (for example, quarterly).
What it costs
A fixed fee CRM audit. Subsequent data cleaning and automation work charged based on a scope of works. Costs of the CRM and support are charged separately.
Notes on CRM and marketing
We'll look for opportunities to improve your current setup before recommending a different CRM. We won't recommend switching your CRM unless we think it would be beneficial, such as if your team's CRM doesn't have the right permissions, data model, native functionality.
Before automating any marketing activity, we'll check that you're collecting consent appropriately and suppressing people correctly. Marketing to a business such as a limited company does not require consent under PECR. It is not B2B marketing if you're emailing a sole trader or some partnerships. You need consent or a solid argument for soft opt-in. Always make it clear who's emailing them and provide an easy way to opt-out. Build a global suppression list that gets referenced before sending emails, otherwise, if you re-import contacts, some will receive your marketing who've asked not to.