When the sales process lives in heads and spreadsheets
Plenty of growing businesses run their sales from a mix of an inbox, a spreadsheet and somebody’s memory. It works while the team is small. Then a second salesperson joins, or the owner goes on holiday, and it becomes obvious how much of the pipeline only exists in one person’s head. Leads get contacted twice, or not at all. Nobody is quite sure which quotes are still live.
The usual answer is to buy a big CRM, and that is often where the trouble starts. Off-the-shelf systems come with dozens of fields and screens that do not match how you actually sell. The team logs in for a few weeks, finds it slower than the spreadsheet and quietly goes back to old habits.
A custom CRM starts from the other end. We look at how you win work today, the stages a deal really goes through and the handful of details that matter, then build a system around that. Leads are logged automatically, so the CRM fills itself rather than relying on everyone to remember to update it.
What we set up and automate
Pipeline stages that match your process
Your stages, in your language. A builder might use enquiry, site visit, quote sent, accepted and booked in. A consultancy might use introduction, discovery call, proposal and signed. Each stage can have its own checklist and its own reminders.
Leads logged from forms, email and calls
Website forms create a record straight away. Enquiry emails are read and turned into contacts with the key details pulled out. After a phone call, a short note or voice memo can be added from a phone and attached to the right person.
Duplicate detection
If the same person gets in touch through two routes, the system spots it and merges the details rather than creating a second record. Your figures stay honest and nobody calls the same prospect twice.
Tasks and follow-up dates
Every deal has a clear next step and a date. When that date arrives, the owner gets a reminder. When a task is overdue, it is flagged in the morning summary.
Stage change notifications
When a deal is won, the people who need to know hear about it straight away, whether that is the operations team who will schedule the work or the accounts team who will raise the first invoice.
Quotes and proposals stored against each deal
Every quote, proposal and revised version is linked to the deal, so anyone picking it up can see exactly what was offered and when.
Migration from spreadsheets
We clean up and bring across your existing contacts and open deals, so you start with a complete picture rather than an empty system.
Example workflow. This shows the kind of thing we build. It is not a client result.
Before: enquiries come in through the website, a shared inbox and the office phone. Each is noted somewhere different. Follow-ups depend on whoever took the enquiry, and the owner has no single view of what is in the pipeline.
After: a web form, an email and a phone note about the same prospect all end up on one record in the CRM. The record is assigned to a salesperson with a task to call back the next morning. If that task is not ticked off by midday, a reminder goes to the salesperson and the deal appears on the owner’s daily summary.
HubSpot, Airtable, Notion or a spreadsheet?
There is no single right platform. HubSpot is a strong choice if you expect to grow the sales team and want email tracking and marketing tools in one place. Airtable suits businesses that want something flexible and visual, with custom views for different roles. Notion works well where the CRM sits alongside your other documents and processes. For very small teams, a well-structured Google Sheet with the right automations can be enough to start with.
We will recommend the simplest option that does the job, explain the running costs plainly and avoid anything that locks you in. The system is set up in your own account, so you own the data and can take it elsewhere if you ever need to.
Making sure the team actually uses it
A CRM is only useful if people keep it current, so we design for the person doing the selling. That means as few fields as possible, sensible defaults and a mobile-friendly view for anyone out on site or with customers. Because most records are created and updated automatically, the day-to-day effort is small. We run a short training session for the team and write a one-page guide covering the handful of things they need to do.
How a project runs
We start by sitting down with whoever does the selling and mapping a few recent deals from first contact to signed work. That tells us the real stages and the information that matters. We then build a working version, load in a sample of your data and let the team try it for a week or two. Feedback goes straight back into the design before we migrate everything and switch on the automations. After launch, we check in regularly to adjust stages, add reports and fix anything that is getting in the way.
Which package fits
AI Kickstart (£495 one-off) is where we design the CRM with you: the stages, the fields, where leads come from and which platform makes most sense.
AI Partner (from £2,500/month, 3-month minimum) is the natural fit for building and maintaining it, including the automations around it and a reporting dashboard of your pipeline.
If you are already on AI Team Upskill (£795/month, 3-month minimum), a single CRM automation, such as logging web enquiries automatically, can be one of your monthly quick wins.
Bring a recent deal or two to a free consultation call and we will show you how they would look in a CRM built around your process.