Bespoke CRM and sales systems

Most studios stop at the lead. The campaign runs, the form fills, and the result is handed to a CRM that was chosen because everyone else had one, bent to fit over three years of workarounds, and paid for per seat whether the seat sells or not.

Marketing reports from one system. Sales works in another. The question the directors actually asked, which source produced the deals, gets answered in a spreadsheet on a Friday afternoon.

We do not stop there. We design and build the systems that take a lead from first contact to a signed form: the CRM, the portals around it, and the rules for who works what, and when. Because we also make the demand, we know what a lead looks like when it arrives, what it needs to hear next and what a sale needs to close. One point of view, both halves of the job.

A CRM built to your process. Your stages in your words, your rules of engagement enforced by the database rather than a laminated sheet, marketing and sales sending from one policy so nobody gets six emails in a week. You own the code and the data. Nobody charges you per seat.

Portals. The place where everyone in a process sees the same thing: the client who wants to know where they are, the partners who sell or refer on your behalf, and the third parties who have to act. One record instead of six inboxes.

Consultancy. Sometimes the software is fine and the process is not. We map how a lead actually moves through the business, where it dies and what to automate first. You get a plain-English document the directors can sign off, and a build plan if there is something to build.

The thing that makes a sales system work is not the software. It is knowing what the lead is worth, what the buyer is nervous about at each stage, and which of the thirty fields on the form anyone will fill in. We have sat on that side of the desk.

We also run on what we build. Our quoting, our client CRM and our search reporting are our own software, used every week, which is a harsh test of whether a system is any good.

CityRise, an off-plan property agency in the North of England, sold on Salesforce, marketed on HubSpot and synced WhatsApp through a third product. Reports were built by hand. We scoped a replacement in August, had the first module live for staff within weeks, and had the core system in production three months ahead of its January target: pipeline, forms and tracking, email, workflows and mailbox sync. It now carries 75,000 contacts, 600 to 800 new leads a month and around 120,000 marketing emails a month, and the three licences are gone.

CityRise's portal is used by its developers, its sub-agents and the solicitors on both sides of a sale. One of those solicitors put it this way:

Any organisation where a process is worth more than the licence it runs on, passes through more than one pair of hands, and leaves the person at the end wondering where they are. The size of the business does not matter. The shape of the process does. If it lives in three tools and one person’s head, it is for you.

We do not quote systems from a rate card. The number moves with how many people will use it, how many other systems it has to talk to, how much history has to come across, and how many modules you need on day one rather than day ninety. Most builds phase: the core goes live first and the old licences are cancelled last, after a parallel run.