One process, seven kinds of record
Accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, tasks, subtasks and rep goals are all records of one sales process, which is why any record can reference any other: a contact belongs to its account, a lead may point at both, an opportunity carries its account and contact, a task hangs off a deal, and a subtask always belongs to its task.
Following a company from first signal to closed deal is therefore one workspace, not five screens that happen to share a customer name.
What a rep works in
- A personal task board where each card carries its checklist of subtasks directly on the card
- ticked off without opening anything. The day's follow-ups and their steps are one board instead of a board plus every record it refers to.
- The pipeline, where a deal's stage is the opportunity's own workflow status. There is no second stage field to drift away from it.
- Their own quota as a goal with a target, an attained figure and a health status - updated from won deals instead of maintained by hand.
What a manager sees
- Pipeline value, win rate and team attainment on the home page.
- A deal timeline - open deals as expected close dates, so the shape of the quarter is visible and so are the weeks where nothing is expected to land.
- A capacity grid of rep against week, to see who is buried before the week starts.
- An approval before a deal is booked. Closing an opportunity as won or lost passes through a manager step instead of being a dropdown.
- Pipeline administration - reordering and curating the stage list - reachable only by managers, so the pipeline's shape stays a management decision.
- A forecast and commission scratch pad as a separate sheet, so modelling a quarter never touches the numbers the team is measured on.
Prospecting: research in, records out
Prospecting research lands in a sheet, where a rep enriches the rows and promotes the good ones into real leads or accounts.
The enrichment itself runs through the platform's Apollo connector - a tenant-level integration and not something this application owns, so it is configured once and shared by everything that needs it. An administrator supplies the prospecting account at install time and can change it later from the installation's settings. See Connectors.
Nobody retypes a company name or an address, and nobody maintains a private copy of a prospect list in a personal spreadsheet.
The team channel, both directions
Deal events reach the channel the team already talks in - Slack or Telegram:
- A new deal is posted to the channel.
- A stage change arrives as a comment on that post, so a deal's history reads as one thread instead of a stream of unrelated messages.
- A reply in the channel comes back as a comment on the deal, so the conversation is on the record and not only in the chat.
- A goal falling behind its pace is flagged at risk and the rep's manager is told - while the quarter can still be saved, not at period end.
And the scope is deliberate: only deals, leads and goals are announced. Ticking a subtask posts nothing. A channel that fills with checklist noise is a channel people mute, which makes the integration worse than not having one.
The messaging target is a tenant credential too - the administrator points the installation at the right channel once.
Why it is not a standalone CRM
The pipeline is a process. Stages, permitted transitions, who may approve a close, what happens on each move - a model you can open and change, not a hardcoded lifecycle with a settings screen. The rep and manager split lives in that model's transition roles, so it holds on every surface, including the ones this application does not own.
The numbers come from the engine. Pipeline value, win rate, cycle time and quota attainment are queries against the same data models the rest of the company reports on - so sales figures and finance figures cannot quietly disagree.
The vocabularies are yours. Lead source, industry, deal health and product are master data an administrator edits, not lists frozen inside the application.
And you change the rest of it too. A field your industry needs, a stage your process has, a rule your business follows - edited as artifacts of the application, versioned and reversible. See Applications.