Sales and CRM
Custom CRM boosted conversions by 30% in 3 months
We built a custom CRM for a client in three months, and conversions rose by 30%. This page keeps to what is on the record: why a business ends up building its own CRM, how we approach a build like this, and that result.
The context
A business that needed its CRM built around it.
The client needed a CRM, and chose to have one built rather than buy one off the shelf. Businesses usually make that choice when the way they sell has something a packaged product cannot express well: their pricing, their approvals, a sales cycle of their own.
The result the project is known by is conversion: how many opportunities became customers.
The challenge
When the CRM does not fit, the real pipeline moves somewhere else.
A packaged CRM describes a generic sales process. When a business sells differently, the gap gets filled with workarounds: quotes built in spreadsheets, deals tracked in inboxes, notes that never make it back into the system.
Once that happens, the CRM stops being the place where selling happens and becomes a place where it is reported afterwards, if at all. Follow-ups slip, the forecast describes last week, and conversion suffers for reasons nobody can see in the data.
That is the problem a custom CRM is for: making the system the easiest way to do the work, so the work happens inside it.
What we built, and how
A CRM built around how the client sells.
We built the client a custom CRM. We are not publishing the client’s details or the system’s internals here, so rather than a week-by-week account, this is how we approach a build of this kind.
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01
Map the process people actually run
For a system like this we start with the people doing the selling. We follow how an opportunity really moves, workarounds included, because the workarounds show exactly where a packaged tool fell short.
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02
Put the hard parts in the system
Pricing rules, approvals and the exceptions a salesperson negotiates belong inside the CRM, not in a spreadsheet beside it. That is usually the difference between a CRM people use and one they route around.
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03
Ship in slices
We release the most painful part of the process first and let the team use it while the rest is built. A tool that saves time in its first week does more for adoption than any launch plan.
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04
Keep the client close to the work
The client has access to the repository from day one and a written note from us every week, so nothing about what is being built comes as a surprise.
The result
More opportunities became customers.
The CRM took three months to build, and conversions rose by 30%. That is the figure recorded for the project and the only one we publish for it.
We have not broken it down or added numbers around it. We would rather give you one result we can stand behind than a page of figures we cannot.
What changed
Conversion is revenue you already paid to find.
Conversion is a ratio, so a 30% rise means more of the opportunities a business already has turn into customers. It is one of the few improvements that pays off without buying more leads.
It is also why we will sometimes recommend building rather than configuring. When a packaged product has to be bent a long way to fit, the bending can cost more than a build, and the team never quite trusts the result.
Related services
More work
Next step
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