CRM

Companies, the people at them, the deals in progress, and anything else your organisation needs to keep a record of. The shape is deliberately open: what a "record" is here is up to you.

For how it is built — storage, the attribute system, the automation engine — see CRM architecture.

The shape of it#

Companies, People and Deals come as standard. Everything about them is editable, and a workspace that needs Properties, Vessels or Grant Applications adds an object rather than bending Deals into the wrong shape.

Working with records#

Every object gets the same view: search, filters, a column picker, and a switch between table and board. What differs is the columns, because those come from the attributes you defined.

Deals are the same machinery with a stage attribute, which is what makes the board view a pipeline. Moving a card changes the stage, and the change is recorded on the record's timeline — so "when did this slip?" has an answer.

Lists are saved views, not copies. A list called Enterprise, this quarter is a filter over the same records everybody else is looking at.

Making it do things by itself#

An automation is trigger → conditions → actions, and it lives inside the CRM rather than in a separate tool.

Triggers cover most of what a CRM does on its own: a record created or updated, a specific field changing to a specific value, a stage moving, a date approaching or passing, a form submitted, a webhook arriving, an email opened, clicked or replied to — and a schedule, for the daily and weekly ones.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on one:

• Automations have a monthly run limit. Hitting it does not raise an error; the run is recorded as skipped. When somebody says "the automation stopped firing", look at the runs list rather than the error log.
• They can be left switched off while you build them, which is how the demo workspace ships two that do nothing until somebody enables them.

Funnels (formerly sequences)#

A multi-step follow-up — send an email, wait three days, send another if nobody replied, otherwise create a task — is a funnel: an automation with waits, branches and emails on its canvas. Sequences were removed in 0.58.0. Each one was converted into a funnel with the trigger contact.enrolled, so it runs only when a contact is put in it: by another funnel, by a contact import, or by hand from the funnel's Enrollments tab. CRM sequences had never sent anything, so they were converted turned off and their contacts were not started. See Email marketing → Funnels.

Two parts are easy to overlook and matter more than the steps:

• Exit goals — a reply, a meeting booked, a stage reached, an unsubscribe. Without one, a funnel keeps going after the thing it was chasing has happened, which is how a company sends a nudge to somebody who signed yesterday.
• Send windows — days, hours and timezone on each email. A funnel email with no window sends at three in the morning, and reads like it.

Mail and meetings on the record#

Connect a Google account and conversations and calendar events attach themselves to the right contact — see Email setup.

One asymmetry to know: Gmail also creates contacts it does not recognise; Outlook does not. Microsoft mail imports and attaches, but a new correspondent will not become a record on its own. If somebody is expecting parity, they will not get it.

Common mistakes#

• Bending a standard object into the wrong shape. If Deals are being used to track something that is not a deal, make an object.
• A funnel with no exit goal. It will keep sending.
• Blaming the trigger when a run limit was reached. Skipped is not failed, and it is only visible in the runs list.
• Expecting Outlook to auto-create contacts. It does not.
• Editing records outside the product. Display names, computed fields and activity are derived when a record is saved through the app; writing to the database directly leaves all three stale.