CRM

What a CRM actually is

A CRM is the system of record for commercial relationships. Underneath the vendor differences, every CRM models the same four things: the organisations you sell to, the people inside them, the revenue opportunities in progress, and the history of interactions across all three. Everything else — scoring, sequences, dashboards, forecasting — is built on top of those four.

The four objects

• Company or account: the organisation. The unit contracts are signed with and revenue is recognised against.

• Contact: a person. Related to a company, but the relationship is not always one-to-one — buying committees and households both break that assumption.

• Deal or opportunity: a specific revenue event in progress, with an amount, a stage and an expected close date.

• Activity: calls, emails, meetings and notes, attached to the records they concern. This is what makes the other three readable months later.

Why most CRM projects disappoint

A CRM is a shared memory that only works if it is written to. The failure mode is almost never the software: it is that the people expected to maintain the record get nothing back from doing so. When entering data serves only someone else's report, it is entered late, partially, or not at all — and the forecast built on it is then argued rather than read.

The practical test is whether a seller consults the CRM before a call. If they check their own notes instead, the CRM has become a reporting tax rather than a working tool, and no amount of configuration will fix that.

Where it sits among the other systems

A CRM is rarely the only system holding customer data. Billing knows what was invoiced, support knows what broke, the product knows what is used. The CRM's claim is on the relationship and the pipeline, not on everything — and deciding which system is authoritative for which field, rather than declaring one system authoritative for everything, is what makes the whole stack legible.