Customer relationships — from a first name to a won deal

This guide follows one customer the whole way: a name written down at a trade show becomes a lead, the lead becomes an account and a contact, a deal comes out of it, and the deal moves across a board until it closes. Every step is shown with a screenshot from the running system. You will also see what the platform refuses to do, and why those refusals are the design rather than a fault.

1 — The problem this module exists to solve

Before there is a CRM, customer information lives in three places: a spreadsheet on the rep's machine, a mail thread in their personal inbox, and their memory. The consequences are familiar. A rep travels and half the follow-ups stop. A manager cannot know the real state of the pipeline without asking. Two colleagues talk to the same customer without knowing about each other.

And the finding that shapes everything here: CRM projects do not usually fail because the software lacks features. They fail because nobody enters the data. So this module is built so the platform captures what it already knows — mail sent through DWMail, meetings that took place, approvals that travelled through a workflow — and attaches it to the customer without anyone retyping it.

2 — The big idea: four stations, and everything else hangs off them

Understand these four and you understand the module. Every screen you open stands on one of them.

One distinction matters more than it looks. A lead can be thrown away without regret; an account persists. That is why names you are unsure about stay in the lead list rather than the account list — so the account list stays clean enough to be trusted.

What you see inside the module divides into three:

3 — My Day: the screen you open first

The module opens on My Day. It is not a report — it is a work list: deals that need moving, tasks due today, and leads nobody has touched. The point is that a rep should not have to work out what to do next; the screen tells them.

4 — Leads: the name you are still checking

Open Leads. Each row is a person, a company and some way to reach them. They arrive three ways: typed in, submitted through a form on your website, or imported from a file after an event.

When you are satisfied the lead is real, open the row's actions menu and choose Convert. It is the most consequential click on this screen.

Conversion does three things in one action: it creates the account, the contact, and — if you want — the deal. The lead itself is not deleted; it stays linked to what came out of it, so you can always answer where a deal originally came from.

5 — Accounts and contacts: who you sell to

The account is the company; the contact is the person. One company usually has several — the purchasing manager who negotiates, the finance director who signs, an engineer who checks the specification. They are kept separate because people leave and companies remain.

Open Nile Trading Co. and you get the account page: its details, the contacts under it, the open deals, and a timeline of everything that has happened — mail, meetings, calls, notes — in one place, in date order.

6 — Deals: the board everything moves across

A deal is an opportunity with an amount and a stage. Stages are ordered into a pipeline, and a deal travels along it. The screen shows them as a board — one column per stage — and you move a deal by dragging it.

Open a deal and everything about it is there: the customer, the person, the amount and currency, the expected close date, the next step, and the deal team — the colleagues working it with you — with the deal's own timeline underneath.

If a deal sits in its stage longer than that stage allows, the system marks it stalled and puts a task in its owner's work list. Not a month-end report — a prompt at the time.

7 — Quotes and approvals: where "not on your own" applies

From a deal you build a quote: line items with prices, quantities, discount and tax. What matters is what comes next — if the discount exceeds the permitted threshold, the quote cannot simply be sent. It enters an approval workflow and goes to whoever approves that.

8 — Service: after you have sold

Selling is not the end of the relationship. When a customer complains or asks for something, a case is opened — a ticket with a priority, a queue, an assignee and promised times for a first response and a resolution. Those promises are counted in real working hours: a Sunday-to-Thursday week, with public holidays excluded. A complaint arriving on Thursday afternoon stops the clock and resumes it on Sunday morning.

A case has two separate panes: the conversation with the customer, which really is sent to them, and internal notes between colleagues. The separation is deliberate and visible, so it is not possible to write an internal note and discover it went to the customer.

9 — Campaigns and reports: the wider picture

Campaigns group the people who received a message or attended an event, and connect them to the leads that came out of it — so you can tell which sources produce real work and which produce names.

10 — Settings: your own sales process

Sales stages are not the same at every company. Under Settings → Pipelines you edit them: add, remove, reorder, and give each stage a probability and a number of days after which a deal sitting there counts as stalled. You can have more than one pipeline if you sell in more than one way.

10a — Where are your public addresses?

This is the question that wastes the most time at the start. Every address your customers and your staff reach you on is in one place: Settings → Public links.

What is on it divides into three, and the page says which is which:

• Your staff sign-in page — a link carrying ?tenant= that opens the login screen with your own logo and colours. Send it to your team or bookmark it; without that part they get the default look.
• The customer portal and your web forms — these are the ones you publish.
• Quote, survey and unsubscribe links — shown as patterns so you can recognise them. Each real one is minted for a single customer when you send it, and must never be published.

11 — Who sees what: the most-asked question

A rep does not see their colleagues' deals. That is not a setting somebody got wrong — it is the design. Each person sees what they own, a manager sees what their reports own, and the tenant owner sees everything. If a colleague is added to a deal team, they can see that deal in order to help — without consuming an extra paid seat.

There is a finer level too: someone can see a deal without seeing its amount. The amount has its own permission, because a colleague brought in to help deliver does not need to know what the company sells at. When it is withheld it is shown as withheld — not as zero. That difference matters: zero is a number, and people act on numbers.

And if you open a screen you have no permission for, the platform says so plainly, names the permission you are missing, and shows you nothing else — rather than an empty table that reads as "there is no data".

12 — On a phone

The module works on a phone exactly as it does on a computer — same account, same permissions, with the screens stacked vertically. A rep standing at a customer's site can open the deal and write the next step where they are.

13 — Recipes: "I want to…"

14 — Frequently asked