A quotation is a document, not an opportunity.
Contacts, activity and follow-ups sit inside the customer card that is already opened every day. There is no pipeline of leads and stages, because forwarding does not have one and pretending otherwise produces two records that disagree within the week.
The customer being sold to is the customer being shipped for and the customer being chased for money. One card holds all three, so the person about to make a call can see the unpaid invoice before making it.
It reports which customers have stopped shipping.
Nobody in a twelve-person office notices a customer leaving. They notice a customer complaining. The board below is two dates per account and no opinion about either — the last time they shipped, the last time anyone in the office spoke to them.
| Customer | Owner | Last shipment | Last activity | Open quotes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vernon Cold Storage | J. Ortiz | 04 May121 days | None recordedsince the card was made | 2 |
| Marden Foods LLC | J. Ortiz | 12 Jun82 days | Call 03 Jul61 days | 1 |
| Aster Textiles | M. Reyes | 19 Jun75 days | Quotation sent 24 Jun70 days | 3 |
| Hanpo Trading Co | S. Kim | 28 Jul36 days | Email 21 Aug12 days | 0 |
Activity is written where the work is.
A call, a visit, an email worth remembering, and a follow-up with a date on it. They are recorded against the customer, next to the shipments that customer has running and the invoices they have not paid. Nobody has to open a second application to find out that the account they are about to phone is sixty days past terms.
Follow-ups have a date and an owner
A follow-up without a person’s name on it is a note, and notes do not get done. Each one therefore carries a date and an owner, and an overdue one is visible on the card rather than in a reminder somebody switched off in April.
No leads, no opportunities, no stages.
Every general-purpose CRM sells the same picture: a lead becomes an opportunity, the opportunity moves across a board, and a weighted number appears at the end. Freight does not work that way, and forcing it to costs more than it returns.
What a pipeline would add
A second record beside the quotation, created by hand, describing the same intention. It has its own value, its own stage and its own close date, and none of the three updates when the quotation is revised, expires or is accepted. Within a month the board and the quotation list disagree, and the board is the one people stop trusting.
What already exists
The quotation. It has a number, the buy and sell lines it was priced on, a validity date the system enforces, a margin that was approved or was not, and a status. When it is accepted it opens the shipment carrying its own lines. It is a better record of a deal than any opportunity would be, because the operation runs on it.
An office that needs a sales CRM should buy a sales CRM.
This is a customer record with memory attached to it. It is not a competitor to the software a sales team may already have, and it does not try to be.
A customer not heard from since spring.
The customer’s card is opened on a demonstration company: the shipments they used to run, the quotations still sitting open, the last thing anybody wrote down, and the invoice nobody mentioned. The office can then judge whether a pipeline would have shown anything that card does not.