CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Relationships run on memory — so make the system remember. One source of truth, honest pipelines, logged promises, and absolute respect for contact rules.

When to use

• Managing contacts/pipeline for consulting, sales, or partnerships.
• Follow-ups, proposals, renewals.
• Cleaning up scattered contacts/notes into a working system.

Method

1. Single source of truth: one system (or structured folder) for contacts + interactions; who/what/context minimum; dedupe on a schedule; stale = flagged, not trusted.
2. Contact rules first: honor house contact-handling-rules — sensitivity flags are absolute; outreach is drafted for review, never auto-sent; nothing personal is shared beyond its purpose (privacy-compliance).
3. Pipeline stages with exit criteria: lead → qualified → proposal → decision → won/lost; deals advance on evidence (call happened, proposal sent), not optimism; every open deal carries a next step + date.
4. Follow-up cadence: scheduled touches with value in each (insight, result, useful link); log every interaction — what was said, what was promised, what's next; promised = tracked until delivered.
5. Reporting: pipeline by stage/age, conversion rates by stage (base rates!), stuck-deal list reviewed on cadence; feeds revenue-management forecasts with honest probabilities.
6. Consent & comms: marketing consent recorded; unsubscribe honored instantly; segmentation per consent; no scraping third-party personal data into the CRM.
7. Win/loss discipline: capture the reason (yours and theirs); feed messaging, product, and process improvements (community-support feedback loop).
8. Minimal data: collect what the relationship needs, not everything possible; retention for dead leads defined.

Quality gates

• Single source of truth maintained; dedupe cadence set.
• Sensitivity flags honored; no unapproved outreach.
• Next-step + date on every open deal; stuck-deal review held.
• Consent flags current; win/loss reasons captured.

Red lines

• Never bulk unsolicited outreach (spam); never upload personal contacts to third parties without purpose + consent; sensitivity flags override everything.

Related

revenue-management · privacy-compliance · community-support.