Technology

Technology is the sector best served by existing CRM software, by a distance. There are products built specifically for software revenue teams, they are good, and a page claiming otherwise would not survive contact with anyone who has used one.

So the honest audience here is narrower. A consultancy or an agency doing technical work. A software business of five to thirty people where the alternative today is a spreadsheet and a shared inbox. A hardware or services business that sells to technical buyers. A team that has been quoted a per seat figure that does not make sense at its size, and is choosing between paying it and continuing with nothing.

If you have a revenue stack you like and it works, keep it. What follows is for the case where you do not.

If the work is billed by the day rather than by the seat, three neighbouring pages describe a closer shape: consultancy, where each opportunity is large, slow and personal; marketing agencies, where the retainer renewal and the client contact who moves are the whole problem; and professional services, where the durable record is a client engagement instead of an account with a seat count.

Model the account as an organisation with several people in it

In this trade no one buys alone. There is the person who will use it, the person who signs, the person who will object on security grounds, and the person who owns the budget. Recording one of them as the contact loses the other three.

Connections carry roles, which is what makes the question of who has to say yes answerable instead of a matter of somebody's recollection.

Run renewals as their own pipeline from the first day

A renewal is not a small new sale. It has a different shape, a different probability and a different owner, and it is the revenue that is easiest to lose without anyone deciding to lose it.

Put the renewal date in the moment a deal closes

With a task well before it. This is thirty seconds at the moment of winning and it is the single habit that most changes retention, because the conversation happens while the customer is still happy.

Record the champion separately from the buyer

The person who wanted it and the person who paid are different, and the champion is the one who leaves. When they do, the account is at risk and a warm opportunity has appeared somewhere new, and almost nobody acts on the second.

Then leave the automation alone until you have a full renewal cycle

Anything you build before you have seen a renewal happen is built around a guess about your own business.

The account below does not exist. It is written out at length because the argument for treating a customer as several people is unconvincing in the abstract and fairly obvious once you have followed one account through two years.

Week one: an engineer starts a trial

A senior engineer at a logistics company creates a trial with her work address. She has no budget, no authority and has told no one internally that she is looking. She is the only fact you have, and the reflex is to record her as a contact with the company name typed into a field beside her name.

What ought to exist instead is an organisation for the logistics company and a person connected to it, with a role that says she is the one evaluating. On the day the difference is nothing. It is everything in eighteen months, because every person who appears after her attaches to the organisation rather than to her, and the organisation is the thing that will still be a customer when she is not.

Week three: her manager appears, and he is not the champion

The manager joins the second call. He asks what it costs, whether it replaces something already paid for, and who else uses it. He is the budget holder. She is the champion. Recording both of them, with those roles on the connections, is the point at which the question of who has to say yes stops being somebody's recollection of a call.

When only one of the two is recorded it is almost always the manager, because he is the one who replies to the commercial emails. The champion, who is the person who will actually argue for you in a meeting you are not in, ends up as a name in a thread.

Week five: a security review from a person you never speak to

A questionnaire arrives from someone in the customer's platform team. He wants to know where the rows are held, who inside your company can read them, what happens when one of your staff leaves, and how quickly a customer can get everything back. He is a person at the account with the power to end the evaluation, and in most small technology companies he is recorded nowhere at all.

Some of his questions have answers this product already gives: an organisation lives in the European Union or the United States and is chosen when it is created, the audit trail and the two factor sign in are on every plan including the free one, and the export is complete and free at any time. The rest of his questions are about you rather than about us. Either way he belongs on the account as a person with a role, because he will be back for the same review at the renewal.

Week seven: procurement, a supplier form and a finance contact

Procurement arrives late and asks for things no one mentioned: a supplier onboarding form, evidence of insurance, payment terms, a purchase order number, and a named person for invoices. That named person is a fourth relationship, with a different reason to hear from you and no interest whatever in your product newsletter.

The cost of not recording this stage is that it happens again identically at the renewal, and nobody remembers which form, which portal or which approver. A note on the organisation and a task dated a month before the renewal is the entire remedy, and it takes a minute at the moment the memory is fresh.

Week nine: signed for forty seats, and the thirty seconds that matter

The contract is signed for twelve months with a thirty day notice period. The thirty seconds worth spending here are the renewal date and the notice period as fields on the organisation, and a task dated before the notice window rather than on the anniversary. A renewal task that lands on the renewal date is a task about something already decided.

Month two: the users appear, and they have opinions

Two people who never appeared in the sale are now the people raising problems every fortnight. On the plans carrying service those enquiries are matters against the organisation, on the same timeline as the sale, which is what makes the renewal conversation honest rather than hopeful.

Month nine: the champion resigns

She leaves for another company. Her connection to the logistics company ends with a date rather than being overwritten, and a new connection begins at her new employer. Two true things now exist: an account that has lost the person who argued for it, and a warm contact somewhere new who already knows the product and has arrived with a budget.

Editing her record instead loses both of them. The account looks unchanged and the opportunity never existed.

Month ten: her replacement, who has consented to nothing

Somebody inherits her work. He has never heard of you, has never been asked whether he wants your emails, and is the person who will be asked in two months whether the renewal is worth it. Consent is a fact about him, not about the account, which is why it is held per person and checked again at the moment of sending.

Month eleven: a renewal conversation with the history in front of you

The renewal sits in the renewal pipeline instead of the new business one, so it is not inflating a forecast with a probability that means something else. What is in front of whoever runs the call is the support history, the departed champion, the security review that will be repeated, and the procurement steps that took three weeks last time. None of that is clever software. It is nine records that someone spent under a minute creating, each at the moment it was free to create.

Almost no one in this trade arrives from a CRM. They arrive from four or five systems that each hold a slice of the customer, and the migration question is not how to move them but which of them is worth moving.

The subscription billing system, which has become the customer list by accident

It holds the company name, the billing address, the plan, the seat count, the amount, the start date and the renewal date. That is a genuinely useful export and it is the right place to start an import. What it holds as the contact is whoever put a card in, which in this trade is frequently an office manager or a finance address that nobody reads. Import the organisations and their dates from it, and treat its contact column as a lead rather than as the person you know.

The project tool where the deals became a column of cards

A board in an issue tracker with lists named after stages is how a great many software companies run a pipeline for the first two years. It works until somebody asks how long a deal spent in each stage, which a card does not record, or until a card is archived and takes its history with it. What crosses over is the list of open opportunities and their names. What does not is stage history, which starts from nothing here and is worth a year of patience.

The shared inbox, which is the actual history and does not come across

This is the honest part. The reason your account history is good is that four people can search the same mailbox, and no import brings that with it. Nothing sensible copies six thousand threads into a CRM as notes. What is worth carrying by hand is one paragraph per live account: why they bought, who wanted it, what nearly stopped it. Twenty accounts is an afternoon and it is the most valuable afternoon of the migration.

The support desk, which knows the people the sale never met

Support tooling holds the users, and it holds them with the addresses they actually read because they raised the enquiry themselves. That is where the missing people at each account come from. Bring the person and the account and leave the enquiry history where it is, unless service is part of what you are moving.

The spreadsheet called renewals, which someone maintains privately

There is nearly always one, it is nearly always on one person's machine, and it is nearly always more accurate than any system in the company. It is also the fastest thing to move, because a renewal date and a notice period are exactly what the account record wants. Move it first and turn its rows into dated tasks, then stop maintaining it, which is the harder half.

What no file can carry, and has to be typed by a person

Roles. Which of the four people at an account is the champion and which one signs. Whether a trial that never converted stopped because of price, a missing feature or a change of plan at their end. What consent exists and where it came from. Which accounts are quietly at risk. All of it is judgement rather than data, and it will not be in any export, which is why the honest estimate for a migration in this trade is a day for the files and a week of someone thinking.

The import itself shows what it is about to create before it writes anything, so a messy export is a slower first attempt instead of a mess to unpick. Run it against twenty rows, open five of them, and check that what was created is what you meant.