Krzysztof Balicki runs Web Systems, the company that builds and develops EpicCRM. He writes about CRM and sales from the perspective of a team that builds and maintains these tools itself.
Use a custom field for data every record has and you report on, and a tag for loose, occasional labels; mixing them up is how a CRM ends up with reports nobody trusts. The tooling is rarely the problem. It’s one question nobody answered up front: when does a piece of information deserve a structured […]
A reliable CRM data export means you can pull out every record, the links between records and the full history, in a form another system can actually read. Check this before you sign. Not on the day you want to leave. If you run a cloud CRM that might stop fitting at some point (price […]
Field reps use a mobile CRM when it lets them look up a customer before a visit and log the next step in under a minute; everything else gets skipped. The rest keep notes in their heads until Sunday evening, when they sit down and reconstruct a week of visits from memory. What lands in […]
A polite, scheduled overdue invoice follow-up gets you paid faster than ad hoc chasing. It also protects the relationship, because the client knows what to expect at every step. Most small B2B firms are fine at sending invoices on time. Chasing them? Different story. It runs on mood and memory, and the fear of sounding […]
CRM task management turns every promise made on a call into a dated task with an owner and a reminder, attached to the client record, so nobody has to remember it. Your team’s follow-ups live in heads, notebooks and sticky notes, and when a colleague calls in sick, nobody has a clue what they promised. […]
Selling into the budget cycle comes down to two things: finding out when each prospect plans next year’s spending, and getting your proposal in front of the person who signs before that plan is frozen. Late August is when this matters most, because companies with a calendar fiscal year typically build their budgets between September […]
Marketing owns a lead until it qualifies, then sales owns it, all inside one CRM. Without that line, the split happens on its own: marketing picks a tool for campaigns and email, sales grabs something for pipeline tracking, and a year later the same customer sits in both systems under slightly different names. Both teams […]
Every Monday morning a sales manager makes the same choice. Open the CRM and look at the numbers, or dive into the inbox and let the week happen to them. Option two feels productive for about an hour. Then the week starts drifting. A short, repeatable reading list of reports fixes that, because it turns […]
Contract renewal tracking means keeping every contract’s end date and notice deadline in one place, with a reminder and a named owner, so the renewal conversation starts while the client still has a reason to stay. Skip it and you usually find out a contract ended only after the client went quiet or signed with […]
A shared inbox works fine as long as one person effectively owns the mailbox. Once several people answer it, though, and messages get replied to twice or not at all, support email needs tickets with an owner and a status. That’s the short answer to shared inbox vs help desk. So if your company has […]