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.
Most sales teams never actually design their sales pipeline stages. They inherit a set, then bolt a stage onto it every time a deal goes sideways. Three years later the board has twelve columns, half of them describe internal paperwork, and nobody remembers why “Awaiting Legal Pre-Check” is still there. Looks thorough on screen. Quietly […]
A quarterly business review for a small B2B team is a 45-minute client review meeting built on one page: their goals, what worked, open problems and the plan for next quarter. That’s it. No 40-slide deck required. Early April is a good moment to start, because Q1 has just closed and your clients have fresh […]
Employee offboarding in a CRM comes down to four moves: deactivate the person’s login on their last day, hand everything they owned to someone else, check every connected tool, and keep their records, because that history belongs to the company. Run a small business? Just realised a former employee might still be able to sign […]
Your CRM probably knows more about your customers than any other tool in your stack. Contact details, deal history, payment info, email threads, support notes - it’s all sitting in one place. That’s what makes it so handy. And so sensitive. For a small or mid-sized business, a breach here is never just an IT […]
Anything that signs in to a Microsoft 365 mailbox with a username and password to send mail relies on SMTP AUTH basic authentication. And the only reliable way to find all of it? A written inventory of every device, plugin and app that sends email. The first announced cut-off passed in spring 2026 without a […]
You built it yourself, and for a long time it did the job. One tab tracked leads, another logged calls, and a clever little formula flagged the deals worth chasing. Then the team grew. The deals multiplied. And the sheet that used to save you hours started quietly stealing them back. Spreadsheets win early, and […]
Your mailbox is full of client conversations. Your CRM shows a customer who hasn’t been heard from in three weeks. Both things are true at once, and that’s the whole problem right there. Email and calendar sync sits quietly between your inbox and your customer records, and when it slips, nothing announces the failure. Deals […]
The scrappy tactics that got you your first few deals? They fall apart the second volume shows up. A three-person team can keep everything in their heads, trade updates over coffee, remember which client said they’d call back. Now push that to thirty inquiries a day. The cracks show fast. Leads slip away, follow-ups just […]
Ask a sales team what they hate about their CRM and you rarely hear “the software.” You hear about the form. Eleven boxes standing between them and saving a call they just finished. Required fields are the most political setting in any customer database, because they decide who does the work of keeping data clean. […]
Lead assignment rules are a short written agreement: which rep gets each new lead, who hands it out, and when ownership ends. That’s it. In a sales team of two to eight people, the “rule” is usually “whoever sees it first takes it”. So some prospects get two calls and others get none. Below: how […]