Customers

Contacts & Pipeline

Full CRMs are built for sales teams with managers to report to. A founder needs three things: who am I talking to, where does it stand, and what do I do next. The Contacts stage of the Customers pipeline is exactly that much CRM and no more.

The pipeline board

The Pipeline stage shows the counts: how many contacts sit at New, In touch, Negotiating, Won, Lost, and Future. Won and Lost are self-explanatory; Future is the honest bucket for "right person, wrong time" — better than losing them or letting them clutter the active list.

The same status distribution appears on the brand Dashboard, so the state of your funnel is visible without opening the section.

Contacts

Each contact carries a small, deliberate set of fields:

Name and Contact — email, @handle, or WeChat, whatever channel is real for this person.
Identity — who they are in one line.
Status — one of the six stages above.
Value — what winning them is worth, if you want to track it.
Next action — the one thing you intend to do next. If every contact has a next action, your outbound never stalls silently.

And two running records per contact:

Progress — dated notes: what happened, what you learned.
Conversations — a me/them message log, so the full exchange is readable in one place even when it happened across platforms.

Add contacts inline (name plus a contact channel is enough), promote them from shortlisted leads, or let the agent create them.

Managing contacts by talking

The agent has first-class contact tools, which makes chat the fastest interface for CRM upkeep:

"Move Anna to negotiating, note that she asked for annual pricing, next action: send quote by Friday."

…is one message instead of four form edits. Query works too: "who's in touch that I haven't updated in two weeks?" Because the log lives in the same place the agent does, keeping the CRM current stops being a chore you batch on Sundays.

A workflow that holds

Discovery finds people → you shortlist the real ones.
Shortlist → contact, status New, with the suggested opener as your starting message.
Every touch gets one progress note; every reply flips the status forward.
Weekly, sweep everything without a next action and give it one — or move it to Future.

Small enough to maintain, structured enough that nothing falls through.