CRM

The people and companies you deal with, the deals you are working, and everything said and done with each, on the same records as your tickets and your time.

The CRM is the module for relationships, one of Alba Ticket's five with Projects, Helpdesk, Knowledge base and Time. It keeps the people and the companies your team deals with, the deals it is working, and what was said and done with each of them.

It works on the records the other modules already have. A company is the organisation the helpdesk knows as a customer account and invoicing as the customer a project is billed to. The people who raise requests are contacts from their first request. A deal is a ticket, in a project whose board is the pipeline, and a won deal becomes a contract that time is logged against. Nothing is copied between tools, because there is one tool.

Open CRM in the header. The pages below are in the order a team usually sets the CRM up.

Setting it up

1. Decide who sees it. The CRM has three permissions, held on roles: seeing it, editing it and managing it. The seeded Sales role sees and edits; Account manager manages; customers never see it. See who may see and change the CRM.
2. Bring what you have. An administrator imports companies, contacts, deals and their history from a HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce export under Imports. People who already raise requests in a helpdesk are contacts already.
3. Start a pipeline. A sales project is a project of its own kind, with the stages of a pipeline and the fields of a deal.
4. Let mail in. With the workspace receiving email, each member has a logging address to BCC, and answers to what they write come back to the timeline.
5. Connect calendars. With a provider set up, each member connects their own calendar.

Contacts and companies

A contact is a person: a name and a job title, any number of email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses, a company, an owner and a stage. A company is an organisation, a customer or not yet one, with its website, industry, size and domains. Each has a page with everything about it, and custom fields an administrator adds. See Contacts and companies.

The pipeline

A deal moves through the stages of a sales pipeline on a board, like any ticket on a kanban board: Qualified, Proposal, Negotiation, then Won or Lost with a reason. It carries a value in its own currency, an expected close and a probability, the company it is with and the people there, each with their part in the decision. A company's page lists its deals with their totals.

Interactions and follow-ups

What happens with a person is an interaction: a note, a call, a meeting, an email or a task. It is logged once and shown on the timeline of every record it concerns: the contact, their company and the deal. A task with a due moment is a follow-up: it is on your home page until it is done, and you are reminded when it comes due. A call or meeting can record its time as an activity in the same step.

Email

Mail with a contact belongs on their timeline. Email and the CRM covers the two ways it gets there: BCC or forward to your own logging address from any mail program, or write to the contact from their page. Answers to what you write there come back to the same timeline.

Calendar

Connect your Google, Microsoft 365 or iCloud calendar and a meeting a contact is invited to is logged on their timeline, while a call or meeting you schedule here is put in your calendar.

Quotes

A deal has one quote: lines with quantities, prices, discounts and tax, printed on the same sheet as an invoice and sent to the deal's people from its page. When the deal is won, the quote offers the contract and the first invoice.

Reports

Sales reports show the pipeline by stage, the weighted forecast, what was won and lost and the win rate, how long deals spend in each stage, the interactions each member logged and the follow-ups that are overdue. Amounts are never added across currencies.

Contacts' data

A CRM holds data about people who never signed up to anything. Contacts' data covers what the workspace owes them: a record of what each agreed to, a copy of everything held about one person, and erasing them when they ask.

Programs and AI agents

An AI agent you connect, and a program using the API, reads and works the CRM as you: contacts, companies, deals, interactions and follow-ups, under your own permissions. It never records consent, exports or erases a contact, or writes to one.