Close CRM,
built like infrastructure.
A CRM is not a database your reps fill in for management. It is the work queue that tells every person on the team what to do next, and the ledger that makes forecasting an arithmetic problem instead of an argument. We build it that way.
Why we default to Close — and when we do not
We are not a Close reseller and we take no referral commission. It is our default because for a specific, common profile it is simply the best-shaped tool available.
Close is the right call when…
- Your team calls and emails a lot. Dialler, email, SMS and sequences live inside the record. No tab-switching, no separate telephony contract, no missing activity because it happened in another tool.
- Pricing per seat actually matters. A single plan includes calling, sequences, automation and reporting instead of unlocking each as a paid add-on. For a team of eight to forty, the annual difference is material.
- You want reps to work a queue, not browse a database. Smart Views are saved queries that behave like task lists. A rep opens one view and works down it — this is the single biggest adoption lever in the product.
- Someone will build on the API. The REST API and webhooks are clean, well documented and generous with rate limits. Nearly everything in the UI is reachable programmatically, which is what makes deep automation practical.
- You want it live in weeks. Configuration is fast enough that a migration plus workflow build is measured in weeks. Comparable Salesforce projects start at quarters.
Choose something else when…
- You need heavy CPQ. Complex configure-price-quote with product rules and approval matrices belongs in a dedicated quoting system or a platform CRM.
- Field service scheduling is core. Dispatch, routing and technician capacity need purpose-built software.
- Marketing automation must sit in the same tool. Close is a sales CRM. If you want lifecycle marketing, scoring and nurture in one platform, HubSpot is the more honest answer.
- You are already deep in Salesforce or Dynamics. With integrations, reporting and an internal admin team in place, migration cost usually exceeds the benefit.
- You need granular record-level permissions. Close's permission model is deliberately simple. Highly compartmentalised access is not its strength.
What a Close implementation includes
Eight workstreams. On a typical engagement they overlap across eight to twelve weeks.
Data model & field dictionary
Before anything gets built we agree what a Lead is versus a Contact versus an Opportunity in your business, and write it down. Every custom field gets an owner, a definition, a permitted value set, a source of truth and a retention rule. Fields nobody can define get deleted — that is usually a third of them.
- Lead, Contact and Opportunity custom field taxonomy with naming conventions
- Custom Objects where a real one-to-many relationship exists — contracts, sites, assets, subscriptions
- Required-versus-optional rules mapped to pipeline stage, not applied globally
- Explicit rule for which system wins on conflict when the CRM and ERP disagree
Migration & data quality
Migration is where most CRM projects quietly fail — not because data does not move, but because it moves badly and trust never recovers. We run it as a repeatable, reversible process against a staging workspace before anything touches production.
- Extraction from HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, Excel or a legacy database
- Normalisation of phone numbers to E.164, country and industry values, company names and domains
- Deduplication on domain plus fuzzy company name, with a human review queue for ambiguous matches
- Historical activity preserved — calls, emails, notes and stage changes — so the timeline survives
- Reconciliation report: counts by object, sampled record comparison, and an explicit list of what was intentionally not migrated
- Cutover plan with a defined freeze window and a rollback path
Pipeline architecture
Most pipelines are a list of nouns everyone interprets differently. We define stages by observable buyer evidence, so two reps looking at the same deal put it in the same place.
- Separate pipelines for new business, renewal, upsell and partner-sourced deals — different stages, different maths
- Every stage gets an exit criterion phrased as something the buyer did, not something the rep intends
- Lead statuses for pre-opportunity work; Opportunity statuses for committed pipeline. Never both in one list
- Stage-weighted forecasting calibrated against your own historical conversion, not vendor defaults
- Loss reason taxonomy short enough to be used honestly and specific enough to be actionable
Smart Views — the rep's day
This is the adoption mechanism. If a rep opens Close and sees a database, they will avoid it. If they open it and see today's work in priority order, they will live in it.
- Role-based view sets: SDR queues, AE pipeline hygiene, manager coaching and exception views
- Written in Close's search query language and version-controlled, not hand-built per user
- Standard exception views — no next step, no activity in n days, stalled in stage, closing this month without a meeting booked, high value with a single contact
- A one-page daily operating rhythm per role: which views to work, in what order, and what "done" looks like
Sequences & cadences
Multichannel follow-up that keeps sounding human at volume, and that respects the rules of the market you are selling into.
- Cadence design by segment and entry trigger — inbound speed-to-lead, demo no-show, post-proposal, dormant reactivation, event follow-up
- Reply, meeting-booked and opt-out detection wired to exit the sequence immediately and update status
- Sending domain hygiene: separate outbound domain, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warm-up schedule and volume throttling per mailbox
- Personalisation tokens with safe fallbacks, so a missing field never produces "Hi {first_name}"
- Compliance-aware design — see the outbound section below, which matters a great deal for German recipients
Calling & conversation capture
Talk time is the one input a sales manager can genuinely influence. We remove the friction around it and capture what happens.
- Power Dialer and Predictive Dialer configuration matched to list quality and team size
- Number strategy, local presence where legal, and call-outcome taxonomy that reports usefully
- Recording and transcription with jurisdiction-appropriate consent handling — a real constraint in Germany, where recording without both parties' consent is a criminal offence under § 201 StGB
- Transcript-to-CRM: structured extraction of budget, timeline, stakeholders and next step into fields, not free-text notes (see AI Systems)
- Coaching workflow: manager review queues, snippet libraries and objection banks built from real calls
Automation & integration
Close's built-in Workflows handle in-CRM logic. Anything crossing a system boundary goes through the orchestration layer, where it can be versioned, monitored and replayed.
- In-Close Workflows for stage-triggered tasks, field updates, sequence enrolment and internal alerts
- Outward integrations to quoting, ERP, accounting, e-signature, support, scheduling and data warehouse
- Webhook-driven change data capture so downstream systems react in seconds rather than polling
- Round-robin and territory-based assignment with capacity limits and an out-of-office fallback
- Full detail on the automation page
Reporting & forecast
Three audiences, three different reports. Confusing them is why most CRM dashboards get ignored.
- Rep: my activity, my pipeline, my gaps — visible without asking anyone
- Manager: leading indicators — conversations, meetings booked and held, new opportunities created, stage velocity, next-step coverage
- Leadership: pipeline coverage against target, weighted forecast versus commit, win rate by source and segment, sales-cycle length, cohort conversion from lead to closed
- Closed-loop channel economics joining ad spend to closed revenue (see Growth)
- Where reporting needs to go beyond native capability, we push to a warehouse and build in Looker Studio, Metabase or Power BI
Outbound that is designed around the law, not despite it
Germany has some of the strictest rules on unsolicited commercial contact in the world, and they apply to B2B — a fact a surprising number of sales-tooling vendors gloss over. We design cadences with this as an input, not a disclaimer.
Cold email
Under § 7 (2) UWG, advertising email generally requires prior express consent, and the B2B context does not create a general exemption. Practical consequence: a purchased list plus a mail-merge is a liability, not a strategy. We build entry points that generate a documented lawful basis — content offers, event and webinar registration, inbound requests, existing-customer relationships under § 7 (3) — and record where each contact came from on the record itself.
Cold calling
Calls to businesses require at least presumed consent — a concrete, demonstrable connection between what you sell and that company's business. That is a real bar, but a passable one, and it makes list quality and research the deciding factor. Our sequences therefore front-load qualification and evidence capture instead of maximising dial volume.
Record-keeping
The obligation that catches people out is proof. We store consent source, timestamp, and the exact wording shown, on the contact record — plus a global suppression list checked before every send and every dial, honouring opt-outs across all channels and all pipelines at once.
A typical twelve-week implementation
For a 15–60 person company migrating from one existing CRM with two or three connected systems.
| Weeks | Phase | What happens | You receive |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Diagnose | Interviews with reps, managers and back office. Tool and data inventory. Extraction of a sample dataset to assess real quality. | Systems audit, data-quality report, target architecture, prioritised backlog |
| 3–4 | Design | Field dictionary, pipeline and stage definitions, Smart View catalogue, sequence map, integration contracts, access model. Signed off before build. | Design document and migration plan |
| 5–6 | Build — core | Workspace configuration, custom fields and objects, pipelines, roles. Migration dry run into staging with reconciliation. | Staging workspace and reconciliation report |
| 7–8 | Build — motion | Smart Views, sequences, dialler setup, email authentication and warm-up, in-CRM workflows, task automation. | Working sales motion in staging |
| 9–10 | Build — integration | Orchestration scenarios to quoting, ERP, accounting and support. Error handling, alerting and monitoring. Reporting layer. | Integrated system, runbook, dashboards |
| 11 | Cutover | Production migration in a defined freeze window, verification against the reconciliation baseline, go-live with hypercare. | Live production system |
| 12 | Adopt | Role-based training, recorded walkthroughs, daily operating rhythm per role, adoption dashboard, thirty-day review scheduled. | Enablement pack and adoption metrics |
Greenfield implementations with no migration typically complete in six to eight weeks. Multi-entity rollouts with several sales teams and languages run longer — we phase those by business unit rather than attempting a single cutover.
CRM questions we get asked most
Our data is a mess. Should we clean it before migrating?
Clean during, not before. "We will tidy the data first" is how migrations get postponed indefinitely, because nobody has a spare quarter for it. Our approach is to migrate everything that has value, normalise mechanically what can be normalised, quarantine what is genuinely unusable into an archive segment rather than deleting it, and put ambiguous duplicates into a review queue your team works through in the first fortnight. You go live with a clean core and a visible, shrinking backlog — instead of never going live at all.
Will our reps actually use it?
Only if it makes their day easier, and that is an engineering outcome rather than a training one. The levers that decide it: the rep opens one Smart View instead of searching; the dialler is one click from the record; sequences remove manual follow-up entirely; and every field a rep is asked to fill has a visible consequence they benefit from.
We also measure adoption as a metric from week one — logged activity per rep, next-step coverage on open opportunities, sequence completion — so a drop-off gets caught in week three when it is fixable, not in month six when the project is already labelled a failure.
Can you migrate from Salesforce without losing history?
Yes. Accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, tasks, events, notes and email history all map across, along with owner assignment and created and closed dates. What does not map one-to-one is anything Salesforce-specific — Apex triggers, validation rules, record types, complex sharing rules and Chatter. Those get re-implemented as Close workflows plus orchestration where they carry real business logic, and consciously dropped where they were only compensating for platform complexity in the first place. We give you an explicit written list of what is being reimplemented and what is being retired before cutover.
How do you handle multiple languages and countries?
One workspace, segmented by pipeline, ownership and Smart View rather than split into separate instances — splitting instances destroys cross-entity reporting and doubles the maintenance. Sequences and templates are localised per market, sending domains and dialler numbers are configured per country, and consent and recording rules are applied per jurisdiction. Reporting rolls up group-wide with country as a dimension.
What does Close itself cost?
You license Close directly from Close, on your own card, at their published per-seat pricing — we never resell it or mark it up. Our fee is for the implementation. As a rule of thumb, tooling is by far the smaller number in this kind of project; the cost that matters is the internal time currently spent on work the system should be doing.
Send us your pipeline screenshot.
Genuinely — a screenshot of your current pipeline and a two-line description of how a lead reaches a rep is enough for us to tell you where the leaks are on the first call.