In brief
A custom CRM makes sense when the company's process doesn't fit a general-purpose CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce, or when customers are still managed between Excel and paper. Liquid built one, for example, for a window and door company: a single record per customer from enquiry to survey, quote, order and installation. A first version starts at €1,000, with no per-user licences, with code and data owned by the company.
When it makes sense, and when it doesn't
If your process is the standard one (contact, negotiation, close) an off-the-shelf CRM is perfectly fine and costs less. A custom CRM makes sense when, for you, the customer isn't a deal but a set of orders, quotes, surveys, agents and terms that a general-purpose CRM doesn't hold the way you need.
Building a clone of HubSpot is a waste. Building the tool HubSpot can't be, is not.
What it can contain
- Customer and prospect records with status, contact person, last contact and notes
- Stages and steps that follow your process, not a generic template
- Overdue reminders and follow-ups highlighted
- Inactive customers detected from order history
- Connection to the management system and opening the WhatsApp conversation from the record
- Roles: the owner sees everything, each salesperson their own customers
The case: a window and door company
Before the project the company managed customers with Excel sheets and paper documents: enquiries arrived by phone, email and in the showroom, the survey measurements stayed on a sheet, quotes in a folder, delivery and installation dates in a separate calendar. Finding out where a customer stood meant asking whoever was handling them.
We built a CRM around their process, from the first enquiry to aftercare following installation. Every customer has a single record and every job a clear status.
- Enquiries from phone, email, website and showroom logged in a single list, with the contact source
- Job stages: enquiry, survey, quote, order, production, delivery, installation, aftercare
- Calendar of surveys and installations assigned to technicians and fitters, visible from a phone
- Survey form filled in on site with measurements, photos and notes, already linked to the customer
- Quotes filed in the record, with automatic reminders for those left without a reply
- Supplier orders and expected delivery dates for each job, with a warning on delays
- Documents in one place: signed quotes, order confirmations, invoices, paperwork for tax deductions
- History of interventions and warranties for aftercare following installation
- Owner's view: open quotes and their value, jobs in progress, the week's installations
- Customers and historical jobs imported from the existing Excel files, without starting from zero
Compared with a general-purpose CRM
HubSpot and Salesforce are designed for structured sales departments. For a network of a few salespeople they bring per-user costs and demanding configuration. A CRM designed around the company's process has fewer features and a higher adoption rate.
The same tool we use ourselves
Liquid's own sales activity runs on a CRM we built in-house. Daily use guides design choices: which fields actually get filled in, which stay empty, which reminders make a difference.