Overview
The expensive thing about a separate CRM is not its licence. It is the seam. The opportunity is won in one system and re-typed into another as an order; the customer who is three months overdue is still receiving proposals because sales cannot see the ledger; and the answer to “what did we agree with them last year” depends on who is still working here.
Nama’s pipeline runs on the customer record the invoices are raised against. Winning a deal does not export anything.
The chain, and how short it is
A lead is the prospect you are working on: the company, the contact who takes the calls, the products they are interested in, the campaign that produced them, and the salesperson it is assigned to. Promote it to a potential when it firms up, and convert it to a customer when it is won — from that moment the record is in the same master file the sales order, the invoice and the balance belong to, so a quotation can be raised against it with no re-entry.
Every step there is a button somebody presses. Promoting a lead to a potential first is a convention rather than a requirement, and nothing converts a record because a score crossed a line. That is a design position rather than an omission: this pipeline records what your people decided, it does not decide for them.
The activity that actually moves a deal
Deals move because someone rang, someone visited, or someone sent something. A call and a visit are each logged against the lead or potential they belong to, and each one pushes the record forward — its status, its classification, the activity type and, when the answer is no, the reason for it. Tasks and contacts hang off the same record.
The result is that a lead’s history is the record of what was done about it, in order, by name. When the salesperson who owned it leaves, the account does not leave with them.
Assignment, and who may see what
A lead carries who owns it, and reassignment is an explicit action rather than a quiet edit. Because this is the ERP’s own permission system rather than a bolted-on one, what a salesperson may see, edit or reassign is governed by the same rules that govern everything else they touch.
Campaigns, targets and questionnaires
Where a lead came from is a field on the lead, and the campaign it names is a register card for a marketing effort: what it is, who owns it, which products it pushes, who is working it, and the expected and actual cost, responses and sales as a scorecard the marketing team keeps.
Be clear about what that scorecard is. Those figures are typed by a person reading them off somewhere else — nothing sums the campaign’s real spend, counts its responses or computes a return, and the campaign has no accounting effect of its own. Marketing spend reaches the ledger the ordinary way, through purchase invoices and expense vouchers, and the return on a campaign is a question for reporting and BI against the orders its leads produced.
Alongside campaigns sit target plans, which set an activity quota — forty calls, eight visits, six new leads in a month — and count activities rather than money; and questionnaires, where a template is the survey and each filled-in copy is its own document against the customer who answered it.
What it does not do, so nobody discovers it in a demo
There is no weighted pipeline value and no sales forecast in this module: a lead’s budget field is free text, so it cannot be summed. There is no scoring, no automatic stage progression and no scheduler — nothing in CRM runs on a timer. Nothing compares a target plan against actual results, and questionnaire answers are not aggregated across respondents. Where you need an alert when a deal goes quiet, that is built on the platform’s notification engine and entity flows, which watch business events across the whole system, rather than being a CRM feature.
What you gain in exchange is that the pipeline is not a parallel universe. The won deal is a customer, the customer is a balance, and the salesperson’s next conversation starts from what the company actually knows.
The full chain, screen by screen and button by button, is documented in the sales pipeline.
