Ledgr/Documentation/Sales CRM

Sales CRM

Watch the lesson: Work a deal on the CRM board (1:53).

The six weeks before an invoice exists — the enquiry, the deal, and the call somebody promised to make on Thursday. Joined to your contacts rather than kept beside them.

Leads

Somebody who might buy, before they are a customer. Capture the name, business, email, phone, where they came from, who owns them and what you think it is worth, and move them through new, contacted, qualified or unqualified.

Getting leads in without typing them

• Import a CSV — a list from a trade show, a bought list, an export from whatever you used before. Preview it first: the preview runs the same import and reports the same counts, so what it tells you is what will happen.
• Web-to-lead — point your website's enquiry form at Ledgr with an API key and enquiries arrive as leads directly. API keys come with Business and up, so on Starter this route is not open — import instead. The developer docs show the request. Give each submission your own reference and a form that retries on a dropped connection cannot create the lead twice — which matters, because the visible symptom of a duplicate is two reps phoning the same customer.

The import is deliberately forgiving. The only row it refuses is one with no name at all. A status of "Hot" or "Warm" is kept as a note rather than forced into one of Ledgr's five, and amounts go through the same parser as the rest of Ledgr, so a pasted R1 500,50 is read the way a South African spreadsheet means it. Duplicates are matched on email against both your existing leads and your contacts.

Deals and the pipeline

1. Sales CRM → Pipeline → New deal

   A deal carries a value, an expected close date, an owner and a stage.

2. Put the lines on it

   A deal is not one number — it is 40 frames, 200 beams and 180 decks. Capture the lines and the deal's value is calculated from them.

3. Move it along the board

   The stages are yours to define — the defaults are qualification, needs analysis, proposal, negotiation, closed won and closed lost. Each stage has a default probability, so the weighted forecast is value × probability without anyone maintaining a second spreadsheet.

4. Raise a quote from the deal

   Open the deal and choose Quote these N lines (or Create quote on a deal with no lines yet). This produces a real document through the invoicing engine — not a copy of one — and the deal's lines become the quote's lines, unchanged. Nothing is re-keyed, so the board's figure and the customer's document cannot disagree.

Every stage move is recorded. That history is where average sales cycle comes from, so it is worth moving deals when they move rather than tidying the board once a month.

What the deal value means

Two things about the number on the card are worth knowing, because both are deliberate:

• It is net of VAT. Output VAT is SARS' money passing through your bank. A VAT-inclusive pipeline overstates expected revenue by 15% and then cannot be compared against an income statement, which is stated excluding it. The gross the customer will actually pay is shown alongside, never instead.
• It is derived from the lines once there are lines. A new deal with nothing on it yet keeps the value you typed — that is the normal early state, not a fallback.

Each line can also carry what the item costs you, so the board shows margin on a deal that has not been invoiced yet — before a single invoice has been raised.

Letting the customer accept or decline

The quote you email carries Accept and Decline buttons. Ledgr records who typed their name, on which quote, and when — the typed name is the signature — and a decline can carry a reason. The deal moves with the answer, so your pipeline reflects the customer's decision rather than somebody's memory of it.

See the customer portal for how the link works and what Ledgr deliberately does not record about the person who clicked it.

The deal keeps up with the invoice

The link between a deal and its documents reads both ways. When the customer accepts, when the quote is converted, and when money lands against the invoice, the deal advances on its own — so a deal does not sit in "proposal" while the invoice for it is paid.

It never re-opens a closed deal, so a duplicate payment notification cannot move something you lost back into the forecast.

Activities and follow-ups

Calls, meetings, emails, notes and tasks, each with an owner and a due date, attached to a lead, a deal or a contact. They appear in that contact's timeline in Contacts alongside their invoices and statements, rather than as a separate list you have to remember to open.

Logging an activity updates when that contact was last spoken to, which is what makes "nobody has called these fifteen customers in four months" answerable.

Open tasks are chased by a daily digest, sent to the person who owns them rather than to a manager — mailing somebody five other people's tasks produces a list nobody acts on. It covers what is due and what is overdue, and deliberately not what is due later this week: a digest listing work that is not yet due trains people to ignore it.

Attachments

The enquiry, the specification, two revisions of a drawing, the signed acceptance — open a deal or a lead and choose Attach a file (PDF or an image), as many as it needs. Removing one removes the link and not the file, because the same document may be referenced elsewhere and a sales screen is not the place anybody should be able to destroy a receipt.

Targets

Set a number per period, either for a person or for the team. Attainment is measured against won deal value net of VAT, attributed to the period the deal was actually won in rather than the one somebody hoped for, with the weighted forecast still in play shown beside it.

Attainment is not capped at 100%, because a team that beat its number should be able to see by how much. Where no target has been set, Ledgr says so rather than showing 0% — a zero-length bar reads as a team that has achieved nothing.

Performance

Open pipeline, weighted forecast, win rate and average sales cycle, broken down by owner and by lead source. The source breakdown is the one that changes behaviour: it is the difference between believing a channel works and knowing what it closed.

Campaigns

A campaign records the channel, the window, what you budgeted and what you spent, then attributes leads, deals and won revenue back to it for a return figure. Attribution is by the lead's source, so it is only as honest as the capture — set the source when the lead arrives, not afterwards.

Common problems