Why generic CRM examples mislead you
Search for CRM examples and you get a gallery of dashboards. Every one shows contacts, deals and a bar chart, which tells you nothing, because the hard part of a CRM was never the dashboard. The hard part is deciding what a record is.
A plumbing company does not have deals. It has jobs, attached to properties, attached to the boiler in the cupboard. A charity does not have customers. It has supporters, some of whom are also volunteers, some of whom are in a household with another supporter, and one of whom left a legacy in a will. A recruitment agency has candidates and clients and jobs, and the same person can be all three in a year.
Every CRM example below is described by the thing it tracks, the stages work moves through and the rules that fire in between. That is the part you can compare against your own business.
A quick test: write down the five things your team asks each other about most. If those five things are not record types in your CRM, the CRM is not modelling your business.
The four shapes almost every CRM takes
Across the builds we have done, most systems fall into one of four shapes. Recognising yours saves weeks of specification.
| Shape | What it tracks | Typical industries | The hard part |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job shape | A site or asset, and repeated visits to it | Trades, pest control, cleaning, property maintenance | Scheduling and the phone view |
| Deal shape | One opportunity that closes once | B2B sales, manufacturing, car dealers | Quoting and forecasting |
| Relationship shape | A person tracked for years across many small events | Charities, clinics, membership bodies, advisers | Segmentation and consent |
| Matter shape | A case with dates, documents and compliance | Law, accounting, immigration, care | Deadlines and the audit trail |
A business can carry two shapes at once. A landscaping company has job shape for the weekly rounds and deal shape for design and build work, which is exactly why off the shelf tools feel wrong: they force one shape on both.
Example 1: HVAC contractor, 18 technicians
Records: properties, equipment by serial number, maintenance agreements, jobs. The equipment record is the one that pays for itself, because it holds install date, refrigerant type and every repair, so a technician standing in front of a fourteen year old unit can show the homeowner the repair history and quote a replacement on the spot.
Stages: new call, site visit booked, estimate sent, approved, install scheduled, job complete, invoiced, maintenance plan active.
The rule that changed the business: maintenance agreements generate their own visits and renewal invoices thirty days ahead. Before the build, renewals happened when someone remembered. Read the full breakdown on the HVAC CRM page.
Example 2: plumbing company, 30 vans
Same shape, different urgency. Emergency calls are routed to whoever is nearest and free, the customer gets a text with the plumber's name and arrival window, and missed calls create a callback task without anyone touching a keyboard.
Quotes are built from a price book on a phone at the kitchen table and accepted by the customer with one tap. Approved quotes become jobs with the materials list already grouped by supplier.
Example 3: charity, 11 staff
Records: supporters, donations, Gift Aid declarations, memberships, beneficiaries and services. The last one is why off the shelf donor tools get abandoned: the people you serve need case notes with restricted access, and the people who fund you need outcome reports, and both live in the same organisation.
Stages: enquirer, first donation, regular giver, member, major donor or legacy pledger, lapsed.
The rule that mattered: eligible donations are flagged automatically and the HMRC claim schedule exports in the required format, with a report of eligible but unclaimed gifts. See the charity CRM page.
Example 4: accounting practice, 14 staff
Matter shape. Records are clients, entities, services, deadlines and document requests. One client can be six entities with different year ends, which is the detail that breaks generic CRMs, because they assume one company equals one record.
Deadlines are generated from each entity's year end and the services engaged. Clients are chased for documents automatically, and the board shows what is due, what is waiting on the client and what is in review.
Example 5: estate agency, 3 branches
Records: properties, vendors and landlords, applicants, offers, sales progression, tenancies. Sales progression is the module nobody demos and everybody needs: both solicitors, mortgage status, searches, enquiries and a weekly update sent to both parties automatically.
The applicant matching rule sends new instructions to matched applicants within minutes and reports which ones opened it, so the negotiator's call list is ordered by interest rather than by alphabet.
Example 6: recruitment agency, 22 consultants
Three record types that relate to each other in a loop: candidates, clients, jobs. CVs are parsed on upload, skills are searchable, and each job carries its own pipeline. Temp timesheets are submitted and approved online and flow to both invoicing and payroll.
The saving that justified the build was not features. Twenty two consultants on a per seat recruitment platform were paying more each year than the system cost to build once.
Example 7: private clinic, 6 practitioners
Deliberately not a clinical system. Clinical notes stay in the practice software; the CRM owns enquiries, follow up, treatment plan acceptance, recalls and reviews. Every enquiry from the website, phone and Instagram lands on one screen with a reply within minutes and a sequence that runs until the patient books or declines.
Treatment plans are quoted, sent and tracked to acceptance, which is the number most clinics cannot report today.
Example 8: manufacturer selling through dealers
Records: accounts by tier, quotes with configuration rules, orders synced from the ERP, installed products by serial with warranty terms. Sales reps answer order status questions from the CRM instead of calling the warehouse.
Dealers log into a portal to register leads, request quotes and check shipments, and their registered leads are protected for a set period so two dealers do not chase the same customer.
Example 9: marketing agency, 24 people
Deal shape with a retainer twist. Proposals are built from a service catalogue, tracked for opens and signed electronically, and a signed proposal creates the client account, the retainer and the onboarding tasks.
Renewals appear ninety days out with an account health score built from activity and satisfaction, which is the difference between renewing a client and hearing that they have appointed someone else.
Examples 10 to 14, in one line each
- Mortgage brokerage: applications with lender milestones, fixed rate expiry reviews scheduled automatically, commission reconciled against aggregator statements. Mortgage broker CRM
- Car dealership: marketplace leads captured by email parsing, deal desk with trade in and finance, service reminders that bring the customer back in three years. Car dealer CRM
- NDIS provider: participants with plan budgets drawn down by each service, bulk payment request files generated for the portal, worker screening expiry blocking the roster. NDIS CRM
- Wholesale distributor: reorder patterns per account, churn alerts when ordering slows, customer specific pricing applied to every quote. Distributor CRM
- Wedding photographer: enquiry to contract to deposit in one link, questionnaires timed before the shoot, print sales tracked per session. Photography CRM
What the fourteen have in common
Three things, and none of them are features.
- Every one names its main record after what the business actually calls it. Nobody had to remember that Opportunity means roof.
- Every one has between four and eight pipeline stages. Systems with twelve stages were abandoned; systems with three could not report anything useful.
- Every one automates the follow up that a good employee does on their best day and forgets on their worst. That is where the money is, not in the dashboard.
If you want to see how this works rather than read about it, every industry page carries a working demo of that industry's system with its own records, stages and rules, running on sample data in your browser.
What each of these cost to build
Every example above was a fixed price build, quoted before a line of code was written. The spread is not arbitrary. It tracks the number of record types, the number of integrations and whether data had to be moved out of something older.
| Example | Record types | Integrations | Build window | Price band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HVAC, 18 technicians | 6 | Xero, Twilio, Google Maps | 6 weeks | 12k to 15k |
| Plumbing, 30 vans | 5 | QuickBooks, VoIP, Stripe | 6 weeks | 12k to 16k |
| Charity, 11 staff | 7 | HMRC Gift Aid export, Mailchimp, Stripe | 7 weeks | 14k to 18k |
| Accounting practice, 14 staff | 5 | Xero Practice Manager, Companies House | 5 weeks | 10k to 13k |
| Estate agency, 3 branches | 8 | Rightmove feed, DocuSign, Twilio | 8 weeks | 16k to 20k |
| Recruitment, 22 consultants | 6 | CV parsing, Xero, job boards | 7 weeks | 14k to 18k |
| Private clinic, 6 practitioners | 4 | Practice software, Stripe, SMS | 4 weeks | 8k to 11k |
| Single pipeline sales team | 3 | Email and calendar only | 3 weeks | 4.9k to 7k |
The pattern worth noticing: the cheapest builds are not the smallest companies, they are the ones with the fewest record types. A twelve person clinic with four record types costs less than a five person agency that wants retainers, projects, timesheets and profitability in one system. Full bands and what sits in each are on the pricing page, and the reasoning behind them is in what a custom CRM costs.
Every one of these numbers is a build price, not a subscription. The same businesses were paying between 3,600 and 31,000 a year in per seat fees before the build, which is why the arithmetic works out inside two years for most of them.
Four businesses we told not to build one
The examples that get published are always the ones that went ahead. These four did not, and the reasons repeat often enough to be useful.
A two person consultancy with eleven clients. They wanted a CRM because they felt they should have one. Eleven clients fit in a shared document with a review reminder. We suggested a free tier tool and a calendar habit, and told them to come back when they hired a third person.
A startup six weeks from launch. Their process was going to change five times before Christmas. Building a system around a process nobody has run yet produces a CRM that models a guess. They took an off the shelf tool for a year and rebuilt on evidence afterwards.
A distributor whose real problem was stock. The complaint was that sales could not see availability. That is an ERP problem wearing a CRM costume, and a new CRM would have pulled bad numbers out of the same place. We explained the split in ERP versus CRM, and they fixed the stock data first.
A franchise with a head office system. The franchisor already mandated a platform for reporting. A second system would have meant two sources of truth and a monthly argument about which one was right. The useful build there was an integration, not a replacement.
If your situation resembles one of those four, a custom CRM is the expensive answer to a question you have not finished asking.
Turning your own business into a specification
You do not need a consultant to produce the document that makes quoting accurate. You need four lists, and you can write them in an afternoon.
- Nouns. Write down every thing your team talks about as a unit of work: property, patient, matter, vehicle, campaign, load, unit. Those become record types. If a noun has its own history, it needs its own record rather than a field on another one.
- Stages. For the main noun, list the states it passes through, in order, in the words your team already uses. Do not tidy them into sales language. If your team says waiting on the surveyor, that is the stage name.
- Rules. Finish the sentence when X happens, someone has to remember to Y, as many times as you can. Every completed sentence is an automation, and this is the list that saves the most money, because remembering is what humans are worst at.
- Numbers. Write the five numbers you would look at every Monday if you could get them. This decides what the system has to capture, and it is the fastest way to find out that a field everyone fills in is never used.
Send us those four lists and the quote comes back inside two business days with a scope attached. Most briefs arrive shorter than this and we ask the rest in writing. Nothing about the process needs a meeting, which is deliberate: the written version of your process is an asset you keep whether or not you hire us.
The three integrations that show up in almost every build
Across all fourteen, three connections appear so often that we now assume them in the first quote and remove them if nobody wants them.
Accounting. Xero or QuickBooks in almost every case, MYOB in Australia, Sage in a few UK practices. The integration is narrow on purpose: the CRM sends an approved quote or a completed job across as a draft invoice, and reads the payment status back. It does not manage the ledger, and it never edits a posted invoice. That single connection removes the most common piece of double entry in a small business, and it is the one that people notice in the first fortnight.
Phone and messaging. A click to call from the record, calls logged automatically against it, and outbound text messages for appointment confirmations and arrival windows. In trades and clinics this is the feature that changes the customer experience most per dollar spent, because it converts every no show into a reply.
The web forms. Every enquiry from the website, the landing pages and the paid campaigns landing in one place with its source attached. Sounds trivial, gets skipped constantly, and it is the difference between knowing which marketing works and arguing about it. More on how those connections are built and monitored on the CRM integration page.
Everything beyond those three is industry specific: property portal feeds for estate agents, CV parsing for recruiters, practice software for clinics, an ERP for manufacturers. Those are the ones worth scoping carefully, because they are where an integration project becomes a data project.
