A CRM for SaaS that understands recurring revenue

Most B2B software companies run two flows. Inbound requests from the website: a demo request, a trial sign-up, a question in the chat on the pricing page. And pipeline that sales creates: outbound, partners, and existing customers who want more seats. Both end up in the same pipeline, but they need different follow-up.

An inbound request needs an answer within hours. So you want to know where it came from, who owns it and whether a call is booked. Then comes a demo, a trial or pilot, a proposal with an annual price and some procurement or security review on the customer side. Small deals close in a few weeks. Larger accounts bring more decision makers and run for months.

You probably know this Tuesday morning. The sales meeting starts. Twenty trials are open and nobody knows which ones are actually being used. The account manager of a large customer wants to pitch an upsell. He does not know that the same customer has three open tickets about a feature that is broken. And another customer renews in six weeks, while the only contact there has just left the company.

That is rarely about people being lazy. It happens because sales lives in one system, support in a second and the renewal dates in a spreadsheet. Every team holds a piece of the picture. Nobody holds the whole picture.

Lumo keeps that chain in one database. A lead from a web form gets a source and a status. A qualified lead becomes a deal in the pipeline with one click. On that deal you add products with a billing frequency, so the deal value matches what you actually sell. The tickets from the helpdesk sit on the same organization, with a health score that shows how the customer is doing. And in Customer success you see which accounts need attention.

Automations in Lumo are rules: when this happens, do that. They react to a deal being created, changing stage, being won or lost, to a new lead, person or organization, to a completed activity, and to a deal or lead that has been stale for a number of days. They create an activity or a note, update a field, assign an owner or add a label. They do not send email, on purpose. You test a rule with a dry run first.

Four rules a SaaS team often builds first:

• Deal won in the New business pipeline: create a task Schedule kick-off for the customer success manager.
• Deal enters the Trial stage: create a task Mid-trial check-in, seven days out.
• Lead stale for three days with status New: assign it to the team lead and add the label Overdue.
• Deal lost: create a note that the account may be approached again in six months.

In reports you pick a source, a measure and a breakdown, with a live preview. You build a weighted forecast by multiplying deal value by the win probability per stage. Other reports SaaS teams build: lead to deal conversion per source, average time per stage, lost reasons per quarter and won deal value against a goal line. Every chart drills down to the deals behind it.

Say a software company sells planning software to logistics firms. For this example we call it Routewise. It has two SDRs, four account executives, two customer success managers and a support team of three. About half of its deals come in through the website, the rest through outbound and partners.

Routewise creates two pipelines. New business with the stages from the example above. And Expansion and renewal with the stages Signal, Conversation, Proposal and Signed. So leadership never compares new revenue and expansion as if they were the same thing.

A trial form on the pricing page puts every request into Lumo as a lead with status New. A rule assigns leads that are still New after a day to the team lead. The SDRs work from the Today screen, where leads to follow up sit at the top. They move a qualified lead into Discovery with Convert to deal.

The account executives connect Gmail. Mail with known contacts lands on the deal by itself, and meetings from Google Calendar show up as meetings on the right person. An account executive who works in Outlook puts his personal BCC address on every customer email, and the mail lands in the same place.

After the signature, the customer success manager fills the Renewal date field on the organization. Every Monday she looks at a dashboard with renewals in the next 90 days, next to the Needs attention list. When a customer with a low health score shows up there, she opens a deal in Expansion and renewal at the Signal stage. The risk is now visible in the pipeline instead of in someone's head.