A CRM for sales teams that shows where to start

Most reps start in their inbox. Three prospect replies, a question from an existing customer, a meeting invite to confirm. Then the CRM, to check which deals are open. Then the calendar. And somewhere on a notepad there is a reminder to call back last week's lead.

That is four places for one day, so things slip. Not because you are careless, but because none of those places has the full picture. Last week's lead is in the CRM, but nobody put a task on it. The prospect's email sits in your inbox, but the colleague covering your accounts while you are away cannot see it. And the quote lives in your downloads folder as version 3 and version 3 final.

You only see the cost later. A deal that has sat in the proposal stage for three weeks without a follow-up call. A lead who filled in the form and got a reply five days later. A sales manager asking on Monday where a deal stands, and you digging through your sent folder for the answer. A CRM you have to update next to your real work turns into admin. And admin you fill in after the fact is never quite right.

Lumo flips the order. You start on the Today screen. It shows Your work queue with what is overdue, what is planned for today and what comes later. Next to it are Leads to follow up, the Stuck deals that have been in a stage longer than your team agreed and, if you also look after customers, the Tickets close to SLA. You work down the list.

Email with known contacts lands from your Gmail on the person, the organization and the deal by itself. Google Calendar meetings with a known contact become activities on that deal. If you use Outlook, you put your personal BCC address in the Bcc line and the email lands on the right deal too. So when you open a deal, last week's call, yesterday's email and tomorrow's meeting are all in one place.

Read more about pipeline management, activities and the calendar or how to follow up leads consistently.

Most account managers are measured on a handful of numbers. Calls and meetings per week. New deals created. Conversion from stage to stage. Average deal size. How long a deal takes from first conversation to signature. And won revenue against target.

All of these come out of the work you already do. A meeting in your calendar becomes an activity. A stage change is stored with its duration. A won deal has a value that comes from its product lines. So there is no more Friday spreadsheet for your manager.

In Insights you build your own view. You pick a source such as deals, activities or stages, a measure and a breakdown, for example won value per month or calls per week. Add a goal line and drill down to the deals behind a bar. Save it to a private dashboard and you have your own weekly overview. Which numbers actually tell you something is covered in the guide on sales KPIs.

Picture a distributor of installation supplies with eight account managers, each covering a region. This is an example, not a customer. Each account manager has about sixty open deals: large projects for contractors and smaller repeat orders.

Before, the pipeline lived in a spreadsheet that was updated every Friday. Quotes went out as Word files. When a contractor called on Tuesday about a quote, the inside sales team did not know which version he had.

In Lumo the team gets two pipelines: projects and repeat orders. The quote sent stage gets a limit of 10 days. After that, a deal shows up on its owner's Today screen by itself. An automation creates a task to call within two days for every new deal in the project pipeline.

Sam, who covers the north, starts his day on Today. Three deals are past their limit. On the first, the timeline shows that the contractor replied last week. The email was in his inbox, but he had missed it. He calls, updates the quantities on the deal and creates a new quote. He voids the old one. By three o'clock the customer has signed and the note is on the deal.

When Sam goes on holiday, a colleague takes over his deals by changing the owner in a bulk action. Because Sam's email connection is set to team, that colleague sees the full history.