A CRM is where marketing finds out whether any of it worked. That only happens if the source of a contact survives the journey from a form to a closed deal — and in most accounts we audit, it does not.
Lifecycle stages that match reality
Subscriber, lead, qualified, opportunity, customer — defined with the sales team, with an explicit rule for what moves a contact between stages and who is allowed to move it. Stages that mean different things to marketing and sales make every downstream report meaningless.
Forms and attribution
Forms capture the campaign parameters and the original source, not just the last page visited. That single detail is what lets you report which channel produced revenue rather than which page someone happened to be on when they converted.
Pipelines and properties
Deal stages that mirror how deals actually progress, required properties at the stages where the information genuinely exists, and a small custom property set. Every optional field nobody fills in is a column of nulls that later breaks a report.
Automation, sparingly
Workflows for routing, follow-up and internal notification. We resist automating a process the team has not agreed on yet, because an automated bad process is just a faster one. Email programmes themselves belong with email and CRM.
Closing the loop
Closed-won deals are joined back to marketing spend in the warehouse, so cost per customer is a real number by channel. That reporting lives in BigQuery rather than in any one tool’s dashboard.
Fed by GA4, Tag Manager and server-side tracking.