The CRM consolidates contacts, companies, deals and tasks in a shared workspace. This avoids a loose collection of individual notes and instead creates a cleanly structured system for relationships, responsibilities, follow-ups and sales opportunities. The tool becomes particularly powerful when several people work in parallel on the same customer relationships and it still remains clear at all times who is working on what.
In this article
- How the CRM is structured
- How to work with the CRM in everyday use
- Maintaining contacts and companies
- Managing deals via the pipeline
- Creating tasks directly on the record
- Documenting activities in a traceable way
- Views, filters and saved workspaces
- Dashboard, reports and pipeline management
- Assistant, import and export
- CRM assistant for structured input
- Import and export
- Custom fields and status logic
- Team, roles and collaboration
- Recommended way of working
Instead of just storing customer data, the CRM helps you turn it into an ongoing process: from the first contact through qualification to a concrete opportunity, a task or the next conversation. Dashboards, filters, saved views, activities and the integrated assistant ensure that nothing gets lost in day-to-day business.
How the CRM is structured
The CRM works with four central data types that are deliberately linked to each other. These relationships in particular make the system valuable in everyday use, because information does not remain isolated.
| Area | Purpose | Typical relations |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts | Individuals with contact details, status, tags, responsible person and individual history. | can be assigned to a company and linked to deals as well as tasks |
| Companies | Company profiles with master data, domain, status, tags, contacts and activities. | can contain multiple contacts, deals and tasks |
| Deals | Sales opportunities with pipeline stage, status, amount, expected closing time and context. | are typically linked to companies and optionally to specific contacts |
| Tasks | Concrete next steps such as callbacks, follow-ups, checking on proposals or reviewing data. | can stand alone or be linked directly to a contact, company or deal |
This structure has a practical advantage: you do not only see a single record, but the entire context. For example, when you open a company, you immediately see related contacts, open deals, tasks and past activity.
How to work with the CRM in everyday use
Maintaining contacts and companies
Contacts and companies form the basis of your database. Both areas are designed for structured maintenance: you can assign responsible persons, set statuses, use tags and store additional fields. This makes the CRM suitable not only for pure sales lists, but also for managing existing customers, partners or ongoing acquisition.
It is particularly useful that contacts and companies are not managed separately side by side. A contact can be assigned directly to a company. This avoids duplicate maintenance while still allowing you to keep track of individual contact persons.
Managing deals via the pipeline
Deals turn general contacts into concrete sales opportunities. You define the title, amount, expected closing date, status and pipeline stage and link the deal to a company or contact. In the pipeline, you can see at a glance which opportunities have just been qualified, which are being actively negotiated and where a closing or decision is imminent.
Pipeline stages help not only with maintaining an overview, but also with guiding conversations within the team. If everyone works with the same stages, it becomes clearer where an opportunity actually stands and which next steps make sense.
Creating tasks directly on the record
Tasks are deliberately not conceived as detached items. You can link a task directly to a contact, a company or a deal. This keeps it visible why a task exists and in which context it needs to be completed. For follow-ups, callbacks, call notes or following up on proposals, this is far more valuable in everyday use than a separate to-do list.
Documenting activities in a traceable way
Every customer relationship relies on a clean history. The CRM consolidates activities on the relevant records, so you can later understand interactions, changes and next steps. This is especially helpful when conversations are handed over or a colleague has to step in at short notice.
Views, filters and saved workspaces
As your data volume grows, not only data quality matters, but also the speed at which you can find the right records. The CRM therefore supports targeted filters, sorting and saved views.
- Filters: You can filter by responsible person, status, tags and other fields, among others.
- Saved views: Recurring perspectives can be saved so you do not have to apply the same filters every time.
- Global search: Contacts, companies and deals can be searched centrally.
- Focus on follow-ups: Views for missing activity or missing next tasks help you quickly identify gaps.
In practice, this results in very useful working views, for example for new leads, unattended existing customers, open opportunities or contacts without a current next step.
Dashboard, reports and pipeline management
The dashboard condenses the most important signals for everyday work. These include open deals, the current pipeline total, recently active opportunities, due tasks and additional hints such as upcoming birthdays. This way you do not only see which data exists, but also what you should respond to now.
In addition, reports and evaluations help you identify developments over a longer period of time. This makes the CRM not just a storage location, but a tool for prioritization, forecasting and operational management.
Assistant, import and export
CRM assistant for structured input
The integrated assistant is particularly helpful when information is initially unstructured, for example from emails, call notes or form inquiries. It can prepare content, assign it and convert it into suitable CRM actions. This turns free text more quickly into a cleanly maintained data record with comprehensible next steps.
In day-to-day work this is especially useful for new inquiries, communication logs and subsequent documentation. Instead of manually transferring everything into individual fields, you can first capture the context as a whole and then adopt it in a structured way.
Import and export
For initial data population and data exchange, the CRM supports import and export functions. Contacts can be imported, and key areas such as contacts or deals can be exported again. This is useful when you want to transfer existing lists, clean data or reuse datasets for other workflows.
Custom fields and status logic
The CRM is not limited to a rigid standard schema. Statuses, tags, pipeline stages, loss reasons, visible fields and custom fields can be adapted to your own way of working. This means the tool adapts to your process rather than the other way around.
Team, roles and collaboration
In a team, the CRM operates within a shared workspace. Accepted team members thus access the same data set and see the same contacts, companies, deals and tasks. This prevents duplicate maintenance and creates a unified view of the status of each customer relationship.
At the same time, each record can be assigned to a responsible person. This ensures that despite the shared data basis, it remains clear who is currently responsible for a contact, a company, a deal or a task.
Central settings such as pipeline stages, loss reasons, status models, tags, field visibility and custom fields are typically managed in a team context by administrators or project managers. This keeps the structure consistent, even when multiple people work with the CRM on a daily basis.
Recommended way of working
- Maintain companies as central accounts and consistently link contact persons directly to them.
- Work with clear status values and tags so that lists remain truly filterable later on.
- Create tasks directly on the contact, company or deal whenever possible so that context is not lost.
- Use saved views for recurring working lists such as follow-ups, open deals or dormant contacts.
- Document activities promptly so that handovers within the team remain possible without loss of knowledge.
- Use the assistant especially when information is initially unstructured and needs to be quickly converted into clean CRM data.