Wholesale routes, cross-border builds, multi-year leases and IRUs: deals with legs, jurisdictions and three kinds of money. The CRM lives inside Sales, on the same customer record as billing and support, so a won deal can point at the contract it became instead of at a copy of it.
The deal is a pair of fibres between two cities. It crosses a border, so it has two jurisdictions and two of your own companies building it. It is sold as a fifteen-year IRU with a build fee up front, a lease per month and a maintenance charge per year, and those are three different numbers that must never be lumped into one field. The customer is a carrier whose parent sits in another country. The conversation runs for a year and a half, through an NDA, a survey, a quote, a signature, a build and a first invoice, before anyone calls it won.
A CRM built for software subscriptions has one amount, one country, one company and a stage list it will not let you rename. So the route ends up in the deal name, the second leg in a spreadsheet, and the money in whichever field was empty.
ISPCQ models the deal the way the engineers describe it. A deal can be itemised into legs, each with its own country, distance, fibre pairs, builder, term and money; the deal total is derived from them. Stages, colours, thresholds and vocabularies are configuration rows, not code. Who may see the money is a separate permission from who may see the deal.
And because it sits inside Sales, there is nothing to sync. Accounts and contacts are the same records the rest of the ERP uses. Activities are ordinary tasks and notes. Change history is the platform’s audit log. The document a deal prints comes from the same template screen as the invoices.
Nothing here is a separate system. Deals are rows beside the contracts; accounts are Directory records; activities are notes; the report reads the stage history every stage move writes.
One column per stage, a card per deal, sorted by expected close date. Drag a card to another column and the move is confirmed before it happens; drop it on a lost stage and the board asks why, and, once you keep competitors on file, to whom. Every column shows its count and a subtotal per currency. The board notices when a colleague moves something and refreshes itself, though never while you are mid-drag.
The pipeline ships with a stage editor and a starter set of stages you rename, reorder or retire. Each stage is a row: label, colour from a palette the operator can extend, icon, order, whether it counts as won or lost, a stale-after threshold, a starting forecast and probability for deals created in it, the fields a deal must carry before it may move on (writing one off as lost is always allowed), and optionally a permission without which the stage, and every deal in it, is hidden from you.
Every open deal carries a days-in-stage counter that turns amber at the stage’s own threshold and red at twice it; thirty and sixty days unless the stage says otherwise. The same rule colours the counter on the board card and in the list row.
A deal carries a headline amount and three charge buckets: one-off, monthly and annual. Totals are summed per currency and never converted or added across currencies. One-off, monthly and annual stay three visible numbers; the only combined figure is a contract value priced over a known term. Nothing is rounded until it is displayed.
The thing being sold is a route, and a route can have legs. A deal carries its from, to, distance, fibre pairs, term and NDA status; itemise it and each leg carries its own country, distance, fibre pairs, the company building it, its own term and its own one-off, monthly and annual money. Once any leg is priced, the deal’s total is the sum of its legs, priced over each leg’s own term, and the deal-level figures go read-only.
Activity on a deal is filed as an ordinary ERP note on the account and tagged to the deal: a call, a meeting, a task, a note, or an email you already sent. A meeting is a task, so it appears in the Notes Hub with its date, its assignee and its reminders. Set next step files a task; give it a due date and the deal page and the board card show the soonest open one, red once it is overdue, while the list shows its date and filters to the overdue ones.
A CRM account is a Directory organisation with a CRM tag; a contact is a person under it. The same record serves the Directory, billing and the CRM, so a company is entered once and merged once. An account can sit under a parent, and the parent’s page lists its subsidiaries with their deal counts; a loop is refused.
Every change made in the CRM to a deal, an account, a contact, a stage or a colour is written to the platform audit log, with a before and after for every field of a deal, and read back on the deal and the account as a change history naming who did what and when.
For each stage: how many deals ever reached it, how many are open, won and lost, the win rate among decided deals only, the median completed stay in days, and the median age of the deals sitting there now. Every figure carries the sample it rests on, because a median of two and a median of forty read identically otherwise.
When somebody leaves, a manager hands every open deal they own to someone still here, in one action; people who have left are still listed on the giving side, precisely so their deals can be rescued. Closed deals stay put unless asked for, and every deal’s own history records the handover.
A Document menu on the deal renders it through any document template tagged for the CRM in the same template screen the invoices come from: a cover letter, a term sheet, a proposal in your own words. The deal, the contacts, the route legs, the countries, and the account and owner by name are available to the template; the money only to readers permitted to see it.
Seeing the CRM, seeing deals, seeing every owner’s deals, creating, editing, moving between stages, deleting, exporting, configuring stages and seeing deal values are separate rights. Without the value permission the amounts are removed before the page is built, not hidden with styling: absent from the board, the deal, the list, the CSV, the documents and the change history.
Moving a deal to a lost stage asks for the reason and, where relevant, the competitor. Competitors are a list the sales team keeps; reasons are a vocabulary the operator seeds and a rep can add to. Both are cleared automatically if the deal is ever moved back out of a lost stage.
A won deal can name the contract it turned into. The picker offers only contracts on the deal’s own account, the deal shows the contract number, and both records keep their own history. It is a link, deliberately: contracts are created where contracts are created, with their products, terms and billing, and the deal points at the result.
The situation. A carrier asks for a route from a coastal landing station to an inland capital across the border. Your local company will build the first leg; the group company owns the second; a partner co-builds the third. The carrier wants a twenty-year IRU on the first two legs and a monthly lease on the third, with maintenance billed annually. The carrier’s procurement lead is in one country, its network director in another, and its parent group has two other subsidiaries you already talk to.
What ISPCQ does. One deal, three legs. Each leg carries its own country, distance, fibre pairs, builder, term and money, and the deal total is the sum of them, priced over each leg’s own term. The account sits under its parent group, so the parent, its other subsidiaries and how many deals each carries are one click away. The contacts’ buying roles are worked out from their titles by your own rules. Every call, meeting and email you log from the deal lands on the account’s timeline, tagged to it; the next step is a dated task that turns red and then climbs to the team lead if nobody moves it. If the operator has decided that a deal may not leave the quote stage without a closing date and an amount, the board refuses the move and names the missing fields. The proposal is rendered from the operator’s own template with the legs and jurisdictions filled in.
The result. Eighteen months later the deal is moved to won and linked to the contract that now bills it. The stage history shows where it waited longest; the pipeline report, with its sample sizes, shows whether that is the pattern or the exception. When the account manager leaves, their open deals are handed over in one action, and the deal’s own history says so.