Commercial Discovery, Before CRM

Before you choose a CRM, decide what it needs to represent.

A growing service or SaaS business reaches a point where spreadsheets, memory and disconnected tools stop giving management a reliable picture of customers and revenue. That is usually when CRM becomes a serious option. ProperBizFix works one step earlier: mapping the commercial model, the decisions the business needs to make, and the information a CRM would have to hold or connect to before software is chosen.

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Thinking about your first serious CRM, replacing a spreadsheet-led setup, or starting to compare HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or similar systems? This is the stage ProperBizFix is for.

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Already have a CRM and it no longer gives useful answers? That is a later-stage problem handled by Unsnag.

Get a free Commercial Model Pre-read See what gets mapped

For B2B service businesses and SaaS companies with a management team - Manchester and UK-wide.

Free, before we speak

I map the commercial model before the call.

Using your website and other public business information, I build a preliminary view of how the company appears to move from demand to sale, then into delivery or adoption, repeat, renewal, expansion or churn. I also note what a future CRM would probably need to distinguish if that model is broadly right.

Commercial Model Pre-read
  • A one-page outside-in map of how the business appears to make money.
  • The commercial objects or events I would expect a CRM to need to represent.
  • One or two questions that cannot be answered reliably from public information and are worth testing on the call.

It is a hypothesis, not an audit. The point is to arrive prepared and use the call to test the model against reality.

How the free pre-read works →
The actual problem
A CRM can store whatever you ask it to store. The difficult part is deciding which parts of the commercial reality are worth representing in the first place.
One argument, four parts

The CRM decision should come after the commercial model is understood.

01 The Mistake Why choosing software before defining the commercial model usually hard-codes assumptions the business has never tested. → 02 What to See The commercial objects, events, customer differences, decisions and system boundaries that need mapping before CRM design makes sense. → 03 Commercial Discovery A bounded discovery engagement that turns the current commercial model into a practical CRM and data specification, including what should not be put into CRM. → 04 About Why the work is independent of any CRM vendor, implementation partner or software shortlist. →