A CRM Built to Hand Over

I worked at a venture-funded software company in 2023, as it finished its first year with about 13 people. Notion had started as a few pages for company values and hiring. It held the leads, the deal notes, product work, tech support and the ticketing system by early 2023. Most deals ran through chat apps, and the team sat in hundreds of group chats with prospects and partners.

Notion has no funnel analytics, so nobody could see how many deals moved from one stage to the next. Deal conversations sat in chat threads only one person might see. A prospect would reach out, the right person would miss it, and the thread went cold. My estimate at the time was that visibility on those chats alone would have put the company three to five deals further ahead over the previous two months.

The first option on the table was building an app on top of Notion. CRMs already exist, so I tested them instead, against the company's real deal data. One colleague wanted the biggest-name CRM, and I told the team it tries to do everything and isn't the best at any of it. I ran trials of ClickUp and two newer CRMs, exported everything from Notion and built the first version of the pipeline in ClickUp. I set the rollout for one quarter: sales and business development first, then marketing, then the product team if it held up. I gave myself a target of 30 leads in the new system to show the team the switch worked. And I structured every contact, deal and note so the same data could feed reporting and automation later.

• Notion export to CSV
• ClickUp pipeline, first version
• CRM trials on real deal data
• SOPs and a team knowledge base

The company's leads and deal notes came out of Notion as an export and into one CRM. I left the entire CRM with all my notes in it, a set of SOPs and a knowledge base when I moved on later that year, in much better shape than I found it.

Whoever took over sales started from a working pipeline, written steps for running it and my notes inside it.

I wrote the SOPs and the knowledge base before I left, because the reasons behind each deal lived in my notes. Leaving those notes inside the CRM was part of building it.