CRM

A CRM in a prospecting operation is a write target before it is a reporting tool. Call summaries, replies, booked meetings and enrichment all arrive from somewhere else, and none of them are typed by a human who remembered. That single fact decides how to choose one: if the API is a premium feature, the CRM will quietly become a place where data goes to be re-entered by hand. Three things to check. Whether you can model the objects your business actually has, rather than bending your process into someone else vocabulary of leads and opportunities. Whether every record can be read and written through a normal API, with webhooks that fire reliably. And what a seat costs for the person who only needs to read, because per-seat pricing is what stops a company from giving access to the people who should have it. For an agency there is a fourth question: one shared pipeline separated by a filter is separation by discipline, and discipline fails silently. A workspace per client is structural isolation, and it also makes the end of an engagement clean. Expect nine to twenty dollars a user per month, with open-source self-hosting a real option whose licence is free and whose operations are not.