S.01 / CRM
A custom CRM is a sales system built around how your company actually sells, instead of bending your team to HubSpot, Salesforce or Zoho. I design and build CRMs from your customer sources, your sales steps, the rules that can’t be broken and what management needs to see.
02 / PROBLEM
When the CRM doesn’t reflect how the company sells, the real process moves somewhere else.
To another spreadsheet, to an inbox, to an export someone filters every Monday. The CRM is still there, but it’s no longer where the selling happens: it’s where what already happened gets recorded, late.
The result is duplication and distrust. Nobody knows which version of the customer is right, contact rules depend on someone’s memory and every sales report starts by reconciling sources.
It isn’t the team’s fault. It’s a tool designed for an average sales process applied to one that isn’t.
03 / SIGNALS
If you recognise three or more, it won’t be fixed with more training or another custom field.
04 / FIT
When what’s specific about the way you sell is exactly what a generic CRM handles worst.
05 / STANDARD OR CUSTOM
Customising an off-the-shelf CRM is often the right call. This is the line I use to decide.
06 / WHAT I BUILD
Only the pieces your process needs. Each one already exists in a system that’s running.
Forms, your own website, public sources or imports: every lead arrives with its source recorded and without duplicates.
EvidenceZentia
The stages, priorities and status history are the ones your team uses in everyday conversation.
Contact details, notes, tasks, sources and everything that has happened with that customer, in one place and in order.
Batched send queues, templates with variables and automatic exclusions applied on the server before anything is sent.
When a lead comes from your website, the salesperson also gets what they viewed and the preferences they showed.
EvidenceZentia
One CRM for several business units, with isolation enforced in the database rather than the interface.
EvidenceZentia
07 / INTEGRATION
A custom CRM doesn’t live in isolation: it connects to what already works and starts with your data, cleaned up.
Customers, orders and invoices from the ERP visible in the record, without copying them by hand. The CRM reads from the source; it doesn’t create a second version of the customer.
Forms on your website create the lead with its source and what the visitor looked at, as in Zentia.
Sends and campaigns from the CRM itself, with templates, batched queues and exclusions applied on the server.
Contacts from your current CRM or spreadsheets are imported after reviewing duplicates, statuses and opt-outs, so the new system doesn’t inherit the old one’s problems.
Everything can be exported: the data is yours and doesn’t get trapped in the new CRM.
08 / ARCHITECTURE
Every stage is an explicit server rule, not a team habit.
Every lead arrives with the source that brought it.
Priority and status by your criteria, with history.
Tasks and batched campaigns with a daily limit.
Opt-outs, bounces and “do not contact” kept out of the queue, always.
Management sees what’s moving and what’s stuck.
09 / EVIDENCE
Lead capture for agencies that share a core without sharing customers, and a prospecting CRM with compliance rules.
Multi-tenant platform
Lead capture and follow-up inside each agency’s own platform, with each agency’s data isolated in the database.
STACK Nuxt 4 / Supabase / PostgreSQL
Case study: ZentiaALSO BUILTGustela CRM, a prospecting CRM with leads imported from public sources, batched campaigns with a daily limit, five exclusion rules applied before anything is queued and a simulated mode that runs the whole flow without sending a single email.
10 / DON'T BUILD
If an existing product handles your process well, using it beats building another. I’ll tell you in the first conversation.
11 / QUESTIONS
A sales management system built on a company’s own sales process: its customer sources, its stages, its contact rules and the reports management needs. Unlike an off-the-shelf CRM, you don’t have to bend the process to fit the tool.
Not quite. A customised CRM is usually an off-the-shelf one with extra fields, automations and modules; it still lives inside the vendor’s model. A custom CRM starts from scratch on your process. The first is quicker to get going; the second fits better once the customisations weigh more than the product.
It depends on the process, but it doesn’t have to be built all at once. You start with what hurts most (usually the pipeline and the customer record) and extend it in phases: campaigns, tasks, integrations.
Yes. Importing is part of the project: duplicates, statuses and opt-outs are reviewed before loading, so the new system doesn’t inherit the old one’s problems.
Usually not. Gustela CRM, a prospecting CRM I built, uses no AI because its rules are clear, and Zentia’s natural-language search is handled with rules. AI is added only if there’s a task the rules don’t cover.
It depends on how many pieces the first version needs, the integrations and the state of the data to migrate. The honest comparison is with what you pay today in per-user licences and in hours spent working around the CRM, over three to five years.
Your company does: the code, the database and the contacts. No per-user licences and no vendor deciding when the price goes up.
12 / SAME SYSTEM
A business problem rarely lives in a single piece. These usually appear in the same project.
Tell me where your customers come from, what steps they go through and which rules can’t be broken. That’s enough to know whether you need your own CRM or a better-configured version of the one you have.