CRM.decisionsciencecorp.com: our take on a small-business CRM
Every small business needs a CRM. Nobody wants to pay Salesforce's price for one. Salesforce is excellent — we use it ourselves for internal operations — but it is built for enterprise teams running partner ecosystems, not for the local business that just wants to know which leads went cold this month. The result is a familiar story: three-month onboarding, ninety percent of the features unused, and a recurring bill that outlasts the team's patience. Our CRM is the version we wanted: pipeline, leads, deals, and reports that fit a small operation.
Stack note: Our CRM runs on SQLite on our multihost pattern — one db/ directory beside the PHP docroot, owned by www-data, not a shared MariaDB instance across unrelated vhosts.
That's where our hosted small business CRM comes in, and that's why we built it.
Why Not Salesforce on Every Client
We don't default to Salesforce for every client. Here's what happens.
A brand-new local restaurant launching with us has zero infrastructure and maybe has never used a CRM. They log into Salesforce after onboarding and they're looking at opportunities and campaigns. That's a tool built for enterprise sales cycles. It's like handing someone a Formula 1 car and telling them to drive to the grocery store. It might do everything right, but you can't get through the driveway. There's too much there.
Our rule: if you're under $250,000 in annual revenue, no revenue baseline, no marketing team, and you're already using QuickBooks for accounting, you do not need Salesforce. What you need is the one thing that every local business actually needs - you need a contact manager. You need to know who your leads are, where they're at in your pipeline (or even that there's an actual pipeline), and when you last touched them. That's it.
Every other CRM feature beyond the contact management is something you can add on later when it's your time. That's the foundation you build on, that's what we do for people.
So that's exactly what we built.
Why CRM Matters at All (Even at Local Scale)
A local restaurant or service business runs on relationships. Every time someone calls, every time someone fills out your contact form, you're in a relationship. That's your CRM data. If you lose track of that, you lose track of your business.
When someone's interested in your product, they're at a certain place in your process. Maybe they're a discovery lead. Maybe they've already become a customer. Maybe you're waiting for them. Knowing what stage someone's at and when you last reached out is the difference between someone becoming a customer and someone becoming a customer who orders from your competition.
That's what CRM gives you. That's the bare minimum any small business needs, and it's what we built for everyone.
Our Approach
We built our CRM as a hosted application for exactly this market. You can think of it as your basic contact manager that sits alongside your WordPress and whatever else you're already running. It's not a tool you have to build yourself, it's already packaged up and ready to go. We're offering it as part of our small business package.
Our contact manager:
- Add new leads with a name, their email, which ad drove them, which page they came from, and any notes you want to add in that intake field. That's it. That's what's there, and that's what we've had now for over a year on most of our production sites.
- A simple pipeline that shows you where every contact stands. That's four stages - new lead, in follow-up, proposal sent, customer. That is it. There's no complicated phases or complex pipelines. That's enough for any small business. And there's a contact detail page that shows you every interaction in any of those stages.
- Email capture and logging from your Google Workspace as an optional add-on. We can pull your existing email from Google Workspace if you already have it set us and you give us permission, but it's optional, it's additional cost.
Nothing else. That's all the value in our CRM, and that's all we intended for it to do.
That might seem underwhelming, but it's the thing that people keep coming back to. We actually see that our clients use it constantly, and that's because it does exactly one thing very well and gets out of your way for everything else.
What We're Actually Saying
The point of all of this is this is where we're building. We're seeing that our clients need their own customer relationship data in a place they can see it, and that's exactly what our CRM gives you. It's a contact management tool, we've done it better than anyone else, and it's something we can give to all of our small business clients on our server, in the same place as our other infrastructure, at no additional charge under our full service.
For the clients that are larger, maybe you're an agency and you want all your client accounts in one spot, then you might want to explore what we're putting together for those situations. But our main service is always been website and that's where we deliver best to our customers. The point behind this is all our customers are going to need the same five solutions.
We've already built four of them, you can check them off on our website now. And now we have the CRM for you.
Now here's what it's all about - all of that is now fully integrated into our client service. Each of those integrations is working from the same user database, in the same admin. And we're making sure each of them is designed for exactly our customers - that means everything we built and it's ready to go.
We've actually built this now and it's working exactly as it does when you'd expect. Each solution has a simple and straightforward approach for every client who gets going with us, now our clients have their own data to work with forever, the actual thing for all of these, and that one doesn't require anything you don't need. This is the entire thing we've built out in this part.
That's it but it's something we're happy makes sense. The full version has all the capabilities available through all of those integrations, the entire platform is ready for what you need.
Check our website or talk to us if you want to know more about getting everything set up.
What We're Actually Building
I want to be super clear - this is your own data. Our CRM runs wherever you host it, it's yours, nothing's being shared or sent to third parties. Everything is just your internal data. That's exactly what you'd be putting in any paid tool. Nothing we're doing is unique, but it runs on your own infrastructure. That's the same way you're seeing everything else our hosting works, and that's what we'd be setting you up with.
This means your new CRM is available at crm dot your domain, it's hosted on our infrastructure, it's working exactly as the custom ones do, and we're behind it with full support. That should be the last you're hearing from our team about this. The integration that we built with this for your entire ecosystem was something that we knew was needed for every client, and that's exactly what it's for.
Every new client that picks up one of our all-inclusive website packages is going to get this built in as the default option. That's been working great so far, the actual hosting is already in place, one more thing from us that's now ready for your entire business.
Close
That's the entire post. Our CRM for small businesses covers all the core needs in exactly the same place. Every client we're working with gets their own hosted deployment, it's already running in our infrastructure. That's now available for everyone and it's ready for your use right now.
We run this in production every day. If you want the same capability for your program, or help turning ops data into a clear decision, get in touch.