The most common mistake is starting with software. A company buys a CRM because everyone else has one, adds the sales team, and a couple of months later half the deals are back in messengers and spreadsheets. The software is not to blame: it simply copied a process that never really existed. Automate chaos and you get automated chaos, only more expensive.
So the first step is to describe how things work today. Not the way the guidelines say, but the way it actually happens:
The answers quickly reveal the bottlenecks. Often the real problem is not the lack of a CRM but the fact that nobody records phone calls or Telegram messages. Only then do we pick the tools and decide what to automate first.
An estimate is made up of several parts: process audit and design, CRM setup, integrations with the website, telephony, email and ad accounts, data exchange with an accounting system such as 1C, chatbots, analytics and staff training. Subscriptions are a separate line: CRM and telephony licences are paid to the vendors, not to the contractor.
Automation does not have to be one big project. A sensible order is to bring all leads into one place and set up the pipeline first, then add notifications and automatic tasks, and only after that move on to end-to-end analytics. Individual modules on this page start from $350–$700, and a full turnkey setup starts from $1500.
Payback depends on lead volume and the value of one lost deal. If you get a dozen enquiries a month and the owner handles each of them personally, a complex system is overkill and a simple pipeline will do. When there are dozens or hundreds of leads and several managers, even a small share of lost enquiries usually costs more than the implementation.
It is a report that shows the full path of every sale: which ad channel the person came from, which ad or search query brought them, when they submitted a request, how long the deal took and how it ended. As a result, each source shows not the cost per click but the cost of an actual sale and the revenue it generated.
To build that report, data from three places has to be combined: spend from ad platforms such as Yandex Direct and VK Ads, on-site behaviour from Yandex Metrica, and deal stages with amounts from the CRM. They are linked by a source tag that the website passes along with the lead, and by call tracking for phone enquiries.
Without a CRM, end-to-end analytics is simply impossible: ad platforms know about the click and the form submission, but have no idea whether the client paid. That is why we put deals in order first and build the dashboard after.