CRM for Retail

What selling in a showroom actually looks like

A furniture showroom, a jewellery counter, a kitchen studio and a white-goods dealer share one shape: the product is visible online, the price is not final, and the customer wants to see, touch and negotiate before paying. The enquiry is a screenshot of an Instagram post with "how much is this, do you have it in oak?" sent to three shops at once. The shop that answers first, with a price, a photo of the actual stock and an invitation to visit, gets the customer through the door. The others get read receipts.

Speed is not a soft factor here. A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies found that responding within an hour made a lead nearly seven times as likely to be qualified as waiting even an hour longer, and that the average response time was 42 hours. A boutique answering DMs between customers at the till is not slow because it does not care; it is slow because nobody owns the message.

The second shape is the quiet quote. A price was sent, the customer said "let me think", and nobody called back. In a spreadsheet that customer looks like an open opportunity for months. In practice they bought elsewhere within a week. Making the quiet quote visible and chasing it automatically is worth more than the next ad campaign.

The pipeline we recommend starting from

Every stage is an event that either happened or did not. "Interested" is not a stage; "visited the showroom" is.

For a jeweller, "visit booked" becomes "try-on booked"; for a kitchen studio, "measurement booked" sits before "quote sent". The names change, the rule does not: a stage is something that happened.

Customer and product fields worth having

The lead-detail layout is configurable per role, so the assistant on the floor sees product, budget and visit fields, the delivery desk sees dates and addresses, and neither is scrolling past forty inputs to find a phone number.

The inbox: where the photo arrives

Instagram DMs, Messenger and WhatsApp land in one shared inbox. A new conversation creates a customer record automatically with the full history attached, and phone numbers are normalised so the person who messaged on WhatsApp on Monday and called from a landline on Thursday is one record. Photos go both ways from the same thread: the customer sends the screenshot, the assistant replies with a photo of the actual piece in stock, the colour swatch and the price, and all of it stays on the record.

Two settings carry the load for a store. Distribution: each channel can carry a list of assistants to whom unowned conversations are assigned in turn, so a Sunday-evening DM has an owner before the shop opens. Working-hours reply: a message outside shift hours can trigger an automatic reply — "we open at 10:00, we will send the price first thing" — which keeps the customer from moving on to the next shop.

Response time is measured in working minutes against the shift calendar, so a DM at 22:10 answered at 10:04 counts as four minutes, not twelve hours. That is the number to put on the wall.

The catalogue: products, cost, stock

Products are the retail CRM's second table. Each product carries a sale price, a cost price, a stock quantity, a category and any custom fields you define — colour, material, dimensions, supplier, lead time. The catalogue is imported from CSV: an existing product ID updates the row, an empty cell leaves the current value alone, a new ID creates the product, and categories are created on the fly.

1. Import the price listCSV upload with a downloadable template; a supplier price increase is applied as a bulk change — plus a percentage, plus an amount, or a fixed price — across a filtered set.
2. Attach products to the dealThe quote is the deal's product lines: quantity, unit price, discount. The deal value follows.
3. Win the dealStock is deducted for each line and the cost of goods is booked as an expense automatically, so margin is visible per deal without a second system.

Products can be edited inline from the list — click the cell, change the price, done — which is how a showroom keeps a catalogue current when the supplier sends a new list every quarter.

Quote, deposit, order

A quote is a deal in the "quote sent" stage with product lines attached. A deposit is a number field and a stage move. An order is the won deal. Keeping these three as one object, rather than a message, a paper receipt and a delivery note, is what makes the numbers at the end of the month add up.

Quote sent

Products attached, total calculated, a follow-up task created automatically for three days later. The customer receives the price in the thread they already used.

Deposit paid

The deposit amount and the delivery date are required on entry; a date-based automation sends the delivery reminder the day before.

Won

Income recorded from the deal value, cost recorded from the product cost prices, stock deducted, commission computed for the assistant who owns the deal.

Post-delivery

A task fourteen days after delivery: "ask for a review, offer the matching piece". The second sale to an existing customer is the cheapest sale a store makes.

Wholesale and reseller accounts

Distributors and wholesalers sell to the same customers again and again. The customer record is the account; each order is a deal; the rhythm is a recurring task. "Call Northgate Stores every second Monday for the re-order" is a recurring task on the account, with completion recorded per period, so a missed cycle shows up as an overdue task rather than as a quiet quarter.

• Trade price list: the customer-type field decides which price the assistant quotes; products carry a single price, and trade discounts are entered on the deal lines.
• Account owner: the rep owns the account; department scope lets the sales manager see the whole territory and reassign accounts when a rep leaves.
• Re-order power dialer: filter accounts with no order in 45 days and let the dialer call through the list, recording a disposition on each.
• Commission per rep: percentage or flat per user, computed on each won order and reported by month.

Campaigns to the right customers

A store's customer list is its most under-used asset. Tags and list filters cut it into segments — bought a sofa in the last 12 months, asked about kitchens but did not visit, reseller with no order this quarter — and campaigns go to the segment rather than to everyone. The campaign result is measured where it matters: how many of the segment moved a stage, not how many opened a message.

Automations do the routine part: a lost customer tagged "price" gets a message when the product goes on promotion; a customer whose delivery date passed two weeks ago gets the review request; an enquiry with the ad fields filled is attributed to the post that produced it, so the next month's content is chosen on evidence.

A day on the shop floor

1. 09:50 — clock inThe shift starts; response-time measurement starts with it.
2. 10:00 — the overnight DMsAlready assigned by distribution, already held by the working-hours reply; price and stock photo on each within the first half hour.
3. Through the day — visits and quotesCustomers who booked arrive; quotes go out from the record with product lines attached; the pipeline moves itself.
4. 15:00 — the quiet quotesToday's follow-up tasks: every quote older than three days with no reply, one message or one call each.
5. 19:00 — the owner's glanceEnquiries by source, visits booked, quotes sent, orders won, margin. Five numbers, one screen.

Who sees what in a store

Sales assistant

Own customers plus unassigned enquiries; inbox, quotes, appointments; sees sale prices, not cost prices or other assistants' commissions.

Store manager

Department scope over the store; can reassign; sees the store's deals, margin and commissions.

Delivery / warehouse

Won deals with delivery dates and addresses, product stock; no pipeline, no finance.

Owner

All stores, finance, reports, activity log, product cost prices.

Cost price is the field most owners want hidden from the floor, and per-entity permissions plus role-based lead layouts do exactly that. The activity log records who changed a price, who exported the customer list and who reassigned an account — available from the Growth plan.

Numbers a store owner should watch

• First-response time in working minutes, by channel — Instagram is usually the slowest and the most valuable.
• Enquiry → visit rate by source and by ad — which posts bring people through the door, not which ones bring messages.
• Quote → order rate by assistant — the real conversion, side by side with quotes sent.
• Days in "quote sent" — the leak; if it grows, nobody is calling back.
• Margin by product and by category — with cost prices on the catalogue, the product that fills the showroom is not always the one that pays the rent.
• Re-order rate on reseller accounts — accounts with no order in 60 days, listed by owner.

What this is not

This is not a point-of-sale system, an online shop or an inventory management platform. It does not run the till, print receipts, scan barcodes, issue invoices or connect to marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. Stock here is a quantity on a product that decrements when a deal is won — enough to know what is available to promise, not enough to run a warehouse. Keep the till and the accounts in the systems built for them; keep the enquiry, the conversation, the quote, the follow-up and the margin here.

It is also worth saying plainly that automated daily backups of your workspace are not currently part of the service. Export the customer and product lists you must retain.

When it stops working

Which plan fits?

A single boutique with one assistant answering Instagram runs on Starter. A showroom with several assistants, ad-driven enquiries and quotes that need chasing lands on Growth for the automations and the roles. A multi-store group or a distributor watching margin per order goes to Business. See the pricing page, and the products and inbox pages for the two modules that carry the load.