How to use the OPF CRM
One place for every OPF sales record, from an unworked haulage name through to a paying customer with a warranty certificate. Read this once, then work from the tabs.
What this is
This replaces the OPF sales funnel spreadsheet. It holds every prospect record OPF has, splits them by how far along they are, and shows you what the pipeline looks like as a whole.
It runs entirely in your browser. There is no login and nothing is sent anywhere. Your changes are held in your browser as you work, and go to the shared record on SharePoint when you press Update CRM Server.
The four record tabs
Suspects
Unqualified leads. Names OPF has bought or scraped but nobody has spoken to yet. Almost all of these are haulage operators, and most have a company name, a named director and a site postcode but no phone number or email.
The job here is to work through them, find a contact route, and either qualify or bin. Use the postcode area filter to batch calls by region so you are not jumping around the country in one session.
Click any row to open it, fill in what you find, then press Qualify into Prospects at the bottom of the panel. To move several at once, tick them and use the bar that appears, or drag them onto the Prospects tab.
Prospects
Qualified leads. Someone has spoken to these people or they have put their details in front of us. Two groups make up most of it: contacts captured from the Muffwash lists, and visitors who left details at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
This is where quoting happens. Record units, price per unit and a quote reference, and the record moves to the quotation stage on its own. Press Record an order when a clean sales order lands and the record becomes a customer, or drag it onto the Customers tab.
Customers
Anyone who has placed a clean sales order. Each customer holds a list of orders, so a repeat buyer stays as one record and gains a new order line each time. That is how you see who is buying again and who bought once and went quiet.
Each order carries the after-sales checklist: payment in, paperwork done, warranty certificate issued, then testimonial, referral and Google rating requested. Those last three are what turn one sale into the next one, so they are on the record rather than in someone's head.
Pipeline
Read-only. Counts and values across every stage, drop-off between stages, weighted pipeline value, splits by owner and source and region, and a log of every stage move anyone has made. Also flags the data problems worth fixing, such as records with no way to contact them.
Adding and moving records
Adding one
Each record tab has its own add button in the toolbar: Add a suspect, Add a prospect, Add a customer. It creates a blank record, opens it, and highlights it in the list with a green edge so you can find it again. Fill in the company or name first, since that is what everything else searches on.
Moving one
Click any row to open it. The buttons along the bottom of the panel do the moves: Qualify into Prospects on a suspect, Record an order on a prospect, Mark as lost on either.
Moving a batch
Every row has a tick box on the left. Tick a few, or use the box in the header to take everything currently showing, and a blue bar appears above the table with the things you can do to all of them at once: qualify, assign an owner, set a priority, change stage, or mark them lost.
Dragging
Drag any row, or a whole ticked selection, onto one of the tabs at the top. The tabs that will accept the drop light up, and the ones that will not go dim.
| Drag from | Drop on | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Suspects | Prospects | Qualified, and put at the warm lead stage |
| Suspects | Customers | Qualified and given a blank order line, skipping the quote. You are asked to confirm first |
| Prospects | Customers | An order is recorded, carrying over any units and price already on the quote |
| Prospects | Suspects | Sent back down to unqualified, if it turns out it was never really a lead |
Every one of these moves is written to the stage movement log on the Pipeline tab, so you can see who moved what and when.
Funnel rules
These are the stages carried over from the sales funnel workbook, with the same probabilities. A record only moves when its trigger is met.
| Stage | Probability | Moves on when | Goes to |
|---|---|---|---|
| OPF Data (raw) | 5% | Record validated and a contact route found | OPF Leads (warm) |
| OPF Leads (warm) | 15% | Quote sent | OPF Quotation Tracker |
| OPF Quotation Tracker | 40% | Clean sales order received | OPF Orders Received |
| OPF Orders Received | 75% | Full payment in and paperwork complete | OPF After-Sales |
| OPF After-Sales | 95% | Warranty certificate issued | Closed Won |
| Closed Won | 100% | Sale complete | Retention |
| Closed Lost | 0% | Lost or disqualified | Nowhere |
Weighted pipeline value is quote value multiplied by the stage probability. It only means anything once quote values are being filled in, so fill them in.
Owners
The follow-up owner list is Jonathan Day, Steven Clarke, Marc Claret and Emily Potter, plus Unassigned. Anyone already named as an owner in the imported data stays selectable too, so nothing gets orphaned.
Working a day
- Open the CRM from the link, so your work can go back to SharePoint at the end.
- Open Pipeline and look at the top row of tiles. That tells you where the work is.
- Go to Prospects, filter to your own name in the owner box, and clear anything with an overdue next action.
- Go to Suspects, filter by postcode area, and work a batch. Set an owner and a priority on anything worth a second call.
- Anything that answers and is interested gets qualified across to Prospects the same day, while you still remember the conversation.
- Press Update CRM Server before you finish, so the rest of the team has your work. The amber dot on the button is the reminder.
Saving and sharing
Two layers. Your own edits save into your browser the moment you make them, so nothing is lost if you close the tab. The shared record only changes when someone presses Update CRM Server.
Where the shared record lives
It is one file in the CRM folder on SharePoint, called OPF CRM Data.json. It holds every change anyone has made: qualified leads, new records, customers, orders and the movement log. The app reads it when you open the CRM and writes it when you press the button.
The app itself, OPF CRM.html, does not change day to day. Keeping the record in its own small file is what makes saving quick, and it means SharePoint keeps version history on the record rather than on a large file that mostly stays the same.
Update CRM Server
Press it and your work goes to SharePoint, saved as you. No download, nothing to move, nothing to replace. Your name goes on the update so the team can see who changed what. The button carries an amber dot whenever you have changes that are not saved yet.
If a colleague saves while you are working, the CRM picks it up. With nothing unsaved of your own it just loads their version and tells you. If you do have unsaved changes it will not touch them: a bar appears at the top and you choose whether to take their version or keep yours.
How you get in
Open the CRM web address and sign in with your OPF Microsoft account, the same one you use for email and SharePoint. That is all. There is no separate password and no second account to set up.
The CRM only ever touches one file, OPF CRM Data.json in the CRM folder. It runs as you, so you see and change exactly what your SharePoint permissions already allow.
| How you open it | What Update CRM Server does | You need |
|---|---|---|
| The CRM web address | Saves to SharePoint, one click | Your OPF Microsoft account |
OPF CRM.html from the CRM folder | Hands you an updated file to drop into the folder | Nothing |
Use the web address. The file in the folder is a spare for anyone who cannot get to it, and it cannot save by itself.
If sign-in does not work
- It says permission has not been granted. The one-off approval has not been done yet. Jonathan needs to approve the app once in Microsoft Entra, then it works for everyone.
- It says your account cannot write to the CRM folder. You have read access to the site but not edit. Ask to be added as a member rather than a visitor.
- Nothing happens at all. Your session may have expired. Open the panel next to the button and sign in again.
Whatever goes wrong, your work stays in your browser. Nothing is lost by a failed save, and Export always gives you a copy you can send to someone.
Backups
- Export gives you a JSON backup of the full working record, and CSV files of whatever you are looking at, filters included, which open straight into Excel.
- Import sits inside the Export panel. Load a backup and it replaces your working record with it.
SharePoint keeps its own version history on OPF CRM Data.json, so a bad save can be rolled back from the file's version history in SharePoint.
Where the data came from
| Source file | Went to | Records |
|---|
Duplicates were removed on the way in. Suspects were matched on company plus contact plus site address, so a haulage firm with two depots correctly stays as two records. Prospects were matched on email first, then on name plus phone.
Known data problems
The prospect lists were read off screenshots, so some fields came through damaged. Nothing has been quietly guessed. Where a value could not be recovered it is left blank and flagged.
- repaired means a truncated email domain was completed, and only where the fragment matched exactly one common domain. For example
@gmail.co..can only be gmail.com. Worth a glance before you send anything important. - check means the address was cut off in a way that cannot be recovered, such as a truncated company domain. The original text is kept on the record so you can work it out.
- Statuses that came through as unreadable characters are marked Unclear (OCR) rather than assumed to be New.
- Phone numbers that were all zeroes or too short to dial were dropped.
The Pipeline tab counts all of these so you can see the size of the clean-up job. It is worth doing before any real outbound push.