The CRM: contacts, companies and deals

Whose CRM this is

If you belong to an organization, the CRM you open is the organization's, always. It is shared with everyone there — it is the company's record of corporate relationships: sales, partnerships and institutional contacts. There is no switch on this screen to go back to a personal CRM.

If you are solo, with no organization, the CRM is yours and private. It keeps existing when you join an organization; what changes is that the CRM screen starts showing the organization's.

And there is a second screen, which is a different thing: the Relationships board. It is personal and private, tied to you and not shared with your organization. There you pick the few people you want to stay close to, set how many days should pass between contacts, why each one matters and what they like to talk about. The CRM is the complete record; Relationships is the short list you follow closely. "Stop following" takes the person off the board and keeps them in the CRM; the trash icon deletes them everywhere.

Four tabs, and a box on top

The screen has four tabs — Contacts, Companies, Processes and Activity — and, above them, a Pending actions box with whatever is waiting on a decision from you.

Below the box sit the indicators: how many leads, active, closed and internal contacts you have, plus whichever signals exist at that moment (open follow-ups, stalled negotiations, untouched leads, negotiations with nobody responsible). Clicking a signal filters the list.

Two things about those numbers, because neither is obvious. First: they count only whoever is their own commercial unit — a person with no company, or the single person at their company. From the second contact at the same company onward, people drop out of the count, and the screen states how many dropped and why: in that case the unit is the company, and it is on the Companies tab. Second: cold prospecting does not show up in the contact list. A lead who came from prospecting and has not replied yet stays out of the Contacts tab until they answer — without that, importing a thousand names would bury your real contacts.

A person has no funnel

This is the split that explains almost everything that looks odd at first. There are three different vocabularies, and they do not mix:

Notice what the person does not have: Prospect, Piloting and Using free are states of a company, not of a human being. That was fixed deliberately on 07/08/2026 — before it, the sales stage sat on the person, and the result was that every employee of a customer company showed up inside the funnel.

When a contact belongs to a company with two or more contacts, their relationship field becomes read-only and shows the company's, with a note saying the relationship belongs to it. To change it, you edit the company. On a person who is their own unit, the field is editable and carries the reminder that the negotiation's stage lives on the Processes tab.

Role in the decision. Taking the funnel off the person would make everyone at a company identical, and the people at a company are not identical: one signs, another weighs on the choice, another just uses it. That is a field of its own — 🖋 Decision maker, ◐ Influencer, · User — and it is different from the job title: "Site Manager" does not tell you whether that person signs the contract. In the company's contact list, decision makers rise to the top.

Processes: where the negotiation lives

A process is an ongoing flow with stages of its own. When the contact has a company, the process belongs to the company, and the person is its primary contact — several people from the same company, one single negotiation.

Who sees a process. Contacts and companies are the corporate address book — open to the whole organization. The negotiation is not: its stage, value, forecast and activities are visible only to Admins and to that process's owners. Anyone outside doesn't see the process in any list — nor its traces: the notes the system generates on every negotiation action (owner, value, forecast, stage) also disappear from the company's and the contact's timeline for non-participants. While a company has an open negotiation, its new activities are linked to the negotiation by default — including the ones that arrive on their own, via e-mail or logged messages. Whoever records a note can mark it general to leave it open to the team: opening is the deliberate act. Once the negotiation closes, new activities are open again. The company's other activities — meetings, calls, ordinary notes — stay open. And the totals that reach them state how many negotiations sit outside their view — the number informs without revealing. An Admin can open the whole funnel to the organization if that is the house culture; the default is closed.

There are four types:

Every open process shows one pace signal: Stalled (red) when there is no commitment scheduled and no real activity for 14 days or more; commitment on DD/MM when a follow-up or agreed return lies ahead; or simply how many days since the last activity. Days in stage stay visible, in grey — they inform, they do not alarm. Field edits (value, forecast) and calendar stubs do not count as activity. The screen, the morning digest and the monthly report read this same signal. Marking it Won turns the contact and the company into customers; marking it Lost only closes that process — nobody is disqualified by it.

Who is responsible. A process has one or more people responsible for it, with one marked as primary (★). Responsible means someone from inside: only an active user of the same organization qualifies, and an AI worker can never be named. The process belongs to the company; the person responsible is the one carrying the ball. A negotiation with nobody named becomes a signal of its own in the indicators.

Linked deliverable. A process can point at a Y Managers deliverable and create tasks on it right from there — it is the bridge between what you are selling and the work you will have to do.

Deal panel. At the top of every open deal sits a panel with six strips, all computed from what is recorded: next commitment, whose move (scheduled · ours · theirs · dropped), pace, money and dates (value, expected close and, when the company has an account in the system, its account period — the two clocks side by side, with a warning when they fall within 7 days of each other: one is a contract, the other a trial), decision map (the company’s people with role, title and counted history) and single next step. Copies of the same meeting show once, with participants; field echoes are left out.

Meetings that have not happened yet. Meetings in your calendar with people from the deal show up on it as the next commitment, with nothing to type. They only come in when at least one guest is already an organization contact, they never create new people, and they disappear on their own when the event is cancelled or moved out of the window. A promise you logged for an earlier date wins: the panel always shows the nearest commitment.

Deal breakdown. The deal value is your cap. Under it, the breakdown says what is being sold: seats by subscription type, in the expected quantity and at the price you charge (the list price comes pre-filled, and you change it when you give a different one), plus extras such as consulting or white label. Two numbers come out of it and never add up together: the recurring per month and the one-off. A yearly subscription enters the recurring figure by its twelfth. When the company has an account in the system, one tap fills the seat count with its active people today. If the breakdown goes above the cap, the screen says so.

Forecast with three numbers. The funnel forecast shows the window total, how much of it is recurring per month and how much is one-off, and states how many deals have a value but no breakdown yet — for those the recurrence is unknown.

Deal notes. A free-text field on the deal for the contract draft, extras (consulting, white label), terms under discussion. Saved when you leave the field, and Orion reads it when it talks about that deal.

Forecast with buckets. The funnel forecast picks its window (this month, 30, 90 days, until year end) and states what fell outside: deals dated outside the window and deals whose expected close is in the past — those need a new date or a new stage. None of it enters the total; the total is the window.

Pending actions: the box that keeps the ball from dropping

When Orion spots a lead — someone replied wanting to know more, asked for pricing, an interested party appeared — it does not settle for messaging you. It records the company, the contact and what happened, and creates a line in the Pending actions box at the top of the CRM: what happened, where it came from, and one concrete suggestion for the next step. This exists because a message-only alert dies in the message — which is exactly what happened before the box existed.

Each line waits on a decision from you, among four:

• Confirm lead — and this opens a Sale automatically.
• Turn into a task — creates a task on your list, due the next day. Once used, the button becomes a link to the task, and the item stays in the box.
• Hand to someone — pick a member of the organization. It does not appear in the personal CRM, where there is nobody to hand it to.
• Disqualify — marks the contact and the company linked to it as disqualified. The other people at that company stay as they were. And the matter is settled: if that same person writes again later, the message is still recorded on their history, but no new line appears here — Orion does not ask you twice about someone you have already discarded. To treat them as a lead again, change their status on the Contacts tab.

What lands on its own — and where

Here it is worth understanding a division the product takes seriously: what is captured automatically goes to your personal board; what goes into the organization's CRM is what somebody saved on purpose.

In practice, about the automatic capture:

• A message from a stranger becomes nothing. Someone who writes to you without being on your board creates no contact and leaves no trace. Only what you send creates a contact automatically.
• One line per person per day, per direction. For people you have not marked to follow closely, only the record that contact happened is kept — no content. For those you follow closely, the first 280 characters of the message text are kept, in both directions.
• A meeting on your calendar with someone not yet on the board creates the contact — a meeting is a strong signal. It applies to whoever connected Google, and invitations with many people are left out.
• Email with Orion in copy. Sending an email outside Orion? Put its address in CC or BCC and the message lands on its own as an outbound activity on each real recipient. It only accepts it when the email demonstrably comes from your own account: a forged sender is treated as an ordinary incoming email.
• In the organization's CRM the automatic record is match-only: a message Orion sends only shows up on the organization's timeline if the recipient already is a contact there. It never creates an organization contact by itself.

To put someone in the organization's CRM, then, the path is deliberate: you register them on the screen, import a spreadsheet, or ask Orion.

Meeting notes from any app. Beyond Gemini in Google Meet, notes and summaries from Zoom, Fireflies, Otter, tl;dv, Read.ai, Fathom, Fellow and Teams come in, and so does any summary you forward from your e-mail. What decides is not who sent it but whether the notes match a real meeting in your calendar: the meeting link equal to the event’s, or a start within 15 minutes and at least one participant from the notes among the guests. Same title and day are enough only when the e-mail comes from the app itself or from you. Two meetings at the same time with no participant to tell them apart are refused, and personal blocks with no guests (Focus, Lunch) do not compete. You do not count as a shared participant: you are in every meeting of yours. The same title on a different day does not match, and notes for a meeting that has not happened yet are refused. Notes arriving more than 2 days after the meeting are refused. Only what is in the e-mail body comes in; transcript links that require a login are never followed. Every refusal is counted with its reason.

Calendar meetings: where they go. A meeting enters the organization CRM when at least one external guest matches an organization contact or the website domain of a registered company — it is then recorded with its real title, for those who matched, and anchored to the company’s deal when there is exactly one. Otherwise it goes to Relationships (personal). If it matches both, it is recorded in neither: a receipt is kept, and it is up to you to move the person to a single place. Unknown guests are never created in the organization CRM. Google accounts shared by more than one user are read once.

A contact lives in one place only. Organization CRM or Relationships, never both. Saving is refused when the person already exists in the other, and the message says where; moving them is your call.

Prospecting is off-limits. People at companies that are already customers, in a pilot, on a free plan or the house itself never receive cold outreach — not by SDR e-mail, not by LinkedIn, not by import. The protection is by company, not by the person’s status.

What the system changes on its own — and how you find out

Once a day, overnight, a lead with no contact for 60 days is closed automatically. Two things the sentence hides, both worth more than the sentence itself:

A lead that never had any recorded activity is closed on the very first sweep, however recent the record is. The calculation looks at the last activity, not at the date the person was added. If you imported a list today and logged nothing against it, it can show up closed tomorrow.

Whoever is being worked is never closed. A prospecting sequence under way counts as contact — the sequence is the touch.

And none of it happens quietly. A notice stays at the top of the CRM saying how many were closed and why, with an Undo button on each one (the first eight; the rest appear as "and N more"), plus a note on each person's timeline. The notice only goes away when you click Got it.

The destination of that closing is always Closed, never Disqualified — and the difference is deliberate: closed is "we tried and it did not work"; disqualified is your judgement that this person is not a fit. The machine does not pass judgement.

Duplicates

When you register someone who already exists with that email or phone, the screen warns you before saving and gives you both ways out: update the existing contact or create it anyway.

There is also the Duplicates screen, which groups the likely repeats into three bands — High confidence (same email and a shared phone), Possible and Same name. You can merge one group at a time, and there is a button that merges all the high-confidence ones at once. Merging keeps the history.

You can also mark a group as Not a duplicate, and the suggestion stops appearing. Know one thing before you click: there is no way back. The decision is stored, and there is no way today to undo it from the screen.

Two cooling signals that must not be merged

The CRM separates two things almost everyone lumps together, and lumping them is what makes a sales dashboard lie:

🕒 Stalled negotiation — an open process with no commitment scheduled and no real activity for 14 days or more: no message, meeting or note (field edits do not count). The stage does not matter; a deal with a meeting booked is alive even if it sits in its stage. It is the same signal the screen, the morning digest and the report use — one definition. This is a deal going cold.

💤 Lead with no contact — someone with no open negotiation whom nobody has spoken to in the last 30 days (in most cases, ever). This is a stalled prospecting queue, not a lost deal. Anyone with prospecting under way is left out, and the screen states how many were.

There is also ⚠️ negotiation with nobody responsible: an open deal that no one is carrying.

Through Orion, without opening the screen

Asking in plain language, it will: find a person by name, phone or email; log an activity on their timeline; read what has already happened ("where do things stand with Ricardo?"); create or update a contact; set the next-contact date with a note on what to talk about and a repeating cadence; list who is due today; log in one go every touchpoint from a whole thread; and summarize your pipeline.

The two drawers, and who opens each. When you ask Orion in your own direct conversation, it searches the organization's CRM and your personal board, and tells you which one each person came from — "this one is yours", "this one is the company's". In a group, in an AI worker's run, or while serving a visitor, it sees only the organization's CRM. A personal contact is yours and your Orion's, and nobody else's.

Moving a personal contact into the company is your call, in one sentence: "move Ricardo to the company CRM". The contact goes with its history, and the path is one-way — there is no tool to bring it back, because taking away from the company a contact that became the company's is not a decision a conversation should make.

The numbers in that summary are computed by the system, not by the model — it narrates what the database returned, and never invents a figure.

About the next-contact date, one rule that saves frustration: after you approve and the message goes out, the date moves on its own — with a cadence, it jumps N days ahead; without one, it clears. But that only applies if the date had already arrived. A message sent before the marked day does not touch the reminder.

Honest limits

• Orion does not move the funnel. Opening, moving a stage and closing a process are your acts, on the screen. It reads the board and comments; you are the one who moves it. The single exception is Confirm lead, which opens a Sale.
• It cannot see the role in the decision. Decision maker, influencer and user are not among the fields that reach it, so "who decides at Acme?" is not a question it answers from the CRM. On the screen, it is right there.
• It does not tag anyone. Segment tags are written by the import and by the prospecting screens, not through conversation.
• Logging an activity against a name that does not exist logs it anyway, with no owner. The activity lands on the Activity tab and counts in the numbers, but appears on nobody's timeline. Check the name, or ask it to find the contact first.
• Logging by hand offers four types — note, call, email and meeting. WhatsApp, voice and LinkedIn arrive through the automatic record or by asking Orion.
• The organization's CRM is not erased when you delete your agent. What goes is your personal CRM. The corporate record belongs to the organization, and it is theirs for as long as it exists.