Custom CRM for Cla**** Group, UKCase Study

The sales process did not fit the tool. Deals involve several stakeholders at the customer, run over months, and hinge on quotes with line-item pricing that varied by customer agreement — the team had been approximating this with custom properties and a parallel quoting spreadsheet, which meant the CRM never held the whole picture. Reporting consequently required exporting and reassembling in Excel. Licence cost was rising with headcount for functionality the team largely did not use. The migration itself was the main technical risk: several years of contacts, companies, deals, notes and email history, with duplicate records accumulated over time and associations that would break if lifted naively. Losing sales history would have been unacceptable to a team whose long cycles mean a conversation from eighteen months ago is often still live context. Email integration was non-negotiable — a CRM that does not capture correspondence gets abandoned — and doing that properly means OAuth against the mail provider with careful scoping, not a forwarding address.

We built the CRM on React and Node.js with PostgreSQL, modelling the actual sales process: multi-stakeholder opportunities with roles, long-cycle stage tracking, and quoting as a first-class capability with line-item pricing that respects customer-specific agreements. That last point removed the parallel spreadsheet, which meant the CRM finally held the complete picture and reporting stopped requiring Excel. Migration ran as its own workstream — we extracted the full HubSpot dataset, ran deduplication with human review on ambiguous matches rather than automatic merging, rebuilt associations explicitly, and validated record counts and relationships before cutover. Email integration uses OAuth against the provider with scoping limited to what the CRM needs, threading correspondence onto the relevant company and opportunity automatically. We kept the interface deliberately spare, because the previous tool's unused surface area was part of why data quality had degraded. UK GDPR considerations were built in: lawful basis is recorded per contact, and retention and erasure are supported properly rather than left as a manual database task. We ran the new CRM alongside HubSpot for a short parallel period before switching off the subscription, so the team could confirm nothing was missing before the old system became read-only. Reporting definitions were rebuilt with the sales director rather than replicated blindly, since several inherited metrics turned out to be measuring things nobody used. Related: custom software development and IT outsourcing.