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.

How much closes this month. Every deal carries a value and an expected close date, and from those the Processes tab shows the month's forecast: how much is expected to close, summed by the system. The total is arithmetic, not an estimate — neither Orion nor the screen invents a figure. You can also just ask, by voice or in writing ("how much closes this month?", "what about September?"), and the answer comes from the same sum.

The forecast tells you what it is NOT counting. A deal with no value, or with no close date, stays out of the sum — and the screen shows how many, right under the total. A number that hides deals looks complete without being complete, so it never appears alone. The value and date fields exist only on sales deals: a support ticket or a partnership carries no money, and offering the field there would be asking for a number the forecast would never add up. The currency is your organization's, set in Settings — there is no way to sum different currencies into one total.

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. The same applies to email forwarded to Orion: every hour it looks at every email that arrived and, on the organization Admin's account (or yours, without a company), a likely opportunity from someone who is not yet a client becomes a line here, with the subject and the reason — never the email's text. Another email from the same person updates the same line instead of opening a new one. A line that came from an email in your mailbox carries the 📧 Open the email link, which opens that email on the Opportunities card (Orion › Emails); other members of the organization see the line without the link — the mailbox isn't theirs. See Connecting your accounts › Forwarded email.

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 — with one exception, the email that may be an opportunity, in the last item below.

In practice, about the automatic capture:

• A message from a stranger does not become a contact. 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 — except for the last item.
• 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.
• The exception: the email that may be an opportunity. On the organization Admin's account, a forwarded email Orion classifies as a likely opportunity, from someone who is not yet a client and was not disqualified, creates the contact from the writer's email address (without changing anyone who already exists) and the line in Pending actions — with the subject and the reason, never the text. In a forward, the contact is whoever wrote the original, never whoever forwarded it (unless the original is from your company and whoever forwarded it is from outside); in a reply to a conversation, it is whoever replied; and someone already on the Admin's personal board does not get a second record. On a member's account this does not happen on its own (only the "email received" line of a prospect from their own prospecting whose sequence ended goes into that contact's history, as the prospecting reply does): they get the notice, see the list and decide (the Log lead button makes the same record, by their decision). The emails from the 30 days before the start, read once, never come here on their own.

Apart from that exception, putting someone in the organization's CRM is deliberate: you register them on the screen, import a spreadsheet, use Log lead on the opportunities list, 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.

Contacts that come from outside

The public service line, the agenda, Calendly and Prospecting write into the CRM without you opening this screen. What each one writes, and what it does with someone already there:

Service line and agenda, on WhatsApp. Contacts and interactions are born out of these conversations, with a summary of what was discussed — one interaction per conversation, not one per message. The exception is a conversation in which a document from the script was used (a survey, for example): there the summary gives way to a fixed line, without what the person answered, also after the document leaves the script — see Run a survey on your service number. In a survey run through the «Run a survey» block, the contact gets the fixed line «Answered the survey «X» (7 of 8). The answers are kept with the questions document, under 📋 Responses.» and, from the questions you marked, the name, e-mail and company the person confirmed (on a record that already existed, the name and e-mail become a note for you to check, and the company stays only under Responses). The rest of what the person answered stays with the questions document, under 📋 Responses, in Knowledge, and deleting the contact in the CRM does not erase those responses — for an erasure request, delete in both places. Someone writing from a number that is not in the CRM yet becomes a new contact; whoever books a slot comes in the same way, with the phone they wrote from. Someone already there, by the exact number, shows up on their own timeline and is neither registered again nor changed — anything different they say becomes a note on the record, for you to check. The name and phone dictated at booking do not join the person to a record that already exists: a namesake becomes a new record, and the pair shows up in Duplicates for you to decide.

Instagram. On Instagram, Orion does not write to the CRM yet: someone who writes there does not become a contact — not even when they book a slot, which goes into the agenda and the sheet without a record.

Calendly. What the person types into the Calendly form neither changes nor joins a contact that already exists: each booking coming from there lands in the CRM as a new record, with the phone noted as given and not verified. When the e-mail or the name is that of someone you already have, the pair shows up in Duplicates and you merge it; if only the phone matches, the pair does not show up: the typed phone stays in the new record's notes and is not part of the comparison. Which form question becomes the phone is in Already use Calendly?.

The Prospecting spreadsheet. Someone already in the CRM is found only by the exact e-mail and is not changed by the spreadsheet — a namesake on the list becomes a new contact, and never rewrites the name, e-mail or relationship of someone you already have. The one thing the spreadsheet fills in for someone who already exists is the country, when it is empty (without a country the person does not enter a sequence); a country already saved is not replaced.

Prospecting replies. When someone replies to a prospecting e-mail, the contact's history records that the reply arrived, with the intent in the dashboard's language and the subject; the text is in the list of replies, under Orion → Prospecting. On LinkedIn, the reply is also recorded in the contact's history.

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.

Phones are compared by the full number. Two contacts fall into the same group when they have the same number — country, area code and number — and the same Brazilian mobile written with and without the ninth digit counts as one. These pairs are worth settling: while a number sits on two records, the public service line does not greet by name whoever writes from it, because it cannot tell which of the two the person is.

What comes from outside is born separate. Someone who writes to your service line, books a slot or arrives through Calendly is never joined to an existing contact by name, by e-mail or by a phone they typed — only by the number they wrote from. The rest becomes a new record, and this screen is where the pairs show up (same e-mail under Possible, namesakes under Same name) for you to decide whether it is the same person. The phone the person typed or dictated stays in the new record's notes, as "given (not verified)": if it really is theirs, you save it in the phone field. When the number came without a country code and there is no way to tell which country it belongs to, the note keeps the number as it was written: Orion does not fill in the country on its own. A lead that Orion registers on its own — in a routine, or while looking at your inbox — follows the same rule: it only uses a record that already exists when the e-mail is exactly that record's — or, if the lead has no e-mail, when the phone is exactly that of a single contact who is still a lead or whom you have already disqualified — and without changing anything on it; a namesake becomes a new record and shows up here. If the phone given belongs to a client (or to any contact who is neither a lead nor disqualified), the lead also becomes a new record: the line in Pending actions and Disqualify stay on that new record, and the client stays as they are, with nothing added to their history. When there is no e-mail and no record found by the phone, Orion goes back to the record it opened itself for that lead — recognized by the phone given or, with no phone, by the name — instead of opening another one with every message. That is why someone you disqualified does not come back to Pending actions. That return only holds while the record belongs to a lead or to someone you disqualified: if that lead has since become a client (or has any other relationship that is neither lead nor disqualified — Closed, for example, in the organization's CRM), the next message with no e-mail, with that phone or that name, becomes a new record — the line in Pending actions and Disqualify stay on it, and the client's record stays as it is, with nothing added to its history. When the name is the same, the two show up here under Same name, for you to decide whether it is the same person. By name, Orion also recognizes someone you had already disqualified: if there is a single disqualified contact with that name, with no e-mail (and not from a different company, when the lead names its company), the message goes on their history and no new line appears. Other than that, the name never reaches anyone already in the CRM: a client, or a lead still open, with the same name stays as they are. And, in the rare cases where Orion cannot validate the number the person wrote from (older formats in some countries), that number also stays in the notes, as "WhatsApp number they wrote from (not validated)": that person is not greeted by name in later conversations, but still sees and cancels the slot they booked themselves.

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?" — up to the 20 most recent recorded activities, and it says when there are older ones); 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.