We needed a CRM
We have been looking for a CRM for the sales team for a while. The options we looked at tended to have two things in common: a long list of features we would never use, and a licence per user per month that made no sense for a small team.
So we did what we often ask our customers to do first. We checked what we already pay for.
Microsoft 365 comes with SharePoint. A SharePoint list can hold leads, activities and email templates. And a SharePoint web part can look and behave exactly the way you design it.
The first commit landed on 21 October at 19:34. The work ran through the night, and before lunch the next day the sales board was live as the sales team's home page.
What we built
The foundation. A dedicated SharePoint site with three lists: Leads, Activities and Email templates. The sales team has its own security group and can edit, but not delete. Every change can be traced in the version history. The data stays in our own Microsoft 365 tenant. No new vendor, no new server and no new licences.
The sales board. The home page is a board with phases from first contact to won. Cards are dragged between phases, and every move can be undone for ten seconds. Hot leads sit at the top and are clearly marked. Each salesperson sees their own leads first and picks new ones from a shared pool. If two people claim the same lead at the same time, one of them is told it has already been taken.
The panel. One click on a card shows the customer, the next step and the full activity history. New activities are logged straight from the panel.
New leads. The salesperson looks the company up in the Norwegian business registry by name or organisation number, and the name, industry and website fill in by themselves. If the company is already in the CRM, the registration stops.
Email templates with A/B testing. Three templates. The board suggests the one used least, so all three get tested equally, and the template is saved on the lead so we can see which one actually leads to a conversation. The send buttons stay locked until every field in square brackets has been filled in, so no customer ever gets an email that says "[company]".
Marketing law is built in, not written down
This is the part I care about most.
Section 15 of the Norwegian Marketing Control Act prohibits email marketing to individuals who have not given their consent. The Norwegian Consumer Authority's guidance makes clear that this also covers a person's own work address, such as ola.nordmann@company.no, even when the email is about an offer to the business. What is allowed is addresses that do not belong to a specific person, such as post@company.no.
In many businesses this sits in a procedure document that few people read. With us, it sits in the board.
The board has a short list of known shared addresses, such as post, info, firmapost and regnskap. Anything not on that list is treated as a personal address. The email option is then locked, and the salesperson is told to call or get in touch on LinkedIn instead. Only a manager can override it.
The rule is deliberately cautious. An address it does not recognise is blocked rather than let through. The guidance says it is the sender's responsibility to make sure marketing does not reach an individual when that is unclear, so it is right that the default is to block.
That is the difference between a rule and a procedure. A procedure is something the salesperson has to remember. A rule in the tool means the salesperson cannot get it wrong by accident.
Real data from day one
The board did not start empty. We imported 2,000 leads from our own lead lists, merged on organisation number, with industry from the NACE code, a lead score and the status of the company's website.
The import was done in four steps, and the logs show every one of them:
- A dry run that only showed what would happen: 2,000 leads would have been created.
- A test batch of 100.
- The rest, another 1,900. The 100 from the test batch were skipped, so nothing was duplicated.
- A check where the whole import was run once more. It created nothing, because everything already existed.
The dry run also found 58 companies that had already received an email from us. They were put in a separate round with a 30-day pause, so nobody gets the same cold email twice.
Why it was fast
It is tempting to say it was fast because we used AI. That is not the whole truth.
We built it with Claude Code, but we did not start there. We started with the data model, who is allowed to do what, and which rules apply, including section 15. Then we wrote a plan. Every part went through an independent review and automated tests before it was rolled out. It is the same way of working we described in the post about the night watch.
The board has 788 automated tests, and the scripts that set everything up have 563. The whole setup lives as scripts in Git, so it can be rebuilt from scratch.
It was the structure that made it fast. Once that was in place, AI made it possible to build the rest in one night.
It is not for everyone
This is not a replacement for a full CRM for everyone.
If you need advanced forecasting, ERP integration, marketing automation or have a large sales team, you should buy a real CRM. Then we would rather help with the structure around it.
It is not free either. It takes Microsoft 365 with SharePoint, an app catalogue in the tenant and someone with admin access. But it takes no new licence per user.
The question to ask
If you are a small team and already have Microsoft 365, there is one question worth asking before you sign the next contract:
What does your team actually use in the CRM you pay for today?
The list of what you pay for is often much longer than the list of what you use. And what you use may already be there.