Not every conversation is a sale yet. A name from a trade show, a shop that might stock your rice, a donor your charity met once — these are relationships in progress, and until now BlossomERP had nowhere governed to keep them: they lived in notebooks, inboxes and memory.
CRM is that home. It keeps three kinds of record:
- Parties — the organisations and people you are talking to.
- Leads — new conversations, held apart until they are serious.
- Opportunities — serious pursuits, moving stage by stage through a pipeline towards won or lost.
Every stage an opportunity moves through is recorded with the date and the person who moved it, and every change to its expected close date is kept too. That history is the point: it is what later lets the system answer "what is our pipeline worth?", "which opportunities have gone quiet?" and "how often do our close dates slip?" from evidence rather than recollection.
CRM is a module of its own. It starts switched off; nothing in Sales, Donations or anywhere else changes until you switch it on (§17.6).