Independent revenue operations and CRM consultancy · Amsterdam and Paris
CRMLab works across the whole revenue operation: strategy, customer lifecycle and journeys, lead and sales process, marketing operations, data, AI and automation, and the reporting that shows whether any of it worked. The CRM is where that gets built. Which platform, and whether you even need a different one, is the last decision rather than the first, and we take no commission on it either way.
Seven layers. They only hold up in this order.
Hire us for the whole stack, or for one layer of it.
No partner tier, no licence resale, no referral fee, no commission, no quota to hit with anybody's sales team. Our fee comes from the client and from nowhere else. If a platform would be wrong for you, we have no reason to suggest it and nothing to lose by saying so.
Your commercial model, the way the team sells and serves, the processes that have to work, the systems and data you already have, the skill available internally to run the thing, the budget, and where you expect to be in three years. Sometimes the answer is a smaller platform than expected. Sometimes it is to fix the process and keep the CRM you have.
That is a sample rather than a limit. The revenue stack is large and it changes every year, so if your business runs on something not listed here, we will assess that too.
Six starting points cover most of the work. They overlap, and an engagement often begins as one and turns into another once we can see the whole picture.
Nothing we have was designed to work together.
Every tool, process and report was added to solve one problem at a time, so each made sense on its own. Together they now slow the business down. We map how revenue actually gets produced today, agree the operating model it should run on, and rebuild in that order.
Something is wrong but we cannot say what.
An audit of the CRM, marketing automation, integrations, processes, data and reporting. You get a written assessment of what is broken, what it is costing, and what to change first. Some clients stop there and act on it themselves.
We are moving to a different CRM.
Planning, data mapping, cleansing, migration, validation, workflow and integration rebuild, testing, training and rollout. Migrations rarely fail on the export. They fail on data quality and on adoption, so that is where most of the effort goes.
We are putting in a CRM for the first time.
CRM strategy, architecture, implementation and enablement from the ground up. We start from how the business sells and serves rather than from a feature list, so the system you end up with is one your team recognises.
Our CRM is a mess and nobody uses it.
Years of workarounds, unused fields, competing pipelines, automation nobody can explain and reports nobody trusts. We rebuild it around how the business operates now, and get the people who abandoned it back in.
Marketing and sales do not agree on anything.
Lifecycle stages both teams accept, qualification criteria written down, routing rules and response times, clear ownership at each handoff, and one set of numbers that does not change depending on who ran the report.
The software is almost never the reason it went wrong. It is just where you notice.
Why we start one layer upMost revenue programmes go wrong in the order they are done, not in the software they chose. Configuration before design produces a system that works exactly as specified and still does not fit the business.
How the business makes money, who it sells to, how it serves them, and what has to be true for revenue to grow.
The revenue and lifecycle architecture written down: journeys, stages, processes, data, automation, reporting.
The platform decision and the system design that carries the blueprint: objects, fields, integrations, permissions.
Configuration, migration, integration, testing and rollout, with enablement for the teams who have to live in it.
Reporting against the KPIs agreed at the start, then the adjustments the first real quarter of data always calls for.
The blueprint is the deliverable clients keep. It describes the revenue and lifecycle architecture in enough detail that any competent team could build it, which is the point. Yours whether we do the implementation or not.
What exists today across process, systems, data and reporting, and where it costs you.
How customers actually move from first contact to renewal, and where they stall.
Lead management, sales process, handoffs and customer success motions, with owners.
Object model, record structure, permissions, integration points and the platform decision behind them.
Each stage named, with entry and exit criteria, the owning team, and what it means for reporting.
What fires, on what condition, to whom, and what deliberately stays manual.
The objects and fields the processes need, plus governance so quality holds after go live.
Metric definitions everyone signs up to, the reports that carry them, and attribution where it is worth having.
Sequence, dependencies, effort and the order that gets value out soonest.
of sales and marketing professionals report a lack of alignment, even at companies where leadership believes the teams are aligned.
Source: Forrester, 2024
more likely to exceed revenue goals with an advanced-maturity revenue operations function.
Source: Gartner
of CRM implementations fail to some extent, almost always because of change management and role-based training rather than the technology.
Source: Harvard Business Review
A CRM only reflects decisions somebody already made about how the business runs. When those decisions have not been made, the software gets blamed for it. This is the work that sits around the build, and plenty of clients hire us for it alone.
Every client asks about this now, and they are right to. The ones getting real value have defined processes, a data model that holds up and clear ownership. The ones who are disappointed automated a mess and got the mess faster.
Drafting outreach, summarising calls, researching accounts, updating records, flagging risk in the pipeline and surfacing the next step. We scope agents to jobs where a wrong answer is cheap to catch and a right one saves someone an hour, then measure whether it actually did.
What fires, on which trigger, to whom, and what deliberately stays a human decision. Far more CRMs are damaged by automation nobody can explain than by having too little of it. Every rule we build has an owner and a reason someone can still recite a year later.
Data model, data quality, permissions, and governance you could show an auditor. This is the unglamorous half, and it is the half that decides whether the AI layer is something your team trusts or something they quietly stop using.
CRMLab is deliberately small. The people you meet are the people who do the work, and there is no bench of juniors behind us learning on your project.
We work with clients internationally, across markets and languages, in Europe and well beyond it. Between us we work in English, French, Dutch and Spanish, which matters more than it sounds when the sales team and the marketing team do not share one.
We have worked with businesses ranging from small companies putting in their first CRM to Fortune 500 organisations with several business units, long integration lists and real governance requirements. The method holds at both ends. The scope does not.
We sign NDAs on request, and we treat client systems, data and commercial strategy as confidential whether one is in place or not. We do not publish client names or use client work as a case study without written permission.
CRM Fundamentals: From Strategy to Execution
CRM Fundamentals: From Strategy to Execution runs to seven modules and thirty-five chapters, from the customer journey and functional CRM by department through to measurement, AI agents, and hands-on work in Salesforce and HubSpot. It is the method we use on client work, written down and public. Reading it is the cheapest way to find out whether you agree with how we think.
Both of us have spent our careers inside marketing, sales and customer success operations, at the point where strategy meets the click-by-click reality of running a CRM.
RevOps and CRM strategy
Technical architect who turns complicated requirements into RevOps practice a team can actually follow. Works across revenue architecture, CRM and data modelling, and go-to-market strategy, and has led CRM and GTM programmes across more than ten markets.
LinkedInRevOps and CRM strategy
Solution architect who keeps the revenue ecosystem aligned to commercial goals rather than to whatever the last project left behind. Works across lifecycle design, sales process, marketing operations and reporting.
LinkedInWe hold no partner status with any CRM vendor, we resell no licences, and we receive no commission or referral fee for recommending one platform over another. Our fee comes from the client and nowhere else. That is what lets us tell a client the honest answer, including when the honest answer is that they should keep the system they already have.
Both, and in practice they are the same engagement seen from different ends. Revenue operations is the design work: the operating model, the lifecycle, the processes, the data and the measurement. The CRM is where that design gets built and run. Clients come to us from either direction. Some arrive with a broken CRM and discover the problem is the operating model. Some arrive with a RevOps mandate and need someone who can also build the thing.
Both, and usually in that order. We design the revenue and lifecycle architecture first: processes, stages, data model, automation, reporting. Then we configure it. Clients who already have a design they trust can bring us in for the build alone, and clients who only want the blueprint can stop after it and hand it to their own team or another partner.
Yes, and it is a growing part of the work. Agents that draft outreach, summarise calls, research accounts and surface the next step, plus the trigger and workflow automation around them. The caveat we give every client is that AI amplifies whatever operation it sits on. Where the data model is unreliable and the process is undefined, an agent produces confident nonsense faster than a person could. So we usually fix that layer first, and it is usually a smaller job than people expect.
From the business, not from a feature matrix. We look at the commercial model, how the team sells and serves, the processes that have to be supported, the existing systems and data, the internal skill available to run the platform, the budget, and where the company expects to be in three years. The platform is the last decision, not the first.
A current state assessment, customer journey and lifecycle mapping, process design, CRM architecture, lifecycle stage definitions with entry and exit criteria, automation and trigger design, the data model, a reporting and KPI framework, and an implementation roadmap. It is a document your team can act on, and it is yours whether or not we do the build.
It depends on scope, and we would rather scope it properly than quote a number before we understand the situation. What we can promise is the shape: we phase the work so something useful is in your hands early rather than at the end of one long project, and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price before anything starts. If you need a quick win first, say so and we will design for that.
We are based in Amsterdam and Paris and work with clients internationally, across different markets and company sizes, from small teams putting in their first CRM to Fortune 500 organisations. Between us we work in English, French, Dutch and Spanish.
Yes. We sign NDAs whenever a client needs one, and we treat systems, data and commercial strategy as confidential either way. We do not publish client names or use client work as a case study without written permission.
A platform partner earns from licences and configuration on one platform, so more of that platform is always a reasonable answer for them. We have no such incentive. We will tell a client to buy less software, to simplify a process instead of automating it, or to stay where they are, and none of those answers cost us anything.
A short note is enough, though the more you tell us the more useful our answer will be. You get back a 30-minute call, a written take on your situation, or a straight redirect if we are not the right people for it.
Replies come from Sandy or Niels. There is no SDR, no sequence, and no one else to be passed to.
Happy to sign an NDA before you share anything about your systems or commercial strategy. Just say so in your message.
