CRM Xell

The problem

The sales team lived in spreadsheets. Every rep had their version of the truth, leadership reports were manual, and handoffs between funnel stages got lost. Off-the-shelf SaaS options were expensive and forced the business to adapt to the CRM, not the other way around.

The decision: a custom CRM, integrated with the rest of the stack, with sales flows that mirrored how the team actually works.

Key decisions

Real-time Kanban with WebSockets. When a rep moves a lead between stages, the whole team sees it instantly. No reloads, no “who is on this one?”. Node.js for the WebSocket service, integrated with the Laravel backend.

Data model open to integrations. Every lead, contact, deal, and activity has its own clean table and consistent REST APIs. When the team needs to connect the CRM to another tool (analytics, marketing, support), the integration takes hours, not weeks.

UX optimized for real sales flow. Not the typical 15-mandatory-fields CRM. Screens were designed by watching how the team closes deals, not how “it’s done in HubSpot.”

Outcome

The sales team replaced spreadsheets in a few weeks. Pipeline meetings went from “someone shares a screen” to “everyone watches the same up-to-date Kanban.” Leadership reports come out automatically.

Integration with the rest of the product enables scenarios that were previously impossible: automatic triggers on deal close, sync with onboarding, sales metrics on the same dashboard as product metrics.