This is our answer. Columbus, our CRM, now keeps that balance for you.
Most CRMs decline to engage with any of this. They model the sale as a card that slides rightward through five tidy stages, charge you about $5 a seat, and report the result upward as a number. It is a clean little fiction. The actual relationship, the one with the history and the in-jokes and the favour you still owe from March, lives nowhere in the system, which means it lives in the back of one salesperson's head and leaves the building the day they do.
So we built the part that was missing. Columbus keeps a running ledger on every relationship, the way a bank keeps one on a borrower. On one side, what the client has done for you: the referral that quietly became eighty thousand euros, the testimonial, the introduction to their old colleague. On the other, what you have given back, and what is overdue. It nets the two and tells you, in plain figures, where you stand. And when you go to ask a favour of a client who has done a great deal for you and received very little in return, it does the one thing no other CRM will do. It tells you to wait, and to repay first.
This is, as far as we can tell, an unusual position for sales software to take. The relationship tools that already exist are very good at measuring how warm a contact is and then encouraging you to spend that warmth at once. Columbus measures the same warmth and now and then advises you to leave it alone, on the theory that a relationship you only ever withdraw from eventually closes its account. We are aware this is a strange thing to put in a product. We are fairly sure it is also correct.
There is more to it than the ledger, the long thread of the relationship, the small things worth remembering, the tree of warm introductions each client can open for you, and the easiest way to see how it fits together is to open it. We built a working demo on a fictional studio's book of clients, no login and no sales call, where you can watch a relationship tip from black into red and an introduction stay locked until the balance is settled.
The whole product, the pricing and the rest, lives on the Columbus page. The principle underneath it, for anyone who skipped last week, is here.