What KudosCRM is and how the pieces fit together

KudosCRM is not a collection of separate tools that happen to share a login. It is one spine: a person arrives, gets qualified, becomes a deal, the deal is won, the work is delivered, and the customer is supported — all on records that carry their history with them.

This article is the map. Read it once and the rest of the help center will make sense, because every other article is about one stage of this spine.

Who this is for

Anyone opening KudosCRM for the first time, and anyone who has been using one part of it and wants to understand how their part connects to the rest.

Before you start

• A KudosCRM workspace. Everything below is readable without setting anything up first.
• Nothing else. This is orientation, not configuration.

The five stages

1. Capture — get people in without retyping them
   Leads arrive through online forms you build, a booking link a prospect uses to schedule time, your own existing website form pointed at our inbound endpoint, CSV import, live chat, or the API. Every arrival is tagged with its source, medium and campaign, so you can later prove which channel produced pipeline.
2. Qualify — decide who is worth time
   Scoring rules you define give each lead a 0–100 score that rolls up to a grade: A at 80 or above, B at 60, C at 40, D below that. Routing rules then assign the lead the moment it arrives — to a fixed rep, a round-robin pool, or a territory — with a default owner so nothing lands unassigned.
3. Close — work the opportunity
   A qualified lead converts to a deal on a pipeline you designed. Drag it across stages, or work it from a list, forecast or timeline view. Stage rules keep the funnel honest, and the forecast weights every open deal by its win probability.
4. Deliver — turn a win into work
   A won deal can become an order, an invoice, and a delivery project with its own tasks, files and client portal. The customer record carries the whole history forward, so delivery is not starting from a blank page.
5. Support — keep them
   Tickets, live chat and this help center sit on the same contacts and companies. An agent answering a question can see the deal that was won and the project being delivered, because it is all one record.
6. Running across all of it: automation, email and reporting
   Workflows react to events in any stage and act in another. Email is connected throughout, auto-captured onto the matching contact. Reports read the same data, so the numbers describe what actually happened rather than what someone remembered to log.

What to take away

• Records travel. A lead becomes a deal becomes a customer without anyone retyping the details.
• The 360 view is the point — open any contact or company and the whole relationship is on one timeline.
• Where you start depends on your job: sales starts at Capture and Close, delivery starts at Deliver, support starts at Support.
• Nothing here requires all of it. Most teams turn on one stage, get value, then add the next.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to use every stage?

No. The stages are a spine, not a checklist. Plenty of teams run only contacts, deals and tasks. Adding a stage later does not require redoing the earlier ones, because the records are already there.

Where does my existing data go?

Contacts and companies come in by CSV import, and there is a dedicated Pipedrive migration. Imported records are matched against what you already have rather than duplicated.

What is the difference between a lead and a contact?

A lead is someone who has arrived but has not been qualified into an opportunity yet — it carries a score, a grade and a lifecycle stage. A contact is a person you hold a relationship with. Converting a lead creates the contact, the company and the deal together.

Where should I start if I am setting this up for a team?

Set your workspace defaults, invite the team with the right roles, then build one pipeline you actually believe in. Capture and automation are worth adding once people are working in the system daily.

Learn more

• Capture — How people get into KudosCRM in the first place.
• Sales — Pipelines, deals, forecasting and the close.