Close CRM Tutorial: Fourteen Days Spent on the Meters, Not the Menus

Most CRM tutorials walk you through the menus. At a product where the bill depends on how much your team talks, the useful tutorial walks you through the meters.

A note on method. We have not had this product in our hands, so nothing below describes a button we have not seen. What it does describe is the order the published limits and the billing design dictate, and what seventy-five reviewers said about getting started.

OUR TAKE: Spend the fourteen free days measuring your usage rather than learning the interface. The interface is the easiest part of this product, by the account of its own users. The usage is the part no pricing page will tell you, and it is most of what you will pay.

## Day one: start the trial with the whole team

Fourteen days, no credit card^[1]. Invite everyone who will actually use it.

There is no published seat minimum, so you are not committing to a number by trying it. What you are doing is establishing one, and the only way to know how many people will really work in a CRM is to watch who opens it in week two.

Set up a real pipeline with real deals rather than sample data. Reviewers describe this as the easiest part of the product: setup is raised in 12% of the English reviews we read and averages 4.9 stars, the highest theme score we have measured in this category.

## Day one to three: decide the tier before you configure anything

This decision is binary and it is about automation.

Workflows do not exist on the two cheaper tiers^[1]. Not limited. Absent. The entry tier is also capped at one user and 10,000 leads, which makes it a single-operator product rather than a cheap team product.

So write down three things you want the system to do without being asked. Follow up after five days of silence. Start a sequence when a lead comes in. Create a task when a call ends in a particular way.

If any of those matter, your tier is the third one at $99 a user per month, and the two cheaper rungs are not an on-ramp to it.

Day three to five: turn on the phone and watch the meter

This is the step that distinguishes this product and the one everyone skips.

Calling and SMS are billed separately from the licence, passed through at the carrier's cost: about two cents a minute with numbers at about a dollar a month, and every call rounds up to the whole minute^[1][4].

Make real calls for two days. Then read the usage figure and multiply by ten working days. That number is your telephony bill, and it is the one the pricing page cannot give you.

Pay attention to the rounding if your team makes many short calls. A seventy-second call bills as two minutes, so a dialler-heavy day costs more than the arithmetic suggests.

If you are sending SMS in the United States, register the brand and campaign now rather than later: one-time fees of a few dollars plus a recurring monthly charge per campaign, none of which appears on the pricing page^[4].

## Day five to eight: measure the credits separately

AI credits are the third bill, and they move independently of the first two.

Every tier includes an allowance per user: 500 at the bottom rising to 2,000 at the top^[1]. They pool at account level, reset monthly and do not carry over^[3].

Two things to establish during the trial. First, your consumption rate, because the vendor publishes an allowance and not a rate. Run the AI features you expect to use for two days and read the balance.

Second, your real ceiling. The per-user scaling stops at ten users^[3]. If your team is larger than ten, your included allowance is a fixed account number rather than a per-person one, and the sooner you model that the smaller the surprise.

If you are trying voice agents, treat them as a separate experiment. They consume credits and telephony simultaneously, for the full connected duration of a call including silence^[3], and there is no spending cap of any kind.

Day eight to eleven: test the ceilings that do not move

Two limits are identical on every tier, which means no upgrade rescues you from them.

Custom fields cap at 250 per account^[1]. Count what your current system uses before importing. For a business with product metadata, territory data and lifecycle fields, 250 goes faster than it sounds.

Connected email accounts cap at three on the lower tiers and ten above them^[1]. If your team is larger than ten people each sending from a personal address, this is a wall rather than a constraint, and it is the single most common reason a growing team outgrows this product.

Also check retention. Call recordings are kept thirty days on the lower tiers, ninety on the third and indefinitely on the fourth^[1]. If recordings are part of how you coach or how you comply, that row decides your tier on its own.

## Day eleven to fourteen: price the whole thing

Three numbers, added together, once.

The licence, at the tier your automation answer gave you. The telephony, from your measured two days. The credits, from your measured consumption against your real account ceiling.

Then decide the billing term, which is a separate decision. On the entry tier annual billing saves 52.6%. On the third and fourth it saves 9.2% and 6.7%^[1], and monthly carries no contract at all^[2]. For a team whose headcount moves, the upper-tier discount is not worth the commitment.

One more question if you are at or near ten seats: the vendor offers a discount for ten or more seats on a twelve-month commitment and does not publish its size^[2]. Ask before accepting the list price.

Before day one: two decisions made on paper

Neither needs the product, and both shorten the trial.

Decide who owns the CRM. Not who uses it, who owns it. At a product billed on usage, somebody has to read two meters monthly and act on what they say. If that person does not exist, the bill grows quietly and nobody is responsible for it.

Decide what a lead is. The entry tier caps leads at 10,000 and the tiers above do not cap them at all^[1], which sounds generous until an import of every business card anyone ever collected makes the pipeline unusable. A CRM full of records nobody will call is worse than a smaller one that gets worked.

Both of those are the sort of thing teams settle in month four after an argument. Settling them in an afternoon before the trial is free.

## A worked trial week

If you only have time for one structured week, this is the order.

Monday. Import a real slice of data. Not all of it. Enough to see your field count against the 250 ceiling and to give your team something true to work with.

Tuesday and Wednesday. Call. Properly, for two full days, with the people who will do it after you buy. Do not test the dialer. Use it.

Thursday. Read both meters. Telephony and credits. Write the two numbers down and multiply each by ten working days.

Friday. Add the licence to those two numbers and look at the total. That is your monthly bill, and it is the first time anyone in this process has seen it.

Four days. One number nobody could have given you.

What the measurement usually shows

Three patterns come up often enough to name, and knowing them in advance shortens the exercise.

The telephony is bigger than people expect, and the reason is rounding rather than volume. Short calls are the prospecting norm and they are the worst case for a per-minute meter with a one-minute floor.

The credits are smaller than people fear, unless voice agents are in use, at which point they are larger than anyone guesses. The dividing line is that specific feature rather than AI generally.

And the tier decision is almost always the third rather than the second, because the automation question has a yes answer more often than teams admit before they measure.

After you buy: three things to watch monthly

Credit consumption against your account ceiling. Not your per-user allowance, which is not what you receive above ten seats.

Average call length against the rounding. If your average call is under a minute, you are paying a premium set by a billing rule rather than by usage, and the fix is how people work rather than what you pay.

Enrichment. It is metered at five cents per field each time it is used, and the comparison matrix presents it as an included feature on every tier^[4]. Bulk actions across a list are the expensive case, and the vendor says so itself.

The order matters more than the steps

If you take one thing from this page, take the sequence rather than the checklist.

Tier first, because it is decided by a yes or no question about automation and everything else follows from it. Then usage, because it is the larger number and the one nobody will give you. Then ceilings, because they decide whether this product survives your next two years. Billing term last, because it is the only decision you can change cheaply later.

Teams that do it backwards pick a tier on price, configure for a fortnight, and then discover the automation they needed was two rungs up. That is a wasted trial and a second migration inside the same product.

What to get in writing before the trial ends

Whether there is a seat minimum on your tier, because none is published anywhere we could read.

What your included credit ceiling is at your seat count, as a single account number.

What the ten-seat discount is worth for your team.

And what happens to call recordings if you leave. Retention is tied to your tier, and recordings do not migrate to another vendor in any practical sense.

What the trial cannot tell you

Two things, so you plan for them rather than assume the fortnight settled everything.

Seasonality. A fortnight in a quiet month understates the telephony and a fortnight in a push overstates it. If your calling volume swings, take the measured figure and apply your own seasonality rather than treating it as flat.

And growth. The included AI credit allowance is a fixed account number above ten users^[3], so the trial measurement is accurate for the team you have and wrong for the team you plan to have. Model both.

Neither of those is a reason to skip the measurement. They are reasons to treat it as a baseline rather than a forecast.

## One thing not to do

Do not start on the entry tier to save money while you evaluate.

It is capped at one user, which means you cannot test the thing you are buying: a team working a list together. You will evaluate a single-operator product and then buy a team product, which is two different things.

Start the trial on the tier you think you will buy. It costs nothing for fourteen days and it is the only way the measurement above means anything.