Introducing deals and pipelines

We built Carom to be the anti-CRM—a tool that gives rather than takes and that surfaces the key information from the conversations you’re already having, rather than asking you to spend time entering data. Our first version didn’t have deals or pipelines. But based on feedback from early users, we’ve built them with our own spin. I want to walk you through what we’ve developed and why.

There’s a lot here, so this will be the first of two related posts over the next few weeks:

  • Today, I’ll provide a walkthrough of our new deals and pipelines, including some of the design decisions we’ve made along the way.
  • Next time, we’ll talk about the agentic approach: how we built agents to help you move deals along and keep their statuses in sync with reality—and how that spurred us to rethink autonomous actions vs. suggestions.

Pipelines that aren’t (just) about money

For many companies, the pipeline is purely a sales tool. But it doesn’t have to be: it can be used to track partnerships, applicants, projects, or anything else. We designed our pipeline system with that in mind. Fundamentally, pipelines help you understand what’s moving, what’s not moving, and where you should focus your efforts.

A pipeline board with deals arranged in Lead, Qualified, Evaluation, Proposal, and Negotiation stages.
The pipeline board with a deal details card open for Stonefield Consulting, including amount, close date, notes, and stage history.

Keep track of all the deals across your organization

Whether you’re a commercial leader or a deal owner, you can easily see all the deals across the pipelines you have access to. For each one, see at a glance who owns what, how far along the pipeline the deal is, and what’s at stake.

A deals list filtered to open deals in the New Business pipeline, with summary stats and eight deals showing owner, stage, and amount.

In traditional CRMs, details that require data entry tend to get lost. In Carom, every deal automatically brings together the relevant emails, files, tasks, and conversations across your organization, along with showing clearly what’s happened, when, and why.

A deal detail page for Crosslight Education showing owner, amount, expected close, time spent in each stage, stage history, notes, and an activity timeline.

Useful reports, without the data analyst

Many CRMs offer powerful reporting options but have no point of view. Yes, if you learn their query language, train yourself to use their tools, or employ the right experts, you can put together reports on just about any slice of your pipeline you want. We chose simple, insightful, and immediate over infinitely flexible.

What you’ll see in Carom is something like this—just the relevant details to help you understand progress and opportunities to address stuck deals, lagging deal owners, and pipeline choke points.

A New Business pipeline report with value by stage, owner, and source, plus lists of the biggest deals, stuck deals, and deals closing soon.

Deals and pipelines will be in Carom soon. We’re excited to share more with you, and to talk next time about how we brought AI agents to dealmaking.