CRM playbook: seats and accountability on a team

A team CRM is an accountability machine, and its unit of account is the seat. Who got the lead, how fast they touched it, what happened next — every answer traces to a seat, which means the whole system is only as honest as your seat discipline. This lesson sets that up before the culture sets itself up without you.

Step 1: one human, one seat — no exceptions

Every person who touches leads gets their own login. Five seats come with the Team plan, twelve with Brokerage, and additional ones run $70 monthly — and the temptation to share logins at the margins is how teams blind themselves. Attribution, response times, and audit trails all key off the seat; the moment two people share one, every number about both of them is fiction. Sizing guidance lives in how many seats does a team need.

Step 2: write the deal before you wire it

Before touching routing, put the human agreement in writing: who gets which leads, what response time is expected, what happens to a lead that gets ignored, and what loses someone their spot in rotation. The rules of engagement page is a working template. Systems enforce agreements; they cannot substitute for them.

Step 3: make the wiring match the writing

Now translate the agreement into configuration: routing weights that reflect the deal, monthly caps where you agreed them, claim races where hunger is the culture. Two details worth knowing: routing settings are owner-and-admin territory — agents cannot read each other’s weights, because those numbers decide income — and seat management is where departures get handled the moment they happen, not at renewal.

Step 4: review the scorecards weekly, out loud

The scorecard table gives you one row per seat: leads assigned, unactioned, average attempts, median first touch, whether hot behavioural signals were answered, appointments set, closed. The discipline that keeps it fair is the evidence rule — every number links to the actual leads it counted, so a dispute takes one click to resolve, not a debate. Run it in the open; the agent scorecard page covers reading it well.

Step 5: connect consequences to the audit

Numbers change behaviour only when something follows from them. Tie the scorecard to the agreement from Step 2: sustained unactioned leads shift routing weight; consistent speed earns more volume. The weekly follow-up audit finds the misses; this review decides what they mean.

What done looks like

Every active person on their own seat, a written agreement everyone signed, routing that mirrors it, and a weekly review where the numbers are read aloud and nobody argues with them — because the evidence is one click away.

The mistake that costs the most

Wiring routing before writing the agreement. Configuration without a deal behind it reads as favouritism the first time volume dips, and you end up renegotiating culture in a crisis. Paper first, weights second — in that order it is management; reversed, it is politics.