CRM for riders, fleets and sponsors

A bike shop has more relationships than a till suggests. There is the rider who brings the same gravel bike in every spring. There is the triathlon club that sends fifteen members before race season. There is the operations manager at the delivery company whose cargo bikes are due every six weeks, the brand rep, the event sponsor and the local employer running a bike-to-work scheme. A POS customer list holds names and phone numbers. It does not hold a deal, a follow-up date or who said what on the last call.

The erp.io CRM does. It keeps contacts and companies, custom fields, tags, segments and smart lists, a sales pipeline with stages, tasks, and an inbox per person that gathers their conversation history. For a shop, that means the fleet contract you are chasing sits in a pipeline stage with a next step and an owner, not on a sticky note by the phone.

The Service plan is explicit about this split: customers, contacts, companies, tags, lead source and the sales pipeline belong to the CRM. Service will store a link to the CRM person or company and read from there. It will not keep a second customer table that has to be kept in step by hand.

Service is designed to read and link CRM records through the same cross-module link the other erp.io modules use. Today a Service job belongs to a site, which stores an address and the customer company as typed text. The plan is for a work order to point at a CRM person and a fleet job at a CRM company. Service will own what the CRM has no concept of: the bikes themselves, the service locations for a mobile van, and the repair history.

Automations are planned the same way. Service will emit events such as a job completed or a quote approved to an outbox, and the CRM workflow engine will act on them: a thank-you email two days after pickup, a reminder when a fleet bike comes due, a task for the service manager when a quote sits unapproved. The CRM workflow engine is live today. The Service events that will feed it are on the roadmap.

One piece is partly built. Service already queues a record when a checklist is submitted, so the CRM can hear about it, and holds those records safely until the CRM endpoint that receives them exists. That endpoint is not built yet, so checklist submissions do not show up in the CRM today.

Keep the pipeline for the work that is actually a sale: fleet service contracts, corporate programs, team and club deals, event support. Walk-in repairs do not need a deal record, and forcing them into one is how CRMs end up abandoned by June.

Use tags and smart lists to find the groups you actually market to: e-bike owners, riders who have not been in since last spring, club members. Use a sequence for a fleet lead that went quiet, with an email, a reminder task and a call a week later. Use a booking link for the fleet manager who wants twenty minutes to talk about a service schedule, so it does not take four emails to find a time.

The CRM and Marketing count as one module on your plan, so running both costs you a single slot.