Your work comes from your network, not from a funnel
Someone you know knows someone who needs you. That conversation is about a bespoke proposal, takes weeks, and is ninety per cent coming back at the right moment. Nermio keeps track of those moments, including the conversations with no engagement attached yet.
How it goes now
Everything below is about time, not about having an overview.
- A conversation at an event in February was "something for the autumn". Come the autumn, you can't remember who it was.
- Your proposal is with a client who still has to discuss it internally. That was three weeks ago, and you don't know whether ringing now is too early or too late.
- A former colleague who moved to another company is now your way in there. That is written down nowhere, except in your head.
- Your existing clients are your best source of new work, and they are exactly the ones you don't ring, because nothing is running.
- When you lose an engagement, you hear "we're going with someone else". After five of those you still don't know whether it was the price or the approach.
What makes this work different
Selling here isn't a separate process but the same craft, practised before the engagement starts.
Standard sales software assumes a lot comes in at the top and a fraction comes out at the bottom. In your case little comes in and much of it goes ahead, so every missed conversation costs a lot. One forgotten call-back isn't a percentage for you; it's an engagement you didn't get.
The second difference is that the relationship outlives the work. A client from 2023 who starts somewhere else is a new engagement in 2026. That doesn't need a pipeline, it needs a memory: who was it, what did we do, and how did it end.
What Nermio does about it
Four things, all four about elapsed time.
A conversation with no engagement
Put the company in with two lines of notes and a task four months out. A contact that isn't going anywhere yet isn't a deal and doesn't have to be — it's a name with a date.
A proposal that's sitting there
Six stages from lead to won, so a proposal under review sits in a different stage from a conversation that hasn't started. On long engagements that's the difference between knowing where it stands and hoping you still remember.
Weeks of silence
The Today screen shows the deals that haven't moved for too long. With months of elapsed time that's the only monitoring that works, because your own sense of "this has been quiet a while" calibrates itself on the busiest engagement.
An engagement you lose
When you mark a deal lost, Nermio asks for a reason, and that reason stays with the deal. After a year you have a breakdown instead of a feeling, and on bespoke work that's the only thing you can learn about your rate and your approach.
Your existing list is the first win
Not the new conversations, the old ones.
Spend an afternoon on your own contact list: who haven't you spoken to for over a year that you'd want to? Put those twenty in and attach a task each, spread over the coming months. That isn't a campaign, it's twenty calls you otherwise never make. You don't need to move your whole list across for it. If you want to anyway, you can import a CSV of your companies and contacts under Settings.
If you work under several names, or in a partnership where you also sell for another firm, you can run several organisations side by side with their data kept apart.
What Nermio doesn't do here
Nermio doesn't send newsletters, and it doesn't send campaigns to a list. A one-off email to a single contact does go out, from your own address and with a line on the timeline, and so does an invoice or payment reminder as a PDF. Your proposals you write in whatever you use for that; what you record here is that you sent it, and what came back.
There's no time tracking and no project administration. The work itself happens somewhere else; Nermio stops at the moment you win it.
There are no revenue forecasts and no reports. You see what's running and in which stage, not a prediction of your quarter.
Start with the conversations that have stalled
Put in the five open proposals plus the ten relationships you've left too long. No credit card, and you're not tied to anything.