Set Up for Your Trade in One Click

A blank CRM asks you to design your process before you can use it. Industry templates start you with the pipeline, fields and automations a business like yours already needs — and change nothing you have built.

The first hour in a new CRM is usually spent on questions nobody wants to answer yet. What should the pipeline stages be? Which fields does a deal need? Which automations are worth setting up? The CRM is ready; the business has to design itself to fit it.

Most of those answers are not unique to you. A vehicle appraiser, a recruiter and an estate agent each need different pipelines — but every appraiser needs roughly the same one.

Start from a business like yours

Settings → Templates sets a workspace up for one kind of business in one click. There are six: Kfz-Gutachter, Agency, Trades, Real estate, Recruiting and Coaching. Each adds a pipeline with its stages, win chances and required fields; the fields that matter, including formulas, conditional fields and calendar dates; extra deal sources and lost reasons; a shared view; and ready-made automations.

What a template actually gives you

Take the Kfz-Gutachter template as an example of how specific these are. An accident claim is not a sale in the usual sense, so the pipeline follows the claim: Enquiry, Inspection, Report written, With insurer, Settled. Each step requires what it needs — no inspection without a licence plate, no report without a damage amount, nothing sent to the insurer without the insurer filled in. A formula counts the days since the accident, the other party's insurer only appears when the other party was at fault, and an automation creates a call task when a claim turns out to be the client's own fault. Add a diagram field and the client can mark the damage on a car drawing themselves.

None of it is locked. Rename a stage, drop a field, add your own — the template is a starting point you edit, not a mode you are stuck in.

A good default is worth more than a blank canvas. You can always change a stage. You cannot easily invent one from nothing.

Or describe your business

If none of the six fit, the welcome studio can start from a description instead. Describe your business in your own words and Sentinel drafts the fields (try it on our features page) — deal fields first, contact fields only for what deals do not cover — and you leave out anything you do not want before it is created. The guided tour then opens with a Made for … stop that shows exactly what was set up.

After the template

  1. Walk one real job through the pipeline. Wherever you hesitate, a stage or a field is wrong.
  2. Check the automations, then switch on the ones that match how you work.
  3. Save the views your team will open every morning.
  4. Add what is missing — your own fields, a second pipeline, or a record type for the thing you track that is not a deal.

The best CRM setup is the one that is already close enough on day one that the team starts using it.

See it on screen: Built for your business on our features page lets you type your trade and watch its pipeline snap in.