Integrated CRM

The integrated CRM is a lead management system built directly into the WaaS backend. Every inquiry that comes in through your website — contact forms, lead magnets, newsletter sign-ups — automatically lands in one central place, where it can be maintained, qualified, and moved through your sales process.

This page describes what the CRM offers you today, what it’s suited for, what it explicitly isn’t — and where Blackpattern and you each come in.

What the integrated CRM is meant for

A lot of small and mid-sized companies don’t need a full-blown Salesforce. They just want to know which inquiries came in, where each lead stands in the sales process, and what correspondence has happened. That’s exactly what the integrated CRM is built for — and exactly what you get as part of your WaaS package.

If you need full-fledged marketing automation or a sales pipeline for 50+ field reps, you’ll be better served by HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce — but you can still use the integrated CRM to cleanly collect website leads and then automatically push them into the external system. See the section Sync with external CRMs.

Where do I find the CRM?

In the WaaS backend, you’ll find the “Contacts” section (or “Leads”, depending on how your instance is configured) in the left-hand navigation. There you’ll see:

the lead overview as a sortable and filterable table,
the detail view per lead with all form data and notes,
the pipeline statuses, which you can customize.

The CRM is part of your WaaS backend — no extra login, no extra tool stack, no separate subscription.

What the CRM can do

Lead overview

All leads appear in a central table with the following columns:

Name, email, phone — as far as provided by the lead
Source — which form and which page generated the lead
Partner attribution — if the lead came in via a partner site (see Affiliate Marketing)
Status — where the lead currently stands in the sales process
Received on — captured automatically

You can sort and filter the table by any column. Commonly used filters: “Status = new”, “Partner = X”, “Received in the last 7 days”.

Detail view per lead

Clicking a lead opens the detail view. There you’ll see:

All form fields the lead filled out — including free-text fields, multi-select answers, and attachments.
Notes field for internal correspondence — e.g. “called on May 12, no answer, appointment set for May 14”.
Status history — so you can trace when the lead status changed.
Link to the original form response — the raw data stays accessible at any time.

Customizable lead statuses

The default pipeline is:

New → Contacted → Qualified → Quote → Won
                                  ↘
                                    Lost

These statuses are customizable per customer. A tax advisor uses a different pipeline than a recruiting service provider. If you need your own statuses (e.g. “Waiting for documents”, “Needs analysis”), let us know — we’ll set that up once.

Custom fields for your instance

Your lead record doesn’t have to stick to the standard fields. If your sales process needs its own information — say budget, industry, property type, or an industry-specific attribute — we’ll set up custom fields directly in your CRM.

The best part: these fields are update-safe. Your WaaS backend receives regular central product updates — your custom fields are guaranteed to survive them and never appear for any other customer. Your website forms can also populate these fields directly if we wire them up accordingly.

Just tell us what you need — we’ll take care of the setup.

Notes and correspondence tracking

Each lead has a notes field where your team can record what’s happened so far. There’s currently no automatic email tracking — if you want to leave a note about a phone call, you write it into the field yourself. This is intentionally kept low-friction and works well for most smaller sales teams.

Partner attribution

If the lead arrived on your site via a partner website or a tracking link, the partner attribution is automatically stored on the lead — no manual effort needed. In the detail view, you can also see how the attribution was established (tracking link, referrer match, or manual). More on this on the Affiliate Marketing feature page.

What happens when a lead comes in

As soon as someone submits a form on your website, the following runs in the background — without you having to do anything:

The form response is stored in full (all fields, plus origin info: which page, which form, partner code if any).
The lead is created in the CRM or — if the same email address already exists — updated. So you don’t end up with duplicates but with a continuous record per person.
Status is set to “New”.
Optional: you receive an email notification with the key lead data.
Optional: the lead is transferred to your external CRM (HubSpot / Pipedrive) in parallel.

From this point on, you take over in the backend: review, qualify, contact, move the status forward.

Sync with external CRMs (optional)

If you already use an external CRM like HubSpot or Pipedrive, we can set up a sync:

New leads from the WaaS backend are automatically transferred into your external CRM.
Status changes can be synced bidirectionally — depending on the setup you want.
The integrated CRM stays in place as the inbound funnel; your sales team keeps working in the tool they’re used to.

Status: Currently in use with individual customers. The sync is set up individually per customer (the “API integrations” area per Contract § 5.6 para. 1) — a standard setup is in preparation. If you’re interested, get in touch.

What the CRM can’t (yet) do

So you have clear expectations — honestly, here’s what’s not integrated today:

Feature	Status today
Sending emails to leads directly from the CRM	not available, planned
Configurable auto-deletion of old leads (GDPR)	not available, planned
Automatic lead scoring	not available
Automatic lead assignment to team members	not available
Email conversation tracking (IMAP integration)	not available
Telephony integration / VoIP	not available
Marketing automation (drip campaigns, workflows)	not available

If one of these points is critical for you: let us know. Some of them are on our roadmap anyway and we can prioritize them; others are most elegantly solved via a sync with an external tool (see above).

Data protection and data residency

Where does the data live?

Exclusively on servers in Germany. There’s no third-country transfer, no US cloud connection, and no subprocessor outside the EU. The exact data residency is laid out in your WaaS contract (§ 5.5 para. 3).

Who is responsible for what?

You are the controller in the sense of the GDPR (Art. 4 GDPR). You decide which data you collect in forms and how you use it.
Blackpattern is the processor. Details are governed by the DPA (Data Processing Agreement) you signed with us.

What data is stored?

Only what the lead voluntarily entered in the form. There’s no hidden tracking data, no third-party cookies, and no automatic enrichment from external data sources (e.g. LinkedIn data).

Retention and deletion

You decide how long leads stay in the CRM. A configurable auto-deletion (“delete leads in status ‘Lost’ after 12 months”) is in preparation — today you delete leads manually or via a one-off bulk operation that we’ll support you with.

From a GDPR perspective (Art. 5 para. 1 lit. e — storage limitation), we recommend defining an internal deletion routine. Just get in touch, we’ll set up an appropriate workflow for you.

Data export at the end of the contract

When the contract ends, all CRM data is exported as CSV and handed over to you (§ 5.5 para. 4). After the agreed archiving period expires, it’s deleted. You don’t lose any lead history if you switch products.

How the CRM compares to HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce

	Integrated CRM	HubSpot / Pipedrive / Salesforce
Built into the website backend	✓	–
Additional subscription cost	–	✓
Additional login / tool	–	✓
GDPR-compliant with DE hosting out of the box	✓	depends on setup
Directly connected to website forms	✓	via integration
Sales pipeline for 50+ reps	–	✓
Enterprise-grade marketing automation	–	✓
Telephony / VoIP	–	✓
Newsletter sending	–	✓
Email sequences and drip campaigns	–	✓

Rule of thumb: The integrated CRM is built for everything that happens around website leads. If you need a full-blown sales or marketing system, you use the integrated CRM as a clean inbound funnel and push from there into the external tool.

Scope of service Blackpattern ↔ customer

Area	You as the customer	Blackpattern
Maintain leads, set statuses, write notes	✓	–
Define your own lead statuses (submit request)	✓	–
Set up custom lead statuses	–	✓
Additional fields in the lead record (submit request)	✓	–
Create additional fields	–	✓
Sync with an external CRM (submit request)	✓	–
Set up the sync with an external CRM	–	✓
Export lead data (CSV)	✓	–
Bulk deletion of old leads (submit request)	✓	–
Carry out the bulk deletion	–	✓
Manage permissions for your team	✓	–

Frequently asked questions

How many leads can I store? There’s no hard quantity limit. The system is tested up into the range of tens of thousands of leads per customer. If you reach a scale where performance could become an issue, we’ll talk early about a suitable setup.

Can I assign permissions per employee (e.g. only see your own leads)? Yes. The WaaS backend has a role-based permission system. We set up standard roles for you (admin, editor, sales) and can define more granular roles on request — e.g. “the sales rep only sees leads assigned to them”.

Can I import leads — e.g. from an old Excel list? Yes, via CSV import. Send us your list — we’ll prep the import and run it once so the column mapping and duplicate check work cleanly.

Are leads created automatically in the CRM via the website forms? Yes. Every form response from your WaaS website automatically lands in the CRM. You don’t need to create anything manually for that.

What happens if the same person inquires twice? No duplicate is created. The second inquiry is added to the existing lead record — you’ll see both form responses in the lead file.

Can leads receive emails directly from the CRM? Not yet — this feature is in preparation. Today you write emails from your regular email client and capture the correspondence in the notes field. If this matters to you, let us know — we’re happy to prioritize the topic.

Can I connect the CRM with my existing newsletter tool? Yes, this is part of our optional API integrations (e.g. Mailchimp, Brevo, CleverReach). Talk to us, we’ll set up the sync.

Can the CRM look the way I want (e.g. custom columns in the overview)? The columns in the lead overview are individually configurable. An admin in your team can adjust this themselves, or we’ll do it for you. More complex customizations (custom detail views, custom workflow buttons) are part of our customization package — we’ll discuss that case by case.

Can I get my own fields in the lead record (e.g. budget or industry)? Yes. We’ll create custom fields directly in your CRM — exclusive to your instance. The fields are update-safe: they’re guaranteed to survive all central product updates. Just tell us what you need and we’ll take care of the setup (see Custom fields for your instance).