In Part 1, we talked about setting up your CRM from a clean slate—stripping away unnecessary features, hiding fields, and building a customer foundation that’s actually useful. Now we shift to the other half of the philosophical duo: your products and services.
Because here’s the truth—every company, no matter the size or industry, exists at the intersection of two things: customers and what you offer them. Your CRM needs to reflect both sides of that equation with equal clarity.
So now that we’ve tamed the customer side of your CRM, let’s talk about building a clean, usable, and future-proof product and services structure.
Just like in Part 1, your goal here is to avoid unnecessary complexity. Most CRMs come with product modules that look like they were designed by someone who moonlights as a tax accountant. There are fields for everything: unit cost, SKU, start date, end date, phase, category, discount tiers, and 47 other things you won’t need for months—maybe years.
Your job?
Hide the noise. Keep the essentials.
Your product and service catalog only needs to be as complex as your business is today. Not the size you hope to be next year. Not what the sales team says they “might” need. Just what’s required right now, with enough room to expand later without cornering yourself.
Accurate and well-categorized is the name of the game. If someone can look at your CRM product list and immediately know what you sell, what it costs, and how it fits into the business, you’re already ahead of 80% of organizations.
Once your product and service records exist in a clean structure, it’s time to talk about revenue. Specifically: potential revenue.
Time to climb back on the philosophical soapbox for a moment.
Your organization exists to generate revenue (and ideally, profit). And your CRM is the first place where that revenue story begins—long before a single invoice is generated.
Your sales funnel isn’t just a pipeline filled with deals. It’s a collection of predictions about future revenue. Your CRM should be able to reflect that with clarity and confidence.
For capital equipment, this is pretty straightforward. You have a product with a price. Add in the bells and whistles. Boom—there’s your deal value.
Services follow a similar logic. You’re selling time, expertise, or labor. Someone wants 20 hours of consulting? Great. The number is easy to attach.
But consumables?
Consumables are where things get messy.
Consumables—reagents, parts, supplies, refills, repeat-use items—don’t follow clean pricing patterns. Their use fluctuates. Demand changes. Customers order them in unpredictable cycles. You can’t just slap a single number on them and call it a day.
This is where most CRM setups fall apart.
Not because the CRM can’t handle it, but because the business oversimplifies the most unpredictable part of their revenue stream.
I’m not going to outline a play-by-play solution here, because this blog post would turn into a novel and half the details wouldn’t apply to your specific situation anyway. But the takeaway is this:
Do not overlook or oversimplify your consumables.
If you do, your pipeline becomes fiction—and not even the good kind.
Give yourself a clear way to capture potential deals on variable products. Even a basic structure is better than none. You’ll thank yourself later when your business scales and this area becomes a jungle of inconsistent quotes, unclear forecasting, and very confused sales reps.
It’s no mystery why so many companies shift to a subscription model. Predictability is operational nirvana. But chances are, you won’t have that luxury—so your CRM needs to absorb the complexity instead of ignoring it.
The work you’re doing here isn’t glamorous. It won’t win you applause from your sales team today. But you’re building structural integrity into your CRM that will matter immensely later.
A clean product and services foundation becomes the backbone of your quoting process, your forecasting, your revenue analytics, and your operational planning. If this layer is sloppy, everything built on top of it cracks.
The motto for Part 2 is simple:
Keep it clean. Keep it accurate. Keep it expandable.
Because Part 3?
That’s when we start tying these foundations together and building out the processes—pipelines, quoting, deal stages, automation—that turn your CRM from a database into an operational engine.