It started with one business paying for a CRM it barely used.

We met our first client in June 2012. He was already paying one of the largest CRM vendors in the world, and he was unhappy.

The reason turned out to be simple. He used about a tenth of what the system did, and had to work around the other ninety per cent every day to get to it. When something went wrong, getting help took longer than the problem was worth.

He asked whether we could do better. Our own research said he wasn't unusual — small business owners were buying software built for companies many times their size, then paying in time for the mismatch.

So we built CRMUltimate: a CRM that gets cut down and shaped to one business rather than covering every business at once. Everything since has followed from that first conversation.

How we work with the businesses that use it

Off-the-shelf software asks you to adapt. We do the opposite. Before you go live we sit down with you, work out what you actually need to capture and how your process runs, and configure the system to match — then stay available afterwards, because what you need in year two is rarely what you needed in week one.

The software was built by people with backgrounds in marketing and software engineering, who had worked at companies including Microsoft, IBM, Intel, HP, Canon and CA before building this.

That's the whole reasoning behind CRMUltimate. Make it easier for a business to create customers, keep track of them, and hold on to them for years rather than months. Maximum sales, minimum effort.