pds Tech CRM

Logging in, changing your password & resetting a forgotten one

Open the app at your team's CRM address and log in with the email and temporary password you were given.

Once logged in, your account controls and preferences are organized into the User Profile Menu in the top right of the navigation header (look for your name/avatar pill, e.g. 👤 Stuart ▾).

Click your profile pill at any time to open the dropdown menu, which provides quick access to:

• ⚙️ Users & Permissions — dedicated management panel (visible for Administrators only) to invite team members and set permissions.
• 📫 My Mailbox — connects your personal email inbox to synchronize customer correspondence.
• 📖 User Guide — opens this complete interactive reference guide in a new tab.
• 🔑 Change Password — enter your current password once and your new password twice to update your credentials immediately.
• 🚪 Log out — safely ends your session and removes stored session tokens.

Forgotten your password entirely? Click Forgot your password? on the sign-in screen and enter your email. If it matches an account, you'll get an emailed reset link — it's valid for one hour. The screen doesn't reveal whether the email matched anything, so don't read too much into it either way; just check your inbox.

Today's Recommended Actions Briefing on Login

Every time you log in, the CRM automatically opens the ⚡ Recommended Actions for Today briefing popup. It synthesizes all pipeline priorities for your day into one actionable list:

• ⚠️ Overdue Closes — deals past their target close date needing immediate re-engagement or updated closing milestones.
• ⏰ Closing Soon — deals due to close today or within the next 3 days.
• ✨ Gemini AI Strategy — recommended next steps extracted directly from recent deal briefs by the AI copilot.
• 💤 Needs Touchpoint — deals that have gone cold with no logged interaction in 4 or more days.
• 📥 New Inbound Leads — un-triaged inbound leads from email or the website chatbot.

Clicking any action card immediately transports you to that deal or opens the lead triage modal. You can filter actions inside the modal by category (⚠️ Urgent, ✨ AI Strategy, 📥 New Leads, 💤 Needs Touchpoint) or re-open the briefing popup at any time during your day by clicking ⚡ Today's Actions in the top navigation header.

The Funnel board

This is the home screen — every deal you're tracking, grouped by stage, left to right:

Click any deal card to open it and see its full detail — conversation history and AI brief included.

Quick Navigation: Clicking or tapping the pds Tech CRM logo in the top-left of the header returns you directly to your active Funnel board from any view or modal.

Deep Linking, Browser History & Refresh State Persistence

The CRM automatically remembers your exact viewing position and syncs it with the browser's address bar via deep-link hash routes. When you reload or refresh the browser, you stay on that exact piece of content while fetching fresh, live data from the server:

• Deals (#/deals/123) — clicking any deal updates your address bar. Refreshing your browser reopens that deal and refreshes its interactions, AI brief, and linked contacts live from the server.
• Leads (#/leads/45 or #/leads) — opening a lead details modal deep-links to that lead. Refreshing keeps the modal open and reloads its latest message and AI enrichment notes.
• Contacts (#/contacts/67 or #/contacts) — expanding a contact card deep-links to that contact. Refreshing restores the expanded card, scrolls it into view, and refreshes linked deals and meetings.
• Companies (#/companies/89 or #/companies) — expanding a company card deep-links to that company. Refreshing restores the expanded card, scrolls it into view, and refreshes linked contacts and deals.
• Calendar, Analytics & Admin (#/calendar, #/dashboard, #/admin) — refreshing while viewing analytics, the calendar, or user permissions stays in that view with freshly computed data.
• Browser Navigation (Back & Forward) — you can use your browser's native Back and Forward buttons to navigate between deals, leads, companies, and the funnel board seamlessly.

Stage	Meaning	Default Prob
Prospecting	Early interest, not yet qualified	10%
Qualified	Confirmed real need/budget/authority	30%
Proposal	A formal offer or quote is out	60%
Negotiation	Terms being discussed/adjusted	80%
Won 🏆	Closed successfully — contract signed	100%
Lost ✖	Closed unsuccessfully or discontinued	0%

Moving Deals & Drag-and-Drop Stage Transitions

You can drag any deal card across columns to move it between stages (Prospecting → Qualified → Proposal → Negotiation → Won or Lost). Moving a deal immediately updates the database, calculates the stage probability (100% for Won, 0% for Lost, and smart baseline defaults when moving back into active stages), triggers celebratory confetti if won, and recalculates the pipeline totals instantly.

Searching the whole CRM from anywhere

The search box in the header is available on every screen — you don't need to be on a particular page to use it.

Start typing a company name, contact name or email, deal name, or lead — matching results appear underneath as you type, grouped by type. Click any result to jump straight to it, wherever it lives (even if it's sitting in a different funnel than the one you're currently viewing). Companies and Contacts are always shared, but a Deal or Lead sitting in a teammate's personal funnel won't turn up here — that's deliberately private until it's promoted or you open their funnel directly from the dropdown to review it.

Asking the CRM Assistant

Click 🤖 Assistant in the header to open a chat panel that answers two kinds of questions:

• "How do I...?" — it reads this exact guide to answer, so it won't describe a feature or workflow that doesn't actually exist.
• Questions about your data — "what deals do we have with Acme Robotics?", "what's the status of the Jordan Blake lead?", "what did we last discuss with...?" — grounded in a live snapshot of your companies, contacts, deals, leads, and recent interactions.

Conversation history stays in your browser for that session only — reloading the page starts a fresh conversation. This is a separate thing from the AI chatbot on your website — that one talks to anonymous visitors and knows nothing about your CRM data.

Adding companies, contacts & deals

Three buttons above the funnel board let you build out your CRM data:

1. + Company first — every contact and deal belongs to a company.
2. + Contact next — add the person, and pick which company they belong to (or use + Add new company… right there in the dropdown if it does not exist yet — no need to close the form). Get their email address exactly right — this is how the system recognizes their emails later (see How email sync works).
3. + Deal — create an open deal for that company so any matched emails have somewhere to attach. When tagging attribution, select + Add new source… in the Source dropdown to open the full-width source creator card, type the source name, select its channel (Event, Introducer, or Referrer), and click + Create Source.

AI research on companies & contacts

Open any company or contact and click Research with AI. It runs a live, Google-grounded search and comes back with background notes and the sources it used — not a guess from the model's own memory.

For a contact, the same button also tries to find their LinkedIn profile, and tells you how confident it is — High (a direct, verified match) down to Medium (a probable match from indirect sources). Treat a Medium-confidence LinkedIn link as worth double-checking before you rely on it, not as confirmed fact.

Already researched someone? The button changes to Re-run AI Research, and you'll be asked to confirm — this uses AI quota, so it's worth doing deliberately rather than repeatedly.

Managing Leads

Not every email comes from someone already in the CRM. When email sync finds an incoming message from a sender who doesn't match any existing Contact, it automatically creates a Lead instead of ignoring the message.

The website chatbot adds Leads the same way when it can't resolve a visitor's question and they leave an email — and you can add one yourself with + New Lead, for anything captured outside email entirely, like a call or a trade show conversation.

Click Leads above the funnel board to see everyone waiting to be triaged. Navigating to the Leads view automatically triggers a fresh email sync in the background, ensuring all new incoming messages appear without having to manually press "Sync email".

For each lead, you can:

• Click to View Full Message & Details — clicking anywhere on a lead card opens the high-contrast Lead Detail Modal. This displays the complete email body, sender information, timestamp, confidence score, qualification notes, and the specific destination inbox it reached.
• Convert to Contact — opens the familiar +Contact form, pre-filled with their name and email. Pick (or create inline) the company they belong to, and they immediately become a real Contact, eligible for future email matching and deal attachment.
• Discard — for spam or anything not worth tracking. This marks the Lead as Discarded so it stops cluttering the active inbox.
• Restore Discarded Leads — accidentally discarded a real opportunity? Simply select Discarded in the status filter dropdown at the top of the Leads page, click the lead, and hit Restore Lead to move it right back to active.
• Enrich — asks the AI for a quick written assessment of the lead based on what's known so far, saved to the lead so you don't need to regenerate it each time you look.
• Draft Follow-up — generates a suggested reply you can copy and send, based on the lead's details and any prior conversation.

Viewing a deal & its conversation history

Opening a deal shows two panels: a chronological list of every email/call/note linked to it on the left, and the AI brief tool on the right.

Changing Deal Stages Directly in Deal View

The deal profile card at the top displays the linked company, amount, win probability, expected close date, owner, and timestamps. It features an interactive Stage Selector dropdown alongside a colored stage pill badge (Prospecting, Qualified, Proposal, Negotiation, Won 🏆, Lost ✖):

• Direct Stage Updating — you can change the stage of any deal directly from the dropdown without needing to go to the Funnel board or open the Edit modal.
• Smart Probability Adjustment — selecting Won 🏆 sets probability to 100% and triggers the victory celebration confetti; selecting Lost ✖ sets probability to 0% and animates closure; selecting an active pipeline stage resets the probability to the stage standard if it was previously closed.
• Instant Funnel Sync — any stage change made inside the deal view is immediately synchronized to the backend and updates the Funnel board in real time.

Generating an AI pre-meeting brief

On any deal's page, click Generate Brief. The AI reads everything logged against that deal — contacts, past emails, calls, notes — and produces a structured summary:

Every brief you generate is saved. Reopen the deal later (even after a full page reload) and the most recent brief is shown automatically — nothing is lost. A small dropdown next to the Generate Brief button lets you flip back through up to the last 100 briefs generated across the whole CRM, so you can compare how the picture changed over time.

Starting & scheduling video meetings

Every deal and contact has two ways to get on a video call:

• 🎥 Start Video Meeting — creates a room immediately and drops you straight into the call. Use this for an on-the-spot conversation.
• 📅 Schedule Meeting — schedule a call in advance. The modal automatically fills in today's date and sets the time to the next whole hour of the day (e.g. at 2:20 PM, it defaults to 3:00 PM today). To pick a different time, click anywhere in the date/time box or tap the 📅 button to open the full visual calendar and time picker. You can also tap the quick chips (Next Hour, +2h, Tomorrow 10am, Tomorrow 2pm) for instant one-click presets. Optionally attach the meeting to a contact and deal to automatically generate and email a calendar invite (.ics) with the join link.

Where do scheduled meetings appear?

Once a meeting is scheduled, it is immediately visible across three key locations in the CRM:

• Deal Details Page — A dedicated 📅 Scheduled Video Meetings & Calls card appears prominently above the interactions timeline, displaying the topic, scheduled time, duration, attendee, RSVP status, and a one-click Join Call ↗ button.
• Contact Details Card — Expanding any contact's card under Contacts displays a 🎥 Meetings section listing all CRM video calls and mailbox-synced meeting invites linked to that person.
• The Unified Calendar — Automatically synchronizes both CRM-booked meetings and mailbox-ingested calendar events across your personal schedule and the Primary funnel.

Calls open in an embedded video window inside the CRM, with a full set of resilience controls along the top:

Button	What it does
🔄 Restart Camera	Instantly re-initializes the webcam stream and cycles video tracks if your camera feed freezes, stalls, or drops
🛠️ Test Devices	Opens the built-in hardware diagnostic tool with a live video mirror, microphone volume visualizer, device list, and permission troubleshooting
📋 Copy Guest Link	Copies the guest join link so you can share it directly in chat or calendar invites
↗ Pop Out	Transfers the call to a separate browser tab while automatically releasing the window's webcam lock to prevent device conflicts
📝 CRM Brief	Slides open a sidebar showing the deal's latest AI brief and quick call notepad — notes saved here attach directly to the deal's timeline
✕ Leave	Ends the call and cleanly releases all camera and microphone tracks

Inviting Guests & Joining on Mobile Devices

To invite prospects or clients to a meeting:

• Click "📋 Copy Guest Link" in the meeting header. This generates a clean, branded link formatted as https://crm.pds-tech.ai/meet/pds-... that can be pasted straight into WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, or email.
• Zero App Installation for Guests — Guests opening the link on mobile phones (iOS Safari or Android Chrome) do not need to download the 8x8 or Jitsi app. The link automatically signs a secure guest token and opens the call directly in their mobile browser. When prompted, guests simply tap Allow for microphone and camera access.
• Fast Reconnection & Fallback — If a guest clicks an invite link that was copied from Jitsi's native invite dialog (e.g. vpaas-magic-cookie-... or meet/...), the CRM server automatically intercepts the request, generates an authorized guest token, and redirects them into the video room.

The Calendar

Click Calendar in the top navigation for a unified schedule of every meeting that matters to you — video meetings scheduled through the CRM scheduler, plus calendar invites and meeting summaries synced from your connected mailbox.

User Schedule vs. Primary Funnel Views

The Calendar tabs bar allows you to slice your view instantly:

• All Events — Full visibility across all meetings you can access, combining CRM meetings and mailbox synced events.
• 👤 My Schedule — Focuses strictly on meetings you are hosting, deals you own, or activity within your private personal funnel.
• 🌐 Primary Funnel — Displays team-wide events, company meetings, and emails synced into the shared Primary funnel.
• 📅 CRM Scheduler — Filters to video meetings created via the CRM 8x8 JaaS scheduler.
• ✉️ Mailbox Synced — Displays calendar invites (.ics), meeting acceptances, cancellations, and meeting summaries automatically detected and synced from connected email inboxes.

Every meeting scheduled through the CRM displays a status badge — pending, accepted, or declined — so you can see at a glance who's confirmed. Click any scheduled meeting to open its full detail modal, where you can:

• Edit the title, date/time, duration, or agenda notes
• Update the invite status or meeting state (scheduled / active / completed / cancelled)
• Delete it or cancel the booking

To clear out several meetings at once, tick the checkbox on each meeting you want gone and use the Delete Selected bar that appears above the list — or tick the header checkbox to select everything currently shown.

How email sync works

Click Sync email to pull in new emails from the connected mailbox(es) and automatically attach them to the right deal. Here's exactly how it decides where an email goes:

1. It looks at the sender's email address.
2. If that exact address matches an existing Contact in the CRM, it finds that contact's company.
3. It attaches the email to that company's most recently updated open deal.
4. If no contact matches, or the company has no open deal, the email automatically creates an incoming Lead (see Managing Leads) tagged with the destination inbox, so no message is ever lost.

Sync frequency: Sync runs automatically in the background every 15 minutes, triggers instantaneously anytime you click the Leads tab, and can also be run manually on demand using the Sync email button.

Primary vs. your own funnel, and connecting your mailbox

There isn't just one funnel — there are two kinds:

• pds Primary Funnel — the shared funnel everyone sees, fed by the hello@pds-tech.ai mailbox and anything promoted into it.
• Your own personal funnel — created automatically for you, visible only to you (and teammates reviewing it for promotion). Nothing here shows up for anyone else until it's promoted.

Use the dropdown next to the Funnel heading to switch between them. Whichever one is selected is where new deals you create will land, and what the Leads page shows.

Connecting your own mailbox

Click My Mailbox in the header to connect your own inbox (Hostinger, Gmail, or any IMAP mailbox) directly — your credentials are entered by you, encrypted, and never seen by an admin or anyone else. Once connected, your mailbox syncs automatically into your personal funnel only.

Promoting a deal

Open a deal that's sitting in a personal (non-Primary) funnel and click Promote to Primary Funnel. It immediately becomes visible to the whole team in the shared funnel — this can't be undone from the UI, so only promote deals that are genuinely ready to be shared.

Users, permissions & team management (Admins)

Administrators have access to a dedicated Users & Permissions management page to invite team members, configure granular access boundaries, deactivate accounts, and safely manage departures.

To open the admin page, click ⚙️ Users & Permissions in the profile dropdown (top-right of the header) or click the ⚙️ Admin view button in the main navigation toolbar. This interface is only accessible to users with administrator privileges.

Adding a new team member

Click + Add Team Member at the top of the admin page. You will enter their full name, email address, an initial temporary password (which they can change anytime via the profile menu), and assign their role and granular permissions.

Granular permissions

By default, sales reps are focused on their own pipeline. Administrators can grant wider access using granular permission toggles:

Permission / Setting	When Enabled	When Disabled (Restricted)
Administrator (is_admin)	Full access to all CRM data, analytics, settings, and team user management.	Standard sales representative role without access to admin settings or user management.
Can View All Leads	The rep can see, search, and triage leads across all team mailboxes (including hello@pds-tech.ai and other team inboxes).	The rep is strictly scoped to leads assigned to them, sent to their personal inbox, or unassigned in the shared inbox.
Can View All Deals / Pipeline	The rep can view deals and stage columns across all team members' personal funnels.	The rep only sees deals they personally own, plus deals in the shared Primary Funnel.
Active Status	Account is active and can sign in normally.	Account is deactivated — login is immediately blocked, but historical logs, notes, and records remain intact.

Safe deletion & data protection

When an employee departs, you can either deactivate their account or click Delete:

• Deactivation is recommended for standard offboarding or temporary pauses, maintaining exact historical ownership assignments.
• Safe Deletion deletes the user account and clears their private empty funnel, but all of their associated deals, contacts, and interaction history are preserved. Their deals are safely unassigned (ownership set to Unassigned) in the pipeline so the team can reallocate them without any lost revenue data.
• Self-Protection Guardrails: Administrators cannot accidentally delete, demote, or deactivate their own active account.

Trash & restoring deleted records

Deleting a Company, Contact, or Deal doesn't erase it right away — it moves to that section's Trash, recoverable for 30 days before it's permanently purged.

Click View Trash at the top of the Companies, Contacts, or Deals list to see what's been deleted, and hit Restore on anything you want back.

Dashboard & reporting

Click Dashboard above the funnel board for the numbers behind the pipeline:

Tile / chart	What it shows
Pipeline Total	Combined value of every open deal
Won Total	Combined value of closed-won deals
Win Rate	Share of closed deals that were won, not lost
Chatbot Deflection Rate	Share of website chatbot conversations the AI resolved on its own, without escalating to a human — see the next section
Sales Funnel chart	How many open deals sit at each stage
Activity by Rep chart	Logged interactions per team member

Below the charts, Partner Attribution ROI breaks down deals and leads by the named event, introducer, or referrer they came from — useful for seeing which channels and partners are actually converting. Tag a deal from its New/Edit Deal form, a new lead from the New Lead form, or an existing lead directly from the Source dropdown on its card in the Leads list. Picking + Add new source… in any of those lets you create one on the spot — give it a name and pick whether it's an event, introducer, or referrer.

The AI chatbot on your website

A small chat widget on the pds-tech.ai website answers visitor questions automatically using AI. You won't interact with the widget itself from inside the CRM, but two things from it show up here:

• If the bot can't help and the visitor leaves an email, it creates a Lead for them automatically, tagged via chatbot in the Leads list — triage it exactly like any other Lead.
• The Chatbot Deflection Rate tile on the Dashboard shows what share of all conversations the bot resolved on its own, versus how many needed a human.

Tips & troubleshooting

Situation	What it means
Brief looks thin/generic	The deal doesn't have much real interaction history logged yet — add contacts, and let email sync populate real conversations
A real email did not show up after sync	Check the sender's exact email address matches a Contact, and that contact's company has an open deal — otherwise it will show up under Leads instead
Someone emailed in but is not showing as a Contact	Check the Leads page — they are probably sitting there waiting to be converted
A deal I expected is not on the board	Check the funnel selector — it might be sitting in a different funnel (yours vs. Primary vs. a teammate's)
Forgot your password	Use Forgot your password? on the sign-in screen — a reset link is emailed to you if the address matches an account
Need a new teammate added	An admin can add them immediately from ⚙️ Users & Permissions using the + Add Team Member button
Can't see a teammate's leads or deals	Your account may have scoped permissions. An admin can grant Can View All Leads or Can View All Deals from the Users & Permissions page
Discarded a lead by mistake	On the Leads page, filter by Discarded status, open the lead, and click Restore Lead to return it to active
A company, contact, or deal has disappeared	Check that section's View Trash — it may have been deleted (deliberately or by mistake) and can be restored within 30 days
An embedded video call is stuck on "Connecting…" or camera is loading	Click 🔄 Restart Camera to re-acquire the feed. If another program (Zoom, Teams, or another tab) is locking the webcam, close it, or click 🛠️ Test Devices to diagnose browser permissions and hardware access.
Video call camera works in a tab but not in the window (or vice-versa)	Physical webcams can only be accessed by one app/tab at a time on desktop OSes. When using ↗ Pop Out, the CRM modal releases your camera hardware so the tab can connect cleanly; when returning, click ↩ Return Video to Window.
Meeting invite link shows "404 This Page Does Not Exist" on mobile / WhatsApp	The link points to pds-tech.ai (marketing site on Hostinger) instead of crm.pds-tech.ai (the CRM server). Fix: In your 8x8 JaaS Console under Branding, set the custom invite URL to https://crm.pds-tech.ai, or set up a redirect in Hostinger from vpaas-magic-cookie-* and pds-* to https://crm.pds-tech.ai/$1.
Guest joining on mobile phone (iOS Safari / Android Chrome)	Guests do not need to install an app. Tapping the link opens the video call directly in their mobile browser; they just need to tap "Allow" when the browser requests camera and microphone access.
A meeting won't show as "accepted"	Its invite status is set manually from the meeting's detail view on the Calendar — it doesn't update itself when a guest opens the join link
Can't find something by scrolling	Use the search box in the header — it looks across companies, contacts, deals, and leads at once
Page refreshed or browser back/forward used	The CRM automatically preserves your exact active deal, lead, contact, company, or section, and reloads its latest content live from the server.