A full CRM is a big commitment. If you are a freelancer, a small agency or a solo business owner, you may only need to answer one question each morning: who do I need to follow up with? A kanban board answers that well, and it can live in the WordPress admin you already open every day.
This post shows how to turn the Sales template in KanbanWP into a lightweight CRM, and where the approach stops being enough.
Start from the Sales template
When you create a board, choose the Sales template. It gives you six stages:
- Lead
- Contacted
- Proposal
- Negotiation
- Won
- Lost
It also creates three labels: Hot, Warm and Cold. Each card is one prospect or opportunity.
You can rename any stage. If your sales process is more consultative, you might replace Negotiation with Scoping. Keep the stage list short enough that you can remember it.
What a card should contain
Make each card a single opportunity, not a person. A contact may have two deals, and two cards keep them separate.
- Title: company or person plus the opportunity, for example “Northside Bakery, new website.”
- Description: how you met, what they need, any context.
- Assignee: who owns the follow-up, if more than one person sells.
- Due date: the next action date. This is the most useful field in the whole setup.
- Label: Hot, Warm or Cold.
- Attachments: the proposal and any briefs, so you do not dig through email. See checklists and attachments.
Add the fields you actually track
Custom fields let you record structured details such as contact email, phone, deal value or lead source. Add only what you will act on. If you never filter by lead source, do not collect it.
A daily and weekly routine
The board only works if you use it on a schedule.
Daily (five minutes):
- Filter or sort to see cards with a due date of today or earlier.
- Do the follow-up, then set the next due date. Never leave a card without one.
- Move cards forward when the situation has changed.
Weekly (fifteen minutes):
- Review Proposal and Negotiation. Anything stuck for two weeks needs a decision: nudge or move to Lost.
- Check Lead for cards you have not contacted.
- Add new leads from the week.
Use filtering to find overdue follow-ups quickly, and a saved view to keep the filter handy. The calendar view shows follow-ups by date.
Getting leads in
You can create cards by hand, or feed them in. KanbanWP has a forms integration: a form plugin such as Contact Form 7 or Gravity Forms can turn a submission into a card through a small hook, which takes a few lines of code. There are also webhooks for connecting other tools. For WooCommerce shops, see the WooCommerce integration.
Keeping Lost cards useful
Do not delete lost opportunities. Add a comment with the reason before moving a card to Lost. After a quarter, reading those comments tells you more about your pitch than any report.
Where this stops working
Be honest about the limits. This setup does not do email sync, automated sequences, contact deduplication or revenue forecasting. If you have hundreds of active leads, many salespeople, or need marketing automation, a dedicated CRM is the better tool. For a handful to a few dozen open opportunities, a board is quicker to maintain and easier to keep honest.
Next steps
Create a Sales board, add your current leads in one sitting, and set a due date on each. The dedicated page for sales teams has more on this use, and your first board covers the basics.
For a client-facing version of the same idea, see the client portal, and for AI-assisted follow-ups read AI project management.