Sales Skills

HotCRM does not ship an assistant of its own. It ships skills — packaged AI abilities that attach to the platform assistant (ask) that every ObjectStack environment already provides. When you open the assistant panel inside HotCRM, the sales skills below are what it knows how to do.

Where the personas went. Earlier versions of this page described a "Sales Copilot" agent. HotCRM no longer defines its own agents: the same capability now lives in skills registered through src/skills/, and the platform assistant selects among them. Nothing was lost — the wiring moved from an app-owned agent to the platform one.

Who it's for

• Sales reps — daily companion for working leads and deals.
• Sales managers — pipeline and forecast intelligence.
• Sales operations — bulk insights and what-if analysis.

How a skill gets picked

You do not choose a skill from a menu. Each skill declares the record context it belongs to, and the assistant activates it when that context matches:

So opening a lead and typing "is this one worth a call?" runs Lead Qualification without you naming it.

The sales skills

1. 🔄 Live Data — the foundation

Before it qualifies a lead, drafts an email, or forecasts a number, the assistant grounds itself in live data. Every turn, it calls describe_object and query_records against the live metadata + record store — not a cached snapshot. That's why adding a field at 10:00:00 lets the assistant answer a question about it at 10:00:05 with zero retraining.

See Live Schema (Wow #1) for the 30-second demo. Everything below composes on top of this skill.

2. 🎯 Lead Qualification

Ask the assistant to qualify a lead and it scores them 0–100 on the BANT framework:

• Budget — is there budget for what you sell?
• Authority — is this person the decision maker?
• Need — is there a clear, articulated need?
• Timeline — is there urgency?

It reads the lead record and its related activity history, then returns:

• A score (0–100) with one line of justification per BANT dimension.
• The field or activity each judgement was drawn from.
• The single recommended next step, with the lead ID cited.

If the score is 70 or above and you agree, the skill calls the real Convert Lead action. Otherwise it calls Schedule Follow-up with the date it recommends. Conversion is never performed without your explicit confirmation.

3. ✍️ Email Drafting

On any record (lead, contact, opportunity), ask for an email draft. It produces a context-aware draft using:

• The contact's name, role, and account.
• The opportunity stage and amount (if relevant).
• Past conversation history (recent emails and notes).

Not the knowledge base, on two separate counts. The Product Information and Sales Knowledge knowledge bases this list used to name do not exist — HotCRM ships no such libraries, only the one Knowledge Article object. And even where knowledge does exist, this skill does not read it: the drafting instructions are five steps about grounding the copy in the contact record and writing it, and not one of them reaches for an article. The skill carries query_records and could read crm_knowledge_article — it is simply never told to, so no draft quotes a datasheet or a playbook. When a draft should quote an article, ask Customer 360° for the matching one and paste it in.

Common email shapes it handles well:

• Introduction — first outreach after a lead is captured.
• Discovery follow-up — after a discovery call.
• Proposal cover note — to accompany a quote.
• Negotiation push — to move a stuck deal.
• Renewal reminder — to a contract holder ahead of expiration.
• Win celebration — to the customer after closed-won.

You always preview and edit before sending. The skill never sends on its own.

4. 📈 Revenue Forecasting

Ask "What's my forecast for this quarter?" and you get:

• Pipeline by stage — count and summed amount grouped by stage, scoped to the period you name (default: the current quarter).
• Weighted value — amount × probability, computed by the skill from what it read.
• At-risk deals — named one by one with the signal behind each: a close date already past, no activity in 30+ days, or a stage held longer than its typical duration.
• A forecast given as a range — commit-only (high-probability stages) to full weighted pipeline, with the assumption behind the number stated in one line, rather than false precision.
• A chart — via visualize_data, when one carries the answer better than prose.

Where the four buckets actually live. This page used to present Closed / Commit / Best Case / Pipeline as the forecasting skill's output. Those names are real, but they belong elsewhere: they are options of crm_opportunity's Forecast Category field (alongside Omitted), and the amounts carrying those names are what the scheduled forecast snapshot writes onto Forecast records. The skill neither reads forecast_category nor groups by it. The probability thresholds this page attached to two of them — Commit at >80%, Best case at 40-80% — had no source anywhere in HotCRM: the snapshot buckets by forecast category, not by probability band, and the skill uses probability only to compute weighted value.

Forecasts respect your position and sharing rules — a rep sees their own number, a manager sees their team's, a director sees the rollup.

5. 🔭 Customer 360°

On any account or contact, ask "Give me a 360° view" and you get:

• Relationship snapshot — the account's Customer Tier and its owner, read straight off the account record. There is no customer-since date to snapshot: crm_account carries no field of any name for when an account became a customer, so "how long have they been with us?" has to be answered from the contract's Signed Date or Start Date.
• The people — the account's contacts, primary contact first.
• Active deals — open opportunities with stage, amount and close date, plus the open pipeline total read from aggregate_data rather than added up row by row.
• Open cases — service cases where is_closed is false, newest first, with the case count by status.
• Matching knowledge — published crm_knowledge_article records, matched on the category or tags of those cases.

The answer comes back in three sections — Account Snapshot · Active Work · Risks & Notes — with record IDs cited inline (CASE-01234, KA-0007) so the UI can deep link. A risk has to name its record and the signal behind it: an escalated case, a close date already past, a deal with no activity in 30+ days. A section with no records is reported as empty rather than filled.

What Customer 360° does not pull. Three lines this page used to carry — recent activity (last call, meeting, email), contracts (active and upcoming renewals) and marketing engagement (recent campaigns the customer engaged with) — are not in the skill's instructions, so they will not appear in the answer. This is not a tool ceiling: the skill carries query_records and could reach crm_contract, crm_campaign, crm_event and crm_task. It is simply not told to read them, and widening what a skill reads is a product decision rather than a documentation one. Until then, read those from the account's own related lists.

Perfect for prep before a meeting — "give me Customer 360 on Acme" and you walk in informed.

Tips for reps

• ✅ Ask to qualify the moment a new lead lands — it saves 15 minutes per lead.
• ✅ For email drafts, give the goal in one sentence: "Push for a meeting next week" — better than a generic "draft a follow-up".
• ✅ Ask "What's at risk in my pipeline?" every Monday morning.

Tips for managers

• ✅ Use Customer 360 before every customer-facing meeting your team has.
• ✅ Run Revenue forecast mid-week to spot slipping deals before the EOQ scramble.
• ✅ Ask "Which deals are slipping this quarter?" — the forecasting skill names each at-risk deal and the signal behind it. It does not group by rep: stage and the period you name are its only groupings, so "which reps need coaching?" is not a question it answers.

Limits

• Skills respect sharing — they can only reference records you can see.
• They won't auto-send emails, won't auto-update records, and won't bulk-change data without explicit confirmation.
• Skills declare no bespoke tools: every write goes through a real HotCRM action, so the same permission checks apply as when you click the button yourself.

See Skills for the full skill specification and Knowledge Bases for how to keep the answers fresh and accurate.