NDT CRM: Win More Inspection, Training and Consulting Work

Leads and opportunities for inspection, training and consulting work. Request a demo. Affordable. Accessible. Fully customizable. Quote on request.

Why a generic CRM falls short for an NDT company

Most CRMs were built to sell software subscriptions or office furniture. They ask for a deal value and a close date, and that is about it. An NDT enquiry does not look like that. A refinery planner emails asking for two UT Level II technicians and a PAUT operator for a ten-day shutdown. A fabrication shop wants MT and PT on a batch of structural welds next week. An EPC needs someone to write and qualify a procedure before their contractor starts. A plant wants to send three people on a Level II course.

Each of those is a different kind of work, priced differently, staffed differently and won by different people in your company. When they all land in the same inbox, or the same generic pipeline, the important details get lost. Which method? Which site, in which country? How many technicians, for how many days? Is this a one-off or the first job on a framework contract?

The result is familiar to anyone who has run an inspection business. Enquiries get answered late because nobody knew who owned them. Quotes are built in a spreadsheet from a half-remembered phone call. A promising client goes quiet and nobody follows up, because the lead lived in one salesperson's head. And when the owner asks how much training work is in the pipeline for next quarter, the answer takes a day to assemble.

The CRM in the Atlantis NDT ERP is Atlantis ERP's CRM, pre-configured for NDT companies. It keeps the standard pipeline tools you would expect and adds the fields, scoring and follow-up tools that match how inspection, training and consulting work is actually sold. If you want to see it with your own kind of enquiries, book a CRM demo.

What the CRM records on every NDT lead

Every lead and opportunity carries the details an estimator or operations manager needs before they can say yes or no to a job. These are proper fields, not notes buried in a comment box, so you can filter, group and report on them.

• Service line: for example inspection, training or consulting, using the lines you define during setup, so each part of the business sees its own pipeline.
• NDT service type: the method or service requested, such as UT, RT, MT, PT, VT, ET, TOFD or phased array.
• Industry sector: oil and gas, petrochemical, power, fabrication, marine, aerospace and so on.
• Site country: where the work will actually happen, which is often not where the client's head office is.
• Estimated technicians and estimated days: the crew size and duration you need to plan for, captured at the enquiry stage.
• Lead source: website form, referral, trade show, imported list, business card, reply to an email campaign, and any other sources you track.

Because crew size and duration sit on the lead, your operations manager can look at the pipeline and see a busy month coming weeks before the purchase orders arrive. A lead for eight technicians over three weeks in a country where you have no crew is a different conversation from a two-day MT job down the road, and the CRM makes that obvious at a glance.

The standard Atlantis ERP tools remain: pipeline stages, expected revenue, probability, scheduled activities, notes, email history, and a full log of every interaction on the record. Nothing has been taken away to make room for the NDT fields. Your salespeople get a pipeline that looks familiar, with the questions an inspection company actually needs answered built into the form.

Lead scoring built for inspection work: hot, warm, nurture, cold

Every lead gets an NDT lead score from 0 to 100, grouped into four bands: hot, warm, nurture and cold. The point is simple. Your sales team, which in many NDT companies is the owner plus one or two people, should spend its time on the enquiries most likely to turn into work.

A hot lead is one to call today. A warm lead deserves a tailored follow-up this week. A nurture lead is a real company with a real need, but not ready to buy yet, so it goes into an email sequence rather than a phone queue. A cold lead stays in the database but does not take anyone's afternoon.

The score sits on the lead record and can be used in list views, filters and kanban grouping. A typical morning routine is to open the pipeline filtered to hot leads, work through them, then check the warm leads that have no activity scheduled. How the bands line up with your priorities is reviewed with you during implementation, so the score reflects the work you actually want more of.

Scoring also helps with honest forecasting. When the owner asks what the pipeline looks like, you can separate the hot and warm opportunities from the long tail of nurture contacts, instead of adding everything up and hoping.

It helps new team members too. Someone who joined last month does not yet know which enquiries are serious. The score and band give them a starting point, and the history on each record tells them what has already been said.

Getting leads in: website forms, CSV imports and business cards

A CRM is only as useful as the leads inside it. The Atlantis NDT ERP gives you several ways to get them in without re-typing.

Website enquiry forms

Enquiry forms on your company website, built with the Website app, feed straight into the CRM as leads. A plant engineer who writes that they need RT on a set of butt welds at their site next month lands in the pipeline with their message attached, ready for someone to qualify.

CSV import

If you have years of contacts in spreadsheets, an old CRM export or a list built from an industry directory, the lead import takes a CSV file and creates leads in bulk. You map columns during the import, bring in the fields you have, and fill in the NDT-specific ones as you qualify each lead.

Business cards

Trade shows and site visits leave you with a pocket full of cards. With the Business Cards app you take a photo of a card, and AI/OCR extracts the name, company, job title, email, phone numbers and website. One click turns it into a CRM lead or adds the person to a mailing list. It works from a phone upload, so the card can be in the system before you leave the exhibition hall.

Phone calls and direct enquiries

Plenty of work still starts with a phone call. A salesperson can create a lead in seconds from the pipeline view, fill in the service type, site country and crew estimate, and assign it to the right person.

Whatever the route, the lead source is recorded. Over time you can see which channels bring you real inspection, training and consulting work, and which ones just bring noise.

A day in the pipeline: from enquiry to signed quotation

Here is how a typical inspection enquiry moves through the CRM.

1. Enquiry arrives. A maintenance planner at a petrochemical plant fills in your website form asking for UT thickness and visual inspection during a planned outage. A lead is created with the message attached.
2. Qualification. Your sales coordinator opens it, sets the service line to inspection, picks the service type, industry sector and site country, and enters the estimate: four technicians, twelve days. The lead score shows where it sits.
3. Check with operations. Before promising dates, the coordinator schedules an activity for the operations manager, who checks technician availability in Team Assignments and valid certifications in the Certificates app.
4. Convert to opportunity. Once it is real, the lead becomes an opportunity in your inspection pipeline, owned by one person with a clear next action and date.
5. Quotation. From the opportunity, a quotation is created with job type, site, project dates and applicable codes, using NDT service products flagged by method. A branded PDF goes to the client. The Quotations app covers this step in detail.
6. Acceptance. The client can accept and sign the quote online. It converts to a sales order and the opportunity is marked won.
7. Lost reasons. If you lose, you record why: dates, crew availability, a competitor, a changed scope. Over a year, those reasons tell you a lot about where to improve.

At every step the history is on the record. If the coordinator is on leave, anyone can open the opportunity and see exactly what was said, what was sent and what is due next. Nothing depends on one person's memory or inbox.

Follow-up that actually happens: AI-personalised emails and drip sequences

The most common way NDT companies lose work is not price. It is silence. A quote goes out, the client does not reply, and nobody chases it because the next job has already started and everyone is busy.

The CRM gives you two tools for this.

AI-personalised email preview

From a lead, you can generate a personalised email draft built from the details on the record: the company, the sector, the service they asked about, the site. You see a preview before anything is sent and you edit it like any other email. It is a starting point that removes the blank-page problem, not an autopilot. Where the AI runs is agreed during implementation; the AI Marketing app can use a model hosted on your own server, so lead details do not have to leave infrastructure you control.

Drip email sequences

For nurture leads, you can enrol the lead in a drip email sequence with one action. Sequences are organised by service line, so a fabrication shop interested in inspection gets inspection content, and a plant training coordinator gets training content. Sequences can be paused and resumed, and recipients can unsubscribe.

The practical effect is that leads who are not ready today still hear from you in a measured, relevant way, and your sales team picks up the phone when someone engages. More detail on building those sequences is on the AI Marketing app page.

A simple rule keeps this healthy: when a nurture lead replies or asks for a price, pause the sequence and move the lead to a person. Automation is for staying in touch, not for negotiating.

Inspection, training and consulting: one CRM, separate pipelines

Most NDT companies sell more than one thing, and each line has its own rhythm.

Inspection services

Short cycles, urgent requests, crew-driven. The questions are method, site, dates, crew size and whether your technicians hold the right certifications. Estimated technicians and days matter more than anything else here. Shutdown and turnaround enquiries often arrive months ahead, and the CRM lets you track them as opportunities long before the purchase order is issued.

Training

Training enquiries come from individuals wanting to move up a level and from employers sending groups. The CRM tracks who is interested in which method and level, when they want to start and whether their employer is paying. Once enrolled, learners move to the eLearning portal, where they also get a Practical NDT section that opens Practical NDT, Atlantis's immersive 3D practice platform with UT, PAUT, RT, MT, PT, VT, ET and TOFD scenarios on virtual welds, pipes, vessels and castings. That is a strong point to mention in training follow-ups.

Consulting

Consulting is slower and relationship-driven: procedure writing, Level III services, reviews of a client's NDT programme, supplier qualification. Deals can take months. The CRM keeps the conversation history, the documents exchanged and the next step in one place, so a consulting opportunity does not go cold between meetings.

Each line can have its own pipeline stages, its own sales team and its own reporting, while companies and contacts are shared. The refinery that buys inspection from you might also be the one sending three people to training next quarter, and the CRM shows both relationships on one client.

Who uses the CRM day to day

• Owner or managing director: pipeline overview by service line, sector and country; which sources bring real work; which opportunities need their personal attention.
• Sales or business development: qualify leads, work the hot list, send quotes, chase replies, record lost reasons.
• Operations manager: sees estimated technicians and days on upcoming work, and flags crew or certification constraints before a quote promises dates you cannot meet.
• NDT Level III: pulled in on technical enquiries, such as whether a procedure exists for a method and material, or whether a consulting scope is realistic. Activities assigned from the CRM keep their input on the record.
• Training coordinator: manages training enquiries, group bookings from employers and follow-up with past learners.
• Marketing, often the same person as sales in a small firm: imports lists, runs drip sequences and campaigns, and checks which ones generate replies.

Access rights are set per role during implementation. A salesperson sees their own pipeline, a manager sees the team, and the owner sees everything.

In a small NDT company, one person may wear three of these hats. That is exactly where a shared CRM earns its keep: the owner who is also the Level III can see a technical question waiting for them next to the sales pipeline, instead of finding it in an email a week late.

How the CRM connects to the rest of the ERP

The CRM is the front door. What makes it useful is what happens after the door opens.

• Contacts: every lead links to a company and person in the shared address book, which quotations, invoices and projects also use.
• Quotations: an opportunity becomes a quotation with NDT service products, job type, site and codes, and an accepted quote becomes a sales order.
• Project and Team Assignments: won work becomes an NDT job with site, client PO, methods, scope and acceptance criteria, and technicians and equipment are dispatched with double-booking blocked.
• Certificates: before you promise a crew, you can check who holds a valid certification for the method.
• NDT Reports: the reports your inspectors produce are what the client is really paying for. Pair them with Digital Twin Reporting Software, Atlantis's companion product that places inspection results on a 3D model of the asset, and you have something few competitors can show in a sales meeting.
• Invoicing: timesheet hours, equipment and consumables flow into the invoice for the job.
• AI Marketing and Email Marketing: nurture sequences and campaigns go to the same contacts your sales team works with.
• Dashboards: pipeline figures sit alongside certification, calibration and financial KPIs.

Because it is one database, there is no export-import step between sales and operations. The client name, site and scope typed at the enquiry stage are the same ones on the job, the report and the invoice. When a client disputes an invoice, you can trace it back to the quote and the original enquiry in a few clicks.

Setup and implementation

Atlantis NDT deploys and configures the ERP for you. For the CRM, implementation usually covers:

1. Pipelines and stages for each service line you sell, named the way your team talks.
2. Field values: your service lines, NDT service types, sectors, countries and lead sources.
3. Lead scoring review: we walk through the hot, warm, nurture and cold bands with you and agree how they match your priorities.
4. Data import: existing leads and contacts from spreadsheets or your old system via CSV, cleaned and de-duplicated where possible.
5. Website forms connected to the CRM so enquiries arrive as leads.
6. Email and drip sequences: outgoing mail set up on your domain, and first sequences per service line drafted with you.
7. Users and access rights for sales, operations, Level III and management.
8. Training for your team on the daily routine: qualify, score, follow up, quote.

Anything specific to your company, such as an extra field, a custom report or an approval step before a quote goes out, is part of the customization scope agreed with you. The ERP is affordable, accessible and fully customizable, and pricing is by quote on request. You can see every app in the system on the ERP apps overview.

Frequently asked questions

Is this a separate CRM or part of the ERP?

It is part of the ERP. The CRM is Atlantis ERP's CRM app, pre-configured with NDT fields, lead scoring and follow-up tools, and it shares one database with quotations, jobs, certificates, reports and invoicing. There is nothing to sync.

Can I import my existing leads?

Yes. Leads can be imported from a CSV file, and during implementation we help map your existing spreadsheet or old CRM export into the right fields. NDT-specific fields you never tracked before can be filled in as leads are qualified.

How does the NDT lead score work?

Each lead gets a score from 0 to 100 and a band: hot, warm, nurture or cold. Your team uses the bands to decide who to call today, who to follow up by email and who to place in a drip sequence. We review the bands with you during setup.

Does the AI send emails on its own?

No. The AI-personalised email in the CRM is a preview you read and edit before sending. Automated sending only happens when you deliberately enrol a lead in a drip sequence, and sequences can be paused or the recipient can unsubscribe.

Can we track training and consulting enquiries as well as inspection jobs?

Yes. The service line field separates them, and each line can have its own pipeline and stages. Contacts are shared, so a client who buys both inspection and training appears once.

Can operations see what is coming before the PO arrives?

Yes. Estimated technicians and estimated days are recorded on each lead, so the operations manager can filter the pipeline for expected work and plan crews and certifications ahead of time.

What does it cost?

Pricing depends on your users, the apps you need and the customization scope, so it is by quote on request. Tell us about your company and we will come back with a proposal.

See the NDT CRM with your own pipeline

The quickest way to judge whether this fits is to see it with your kind of work in it. In a demo we set up a few leads that look like yours, an inspection enquiry, a training group booking and a consulting request, and walk through qualification, scoring, follow-up and quotation.

Book a CRM demo or request a quote for the Atlantis NDT ERP.

Works with

• Quotations: Inspection quotes built from rates, crews and scope, sent for e-signature.
• Contacts: One address book for clients, sites, vendors and technicians.
• AI Marketing: AI-assisted outreach and campaign content for NDT buyers.
• Email Marketing: Newsletters and campaigns to clients and prospects.
• Business Cards: Scan business cards from site visits and trade shows straight into CRM.
• Website: Company website and enquiry forms connected to CRM.

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