Writing
25 pieces
Notes from between the systems.
Notes on connecting business systems — reporting, CRM data quality, revenue attribution and the automation that removes the manual repair work in between.
Reporting
31 August 2026
8 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Connecting your CRM to Power BI without the Monday export
There are three ways to get CRM data into Power BI and they fail differently. Choosing between them is less about the connection than about where you are willing to let the business logic live.
Read
Attribution
31 August 2026
8 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Marketing attribution tools: four categories wearing one label
Most attribution shortlists compare a CRM report, a tracking platform, an ad network's own dashboard and a statistical model as though they were competing products. They answer different questions and cannot be ranked against each other.
Read
Platforms
31 August 2026
8 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
What GoHighLevel actually is, and who it is wrong for
Ask two people what GoHighLevel is and you get two unrelated answers. It is not really a CRM, and judging it as one produces the wrong verdict in both directions.
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Consulting
31 August 2026
8 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
RevOps is not sales ops with a bigger remit
Sales ops makes one team's process work. RevOps makes marketing, sales and finance agree on what a number means. The difference is not seniority — it is which arguments you are allowed to settle.
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Platforms
24 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
The real n8n question is not what it can do. It is whether you want to run it.
Everything that makes n8n different from the hosted automation tools traces back to one property: you can run it yourself. That is a genuine advantage and a genuine operational commitment, and the licence is not quite what people assume.
Read
Systems
24 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Connecting your CRM to ad platforms is a two-way job. Most people do half.
Pulling leads out of Meta and Google into the CRM is the easy direction, and the one everybody builds. The return trip — telling the ad platform which of those leads became money — is the one that changes what the algorithm does.
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CRM
24 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Four people say "we need a CRM" and mean four different systems
The acronym covers a database of interactions, a pipeline tool, a reporting layer and a shared inbox. Most failed CRM projects are the moment nobody noticed the room was discussing different things.
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Attribution
24 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Your attribution model is a policy, not a measurement
Three systems reporting three different numbers for the same channel are not disagreeing about facts. They are applying three different credit-splitting rules, and each one is doing exactly what it was told.
Read
Consulting
24 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
A CRM consultant is mostly paid to decide which system wins
The technical half of integration work is well understood and rarely the hard part. The expensive part is that two systems hold the same field, both are edited by people, and nobody has ever written down which one is right.
Read
Consulting
24 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Do not buy n8n workflows. Buy a system someone else can run.
The usual engagement ends with a set of working automations and one person who understands them. Six months after they leave, nobody can say which workflows are live, and the useful ones are indistinguishable from the abandoned experiments.
Read
Attribution
24 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Marketing attribution, explained by following one buyer
Someone has asked you what is working. The honest answer involves explaining why the platforms already claim to know, why their numbers add up to more customers than you have, and what you can actually say instead.
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Attribution
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Revenue attribution starts with the invoice, not the ad pixel
You know the cash came in. You cannot say which activity produced it. That is a join problem.
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Automation
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Lead routing fails in the gap between the form and the owner
Speed-to-lead looks fine when the clock started on the wrong record. The rules have to match the messy path.
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Reporting
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Reporting automation is a pipeline you check, not a spreadsheet you rebuild
The weekly export-reconcile-paste loop is the product. The dashboard is just the last screen.
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Attribution
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
B2B marketing attribution fails when three systems tell three stories
GA4, the CRM and finance are each complete in their own way. The gap is the missing identity and a model nobody agreed.
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Systems
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
CRM integration is a source-of-truth problem, not a connector problem
Ads, CRM, payments and finance will keep disagreeing until you decide which system owns which field.
Read
CRM
22 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Choosing a CRM for a small business: four questions that decide it
Not the feature comparison. The four decisions that separate a CRM still holding the truth in two years from one that quietly turns back into a spreadsheet.
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Automation
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
The one column that stops your automation repeating itself
Almost every automation that misfires does so for the same reason: it has no way of knowing what it already did. That is a database problem, not a workflow problem.
Read
CRM
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Five CRM data quality checks worth running before you buy another tool
Most CRM problems are not solved by a better CRM. They are solved by finding out how much of the data in the current one is wrong — which takes an afternoon.
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Consulting
22 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
What a fractional head of data actually does in the first 30 days
Not building dashboards. The first month is spent finding out which numbers the business already relies on, and which of those are wrong.
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Reporting
22 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Do you need a data warehouse, or just better definitions?
A warehouse is often the right answer. It is almost never the right first answer — and buying one to fix a disagreement about what a lead is produces a very expensive version of the same disagreement.
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CRM
22 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
GoHighLevel to Salesforce: what to sync, and where attribution breaks
The integration is not the hard part. Deciding which system owns which field is — and getting that wrong produces two CRMs that disagree with each other forever.
Read
Automation
22 August 2026
8 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
n8n vs Zapier vs Make: what actually breaks at scale
The comparison tables all measure the wrong things. What separates these tools is not features or pricing — it is what happens on the day a workflow fails at three in the morning.
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Attribution
22 August 2026
7 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
How to connect ad spend to booked revenue
Most businesses can tell you what a click cost. Far fewer can tell you what it earned. The gap is four handoffs long, and every one of them drops something.
Read
Reporting
20 August 2026
6 min read
Mehrdad Fashami
Why your CRM and your finance system never agree
Three systems, three numbers, and none of them wrong. The gap is a definitions problem wearing a data problem's clothes.
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Have a messy system?
That is usually where we can help.
Tell us what is not working, what is still manual, or what you cannot currently see clearly. If it is not something we should take on, we will tell you that too.
Engagements are scoped to an outcome and priced as a fixed scope or a retainer, not by the hour. If the work is small enough to bill hourly, it is not work we should be taking.
hello@core-x.solutionsStart with whichever is true
- 01“Our numbers do not match between systems”
- 02“Reporting takes too long every week”
- 03“We cannot explain where revenue comes from”
- 04“Leads are falling through the process”
Taking on new work.