CRM Basics
Setting the CRM up: your first week
The order to do things in when you are starting from nothing, and what to leave until later.
Last updated September 2, 2026
The CRM will happily let you start anywhere, and that is how networks end up with three spellings of every stage name. This is the order that avoids rework.
Day one — decide who is in
- Switch the CRM on for the tribes that will use it, under CRM Settings → CRM Tribe Access.
- In each tribe, open Team Members and include the people who should appear when work is assigned. Exclude the ones who never will — a shorter list is a faster list.
Day two — agree the words
These are organisation-wide and every tribe uses them, so they are worth a conversation before anyone types anything in.
| Set up | Decide |
|---|---|
| Lifecycle stages | The journey a company takes with you, start to finish. |
| Opportunity stages | The steps a deal passes through before it is won. |
| Lead sources | Where business comes from. Keep the list short enough to report on. |
| Company statuses | How you describe a company's standing, separate from where it is in the journey. |
Day three — get the data in
- Create any custom fields you know you need before importing — a field that does not exist cannot be mapped to a column, and that column is simply dropped.
- Import your companies and contacts from a spreadsheet, into the tribe they belong to.
- Check the result on a handful of records before importing the rest.
Day four — connect the mailboxes
Each rep connects their own Google or Microsoft mailbox from Team Members. Email with a contact then appears on that contact automatically, which is the single biggest difference between a CRM people use and one they do not.
Day five — start working, and only then automate
Assign the leads, book the first tasks, and let the team use it for a fortnight. Leave auto-advance triggers, Quick Rules and sales linking until you have watched real records move — automation built on a guess moves the wrong records, and unpicking that costs more than it saved.