Your CRM Setup Checklist

Step 1 — Define your pipeline stages

Start here, before touching any tool. Revisit the guidance in Chapter 2 and turn it into a finished, agreed pipeline before importing a single contact.

• Write down every stage a real deal has passed through in your last ten to twenty wins and losses.
• Reduce that to five to seven clear stages, each with an explicit "what moves it forward" trigger.
• Add "Lost" as a real, actively-used stage with a short reason field, not a dumping ground.
• Get the whole team to agree on stage definitions in one sitting, rather than letting each person interpret them differently.

Step 2 — Import and clean existing contacts

Every business starting a CRM already has leads and customers scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes and old tools. Bring them together properly rather than dumping them in as-is.

• Pull every existing lead and customer list out of spreadsheets, inboxes, and any prior tool into one source file.
• Remove obvious duplicates and clearly dead contacts before importing, not after — a messy import is far harder to clean up once it is inside the CRM.
• Map each imported field — name, phone, source, stage — correctly, rather than dumping everything into a single notes field.
• Assign an owner to each imported record so nothing lands in an unowned pile that nobody feels responsible for.

Step 3 — Connect your capture sources

With clean data in place, connect every place a new lead can arrive so nothing needs to be manually retyped, as covered in Chapters 3 and 7.

• Connect the website contact form and any chat widget so submissions create CRM records automatically.
• Connect ad platform lead forms if the business runs paid campaigns.
• Connect the email or newsletter tool so engagement shows up directly on the lead's record.
• Test every connected source end-to-end with a real dummy submission before trusting it in production.

Step 4 — Set up follow-up automation

This is the step that turns a database into a working system, following the approach in Chapter 5.

• Attach a default task or reminder to each pipeline stage — what should happen, and by when.
• Define the follow-up cadence: how many touches, across which channels, over what period.
• Set a clear rule for when an unresponsive lead moves to Lost or a nurture list, rather than sitting untouched indefinitely.
• Make logging an interaction fast enough that people will actually do it in the moment, not put it off.

Step 5 — Train the team and review after 30 days

A CRM is only as good as the habits built around it. Close the setup loop properly.

• Walk the whole team through the pipeline stages, capture sources and follow-up rules together, in one session — not by email.
• Agree on daily habits: when leads get logged, when tasks get checked, who reviews stalled deals.
• After 30 days, pull the basic metrics from Chapter 8 — stage conversion, pipeline velocity — and compare what is actually happening against what was assumed at setup.
• Adjust stage definitions, cadence, or ownership based on what the first month's data shows, then repeat this review roughly every quarter.