Structure your records
Separate people from organizations from deals. Contacts hold individuals, companies hold the organization and its relationships, and opportunities hold the commercial conversation. Custom fields belong on whichever object you'd filter by, industry on the company, role on the contact, source on the opportunity.
- 01Keep required fields to the minimum a record needs to be useful
- 02Use picklists rather than available text for anything you'll report on
- 03Agree a rule for duplicates before importing
Design your pipeline
Stages should describe an observable change in the buyer's world, not an internal feeling. “Proposal sent” and “Verbal agreement” are testable; “Warm” is not. Five to seven stages is usually enough, each with an entry condition and a probability.
- 01Define what must be true to enter each stage
- 02Set a probability per stage for forecasting
- 03Decide what counts as lost and capture the reason
Assign owners and next steps
Every open record needs one owner and one dated next action. That single rule prevents the most common CRM failure, a pipeline full of deals nobody is actually working. Review records with no next step weekly.
- 01One accountable owner per record
- 02A dated next action on every open opportunity
- 03A saved view of records with no next step
Automate follow-up
Use workflows to catch what people miss rather than to send more email. Stalled-deal alerts, renewal reminders and post-meeting task creation cover most of the value with none of the noise.
- 01Alert the owner when a deal ages past a stage limit
- 02Create follow-up tasks when an activity is logged
- 03Notify a manager when a large deal changes stage
Report on what matters
Start with four figures: open pipeline value, weighted forecast, win rate and average cycle time. Add activity volume only if you intend to act on it, measuring calls without a coaching plan changes nothing.
- 01Pipeline by stage and owner
- 02Weighted forecast for the current period
- 03Win rate and loss reasons
- 04Average days per stage
Keep the data honest
A CRM decays without a maintenance habit. Run a short monthly hygiene pass: close dead deals, merge duplicates, reassign orphaned records and archive contacts who have left.
- 01Monthly: close or re-date stale opportunities
- 02Quarterly: merge duplicates and fix owners
- 03Export a backup before any bulk change