Stop your sales team from running in opposite directions. This 4-step checklist gets your CRM out of chaos and into a system your reps will actually use — with pipeline visibility in 30 seconds.
Step 1: Map Your Real Deal Stages
- Review your last 5 closed-won deals
- Write down every step that actually happened (not what you think should happen)
- Identify: Was there a discovery call? Demo? Proposal? Decision-maker loop-in?
- Create pipeline stages from those real steps (not CRM defaults or blog templates)
- Build a Kanban view with your custom stages
"Your stages should reflect how your deals actually move, not an idealized playbook."
Step 2: Define Ownership & Required Fields
- Assign a deal owner to every deal — no orphaned deals
- Associate the right contacts/people to each deal
- Identify 3 key qualifying questions (e.g., Budget confirmed? Decision maker? Timeline?)
- Create ONLY the fields that answer your Monday morning questions
- Remove or skip any field that won't show up in a report you'd actually look at
"Every field you add is something a rep has to fill in. The more junk, the less they fill in anything."
Step 3: Set Up Workflows That Catch Skipped Steps
- Stalled deal alert — notify deal owner when a deal hasn't moved in 14 days
- Stage gate enforcement — block/alert when required fields are missing at stage transitions
- Auto-task creation — create follow-up tasks when deals hit key stages (e.g., "Send recap email within 24 hours")
- Auto-fill close date — when a deal is marked won, record the close date automatically
"A Google Doc nobody opens doesn't enforce anything. Make the system catch the skipped steps."
Step 4: Build Your 30-Second Dashboard
- Report 1: Active deals by stage — see where deals are getting stuck
- Report 2: Stalled deals — deals untouched for 14+ days, grouped by owner and stage
- Report 3: Deals closing this month — filtered by close date
- Verify you can answer these 3 questions in under 30 seconds:
- How many deals are live right now?
- Which ones are stuck?
- What's supposed to close this month?
"If you can't answer these 3 questions by opening one screen, you don't have visibility yet."
Want us to build this for your team? Book a free consultation — we figure out how your team actually sells, make the systems match, and get it done in weeks, not months.