Monday, 9:15 a.m. You open your CRM to see how sales are going. The “New” column contains 140 deals, some dating back to March. Three salespeople give three different explanations of what “in progress” means, and the forecast looks like a good joke with the punchline missing. This is a hypothetical scene, but the cause is familiar: the business bought the software without agreeing on how to use it each week.
For an owner, “how do we use a CRM?” rarely means “which button do I click?” You need rules for each enquiry, a way to review the pipeline every Monday and a way to tell future sales from a collection of forgotten records. I would start with a short owner routine, not another round of pipeline configuration.
Let’s use a hypothetical distributor of packaging for cafés and restaurants. It sells cups, boxes and custom printing, has three salespeople and receives repeat orders. A contact from spring might buy again in autumn, but that is no reason to leave every old quote marked “new”. This is an example for working out CRM rules, not a claim about a GrandMa client’s results.
1. Decide what the CRM records
Most systems store records for a contact, company, potential enquiry and deal. Names and relationships vary. Salesforce Trailhead, for example, distinguishes leads, contacts and opportunities. Zoho CRM has separate modules for leads, contacts, deals and tasks. Do not copy another product’s vocabulary word for word. Agree within your team when an enquiry becomes a deal and what counts as a completed sale.
For the distributor, a café contact might remain in the system for years. In May it asked for a trial batch of cups: one specific enquiry. In September it ordered boxes with a new print: another. You do not need two unrelated company records just because the orders differ. Nor should you keep May’s enquiry open until year-end if the decision is already known.
The minimum for an active deal is customer, subject of the request, owner, stage, date of the next action and enquiry source when known. Add a price or expected value when there is at least a reasoned estimate. Do not invent one just to fill a report. Keep a short history of what was agreed in the record. If someone else can pick up the conversation after a salesperson’s holiday without making the customer repeat everything, you have enough information.
2. A stage should describe a verifiable event
“In progress” is convenient but says almost nothing. Has the salesperson merely opened the email? Sent a price list? Has the customer confirmed the terms? Stages help people make decisions when they refer to events rather than a team member’s mood.
The hypothetical distributor could begin with this short pipeline:
| Stage | What must happen before moving here | Next action |
|---|---|---|
| New enquiry | The request arrived and a record was created | Assign an owner and a time for the first reply. |
| Need clarified | Product, quantity, deadline, city and printing requirements, if relevant, are known | Prepare a suitable offer. |
| Offer sent | The customer received the document or specific terms | Agree when to check back for a decision. |
| Terms agreed | The customer confirmed the order on the agreed terms | Hand it over for fulfilment and verify receipt. |
| Completed | The order was fulfilled and the outcome recorded | Set a repeat-order reminder if useful. |
| Lost | The customer declined or the need disappeared | Record the known reason without guessing. |
This is not a universal configuration. If a sample or legal review sits between the offer and agreement, add a stage only if the team makes a separate decision there. A twelve-column pipeline is too heavy for a sale completed in two calls.
Give each transition an evidence rule. “Offer sent” means the document or message was actually sent and appears in the history. “Terms agreed” does not mean “the salesperson thinks the customer is almost convinced”. The CRM reflects reality only as honestly as the team names its events.
3. The owner's 20-minute Monday routine
I would put this in the calendar before meetings. The owner is not there to rewrite every record. The aim is to spot exceptions that cost the team money or trust. Twenty minutes can be enough for an initial review of three salespeople; a larger team may need line managers and deeper sessions.
Minutes 0-3: overdue tasks. Open the list of actions past their due date. Look beyond the count. Pick a few deals and ask: is the customer waiting for an answer, or was the date in the record simply left unchanged? If the date means nothing, why set one?
Minutes 3-7: open deals with no next step. Filter records without a task or a return date. This may be the owner’s most useful list. The hypothetical distributor sent 40 price lists, but half the records say nothing about who will follow up or when. A report of 40 sent quotes looks busy. Without a next action, it is an archive of outgoing email.
Minutes 7-11: stuck deals. See how long records sit at each stage. Set thresholds based on the real sales cycle: a week may be normal for complex custom printing but worth discussing for a standard batch of cups. Do not push records forward to make the chart tidy. Find out whether the wait is justified and who knows the next date.
Minutes 11-15: new enquiries with no reply. Compare at least a sample of CRM entries with inboxes, forms and messengers. A record marked “new” does not prove the salesperson saw the message. If incoming requests never entered the system, the CRM shows only part of demand. We have written separately about the gap between chats and enquiry records.
Minutes 15-18: returning customers. Find those who normally order every month but have been absent for a while. Do not send everyone an automatic “we miss you” message. First check whether the order cycle has truly changed, who owns the relationship and whether a personal call makes sense now.
Minutes 18-20: three decisions. Choose one process failure, its owner and a review date. For example: “Website form enquiries have no owner. Assign one by Wednesday and send a test enquiry.” Do not finish with twenty complaints about salespeople. The routine works when something changes afterwards.
Three questions for a short team conversation: Which customer is waiting for our answer? Which deals have no next action? What in the data does not match reality? The last question can be uncomfortable, but it tells you whether the forecast is usable at all.
Keep the review from becoming click-by-click surveillance
An owner may want to open all 140 records and comment on each. That turns a twenty-minute routine into a three-hour discipline inspection. Salespeople then learn to fill fields for the owner, not to help the customer. Look at exceptions and recurring causes instead. If one salesperson has five deals without a next action, discuss a few examples. Do they not know what to do, or does the CRM make the action awkward to record? Those problems need different fixes.
Ask the salesperson to suggest the next step for a particular customer. The owner sets the standard but need not plan every call on the team’s behalf. If the same mistake appears across the team for two weeks, change the rule or the workflow. If it appears in one record, fix that record. The CRM is useful when it helps with such decisions, not when it merely offers another way to count employee clicks.
Show the team which decision you made thanks to their records. Perhaps the reasons for lost deals led you to change the minimum order size or rewrite custom-printing terms. Then recording information has an obvious purpose. If reports exist only for a quarterly presentation, salespeople have little reason to maintain them carefully each day.
4. Team rules you can paste into a work chat
Record every new enquiry that needs a reply in the CRM and assign an owner. Before creating a contact, search by phone, email or company for an existing one.
Every open deal has a next action and date. After a call or email, add a short note on the same day: what the customer asked, what we promised and when we will return.
Change a stage after the event, not to improve a report. If the offer was not sent, do not mark it “sent”. If the customer did not agree, do not mark it “agreed”.
Close a lost enquiry with the reason we know. If the reason is unknown, say so. Report it on the same day if a form, chat or email fails to reach the CRM.
This message will not replace training. Walk through one real enquiry together and compare how each salesperson records it. Where interpretations differ, clarify the rule using the example rather than adding another paragraph of instructions. Check access rights too: team members need relevant context, though not necessarily unrestricted access to the entire database.
5. Look at three reports once a month
Movement between stages. How many enquiries reached the offer stage? How many offers became agreed orders? How many orders were fulfilled? Do not compare those proportions if salespeople interpret stages differently. Make the data consistent first.
Reasons for losses. Did the customer really decline because of price, timing, availability or minimum quantity, or did they simply stop replying? A report in which half the deals are marked “other” offers little guidance. But do not force someone to invent a reason they do not know.
Sources and enquiry quality. Which channel brings requests that become sales, rather than merely open records? A source can be unknown or mixed; label it honestly. If a form does not pass campaign tags through, fix measurement before drawing conclusions. We cover a coordinated record of enquiries, work and payments in a separate guide.
A stage-to-stage percentage without a deal count and period can mislead. If you sent five offers in a month, one additional sale changes the percentage sharply. Do not make a major budget decision from one small slice. Compare periods and inspect the records behind the number.
6. If the CRM is already cluttered, hold one “amnesty” session
Do not begin with “everyone must fill in the old records by tonight”. People may assign random statuses mechanically, leaving the data even less trustworthy. Set aside one work session, perhaps two hours, and agree on its purpose: restore an honest picture, not find someone to blame for every six-month-old record.
Start with open deals from recent weeks. Compare them with messages, payments and agreements. Close completed or lost work with its known outcome. For older unanswered deals, decide whether getting in touch is still appropriate or whether to close them while noting the lack of confirmation. Do not delete a duplicate at random: it may contain a distinct history or another contact. After the clean-up, set a check date and a rule that keeps the clutter from returning.
If the conversation exists only in a messenger and the CRM record is empty, add a short account of what was agreed. Our guide to one order record after a chat helps a team avoid arguing about who promised what. You need not copy every old message. The current promise, owner and next step matter most.
7. When to add automation
Automate a repeated action once the team has agreed on the process. A form can create a record, a new stage can create a task, and the approach of a regular repeat-order date can remind a salesperson. But an automatic task without an owner or a completion check merely adds digital clutter.
Test the first route end to end: submit a sample enquiry, check the record and absence of a duplicate, its owner, the notification and what happens after the salesperson replies. Deliberately break one step too. Temporarily remove an integration’s access, for instance, and see who learns about the error. Automation has made the process worse if it silently loses an enquiry.
We help design these routes through GrandMa automation and AI systems. Bring one real enquiry route and show where it currently gets stuck. Installing a CRM is a technical action. Teaching the team to leave a truthful next step every day is a management task.