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From prospect to close: how your CRM works

Updated 2026-08-18

In two lines: the CRM connects your campaigns with your sales. Every inquiry comes in on its own as a prospect, you convert it into a deal that moves through your funnel, and when you close it you see which campaign it came from. Marketing and sales, in a single platform.

What is a lead's journey through the CRM?

The whole module revolves around a single cycle. Understanding it organizes your daily use:

  • A prospect comes in. A web form, an ad or WhatsApp generates an inquiry. It enters Prospects, the CRM's inbox, on its own, with its origin: which campaign it came from.
  • You convert it into a deal. You review the prospect and, with one click, convert it into a deal inside a funnel.
  • It moves through the funnel. The deal passes through the stages of your sales process (for example: contact → proposal → negotiation → close), dragging it across the board.
  • You work it. Each deal gathers the history in one place: the contact's email and WhatsApp come in on their own, and the calls you make or receive with Phones are logged on their own too, with their outcome and duration (see Call from the CRM: every call logs itself). Whatever you discuss through another channel, you record with Log activity. Right there you schedule the next follow-up.
  • It closes as a sale. When you win the deal, the CRM connects it with the campaign that originated it and you see the real revenue by channel.

The module's goal is that no follow-up slips through and that you know which marketing investment brings real sales.

Where is each thing?

The CRM section of the menu groups the whole module. These are the areas you'll use most:

  • Prospects — the inbox where new inquiries arrive before you convert them into deals.
  • Pipelines — your funnels and their stages. Here you define your sales process.
  • Deals — the open opportunities, with their history and value.
  • Activities — your agenda of tasks, calls and meetings, by day or by calendar.
  • People — every contact in your base, with their labels, their owner and their deals. From here you build lists by filtering, including by what happens in their deals.
  • Companies — the organizations those people belong to, with their own deals and history.
  • Performance — the reports: conversion funnel, revenue by channel and attribution (which campaign brought each sale).
  • Settings — where you define your pipelines, your lead sources, the assignment rules, your AI Team and the design of your Quotes (see Send a professional quote in PDF from the deal).

The same section holds the contact channels —WhatsApp, Phones, Mail, Calendar— plus Sequences, to automate follow-up, and Lists, to segment your base. See Centralize WhatsApp, email and calls in the CRM and Automate follow-up: Sequences and booking pages.

Before loading your first deal it's worth having your funnel ready. Start with Build your sales funnel: pipelines, stages and deals.

How are leads distributed across the team?

You don't have to assign each inquiry by hand, and this is the first thing worth getting clear: who handles a lead isn't decided by the source, it's decided by an assignment rule. The source defines which Pipeline and which Initial stage the lead enters; the rule defines whose it is.

Rules are created in CRM > Settings > Assignment, with New rule. Each one answers two questions, in this order.

1. Applies to — how far the rule reaches: Global, a specific Source or a Pipeline. If it's global, you also choose whether it applies to All (prospects and deals), Prospects only or Deals only.

2. How it assigns — how it picks the owner:

  • A fixed person — every lead always goes to the same owner.
  • Distribute across a team — they are spread among several salespeople, in two modes: Round robin, in turns, or By load, to whoever has the fewest open deals.
  • By territory — based on the lead's country, it goes to the salesperson of the territory that covers it. Territories are loaded beforehand in CRM > Settings > Territories.
  • No automatic assignment — leads stay without an owner until someone takes them.

For what doesn't fit that logic —routing by Deal value, by Source or by Country, among other fields— open Advanced (exceptions) inside the same rule: with Add rule and Add condition you build the exception, and in Assign to you choose who it goes to, or leave Use main method so it follows the general logic.

And Fallback if nobody matches defines plan B when the rule finds no one: Leave unassigned, Notify an admin or Assign to a specific user.

When a lead comes in, a single rule is applied: the most specific one that matches. The order of priority is source shortcut → source → pipeline → global, so the Global rule works as the safety net for everything that has no more specific rule. Before saving, Test rule simulates a lead with whatever data you want and tells you who it would be assigned to and why.

The notification lives in the same rule: Email the responsible comes switched on, and Also notify adds someone else —a supervisor, for example— in every case.

The notification depends on a rule matching. If none reaches that source, the lead comes in anyway, but it stays without an owner and nobody receives anything. That's why it's worth always having an active Global rule.

If you only want to solve one specific source, you don't need to go this deep: in CRM > Settings > Lead sources, each source shows its Owner line with Set up. It opens the same rule, already scoped to that source — it's a shortcut, not a separate configuration.

For someone to receive leads, they must first be a member of the account and have access to the CRM. How to add them: Add your sales team to the CRM.

What do I need to start using it?

The CRM works as soon as you go in, but it pays off much more with three things configured:

For a person on your team to work in the CRM, they must first be a member of the account. Then they are given CRM access and, if applicable, marked as CRM Admin: they manage salespeople and configure the module, without being a workspace administrator.

What's next?

With the vocabulary clear —prospect, deal, funnel, stage, source— you can now get the CRM operational in the order that avoids redoing work: Implement your CRM: the complete path and the order that avoids redoing work.

If you'd rather start with what's yours, go straight to the funnel: Build your sales funnel: pipelines, stages and deals.

Still have questions?

Ask MIA, the MB Suite AI assistant: open it with the MB AI button (⌘J) in the top bar. MIA knows the section you're in, so you can ask it about what you see on screen — and it can also answer how-to questions about using MB Suite.