Choose your CRM's initial configuration by type of business

Milestone 2 of 8 · Your starting configuration

In two lines: there are four complete, ready-made configurations and only one is yours. Choose the one that most resembles your business and adjust it after a month of real use: starting with someone else's configuration and correcting it is far better than spending two weeks designing your own.

When you finish you'll have: decided, on a sheet, which stages, which lost reasons, which fields and which way of distributing you'll use. Still without touching a single screen.

How long it takes: about forty-five minutes of decisions, not screens.

Which configuration is mine?

Find the line that describes your business and open only that one. The others won't help you.

If your business is like this…	Open this one
You sell to companies, the cycle is long, there are few high-value leads and more than one person decides	CRM configuration if you sell to companies, by project
You sell to individuals, many inquiries come in and whoever answers first wins	CRM configuration if many inquiries come in and whoever answers first wins
You charge every month: subscriptions, retainers, maintenance or contracted services	CRM configuration if you sell subscriptions or recurring services
You sell online and the inquiry reaches you before the purchase	CRM configuration if you sell online
What you want to serve are customers who already bought from you	None yet: read the box below

Don't fit clearly into any, or fit into two? Break the tie with a single question: how many days usually pass between the first inquiry and the close? If it's days, it's the many inquiries one. If it's weeks or months, it's the companies by project one, even if you sell to individuals. And if you keep charging after closing, it's the recurring subscriptions one, no matter how long the first sale took.

Don't pick the many-inquiries one just because it's the simplest. It comes with rotting days of one to three days and round-robin distribution, which is exactly what a sale that closes within the day needs. In a sale that takes weeks, it fills your board with false alerts and hands the lead to whoever's turn it is, instead of whoever knows the account. Choosing the approximate one today is better than choosing the perfect one in two weeks, but choosing the wrong one makes you distrust your own alerts.

And if what I serve are customers who already bought from me?

MB Suite has no help desk: there are no tickets, no service-level agreements, no support queue, and no response time as a metric.

It's not for you if you commit response times to your customers by contract, or handle a high volume of support inquiries per day. Look for a help desk tool.

It does work for you if you're a small team that serves customers over WhatsApp and needs every inquiry to have an owner and be recorded. In that case, create a separate pipeline with stages Received · In progress · Waiting on customer · Resolved, all with probability 0, and use Rotting days as the closest thing to a response agreement you'll have.

If you do this, don't mark "Resolved" as the won stage. Every resolved case would count as a won deal and, with zero value, it sinks your average ticket and your close rate as soon as you look at both pipelines together: CRM > Performance opens on your default pipeline, but it has the All pipelines option and your goals can span all of them. Keep your goals and your reports scoped to the sales pipeline.

Do I need more than one funnel?

Only if the negotiation process is different. Three questions settle it:

Are the steps the same? If selling maintenance and selling a construction job goes through the same stages and only the amount changes, it's one funnel with a "service type" field.
Does "won" mean the same thing? A signed purchase order, a subscription that starts and two consulting sessions are, most likely, different processes.
Is it worked by the same people with the same logic? A tenders team has nothing to do with the one handling inbound inquiries.

If the only thing that differs is the product, the customer or the salesperson, separate funnels are not needed.

Which entity does each piece of data belong to?

This applies to all four configurations:

If it changes when the same person buys from you twice, it belongs to the deal (service type, term, payment method).
If it's stable about the person, it belongs to the person (job title, how they found us, role in the decision).
If it describes the business, it belongs to the company (industry, employees, area).
If you only know it before qualifying, it belongs to the prospect (declared budget, urgency).

And one preference that applies to everyone: choose Select over Short text whenever you can. A list can be filtered, grouped and crossed in reports; "Buenos Aires", "buenos aires" and "BsAs" are three different values to the system.

What's next?

Open your configuration from the table above, write down its numbers and move to the screen: Set up the CRM foundations: team, funnel and custom fields.

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.