Receive your first lead today, before setting up everything else

Milestone 1 of 8 · The first lead

When you finish you'll have: a real inquiry inside the CRM, with its origin, converted into a deal in your funnel.

Why start by receiving and not by configuring?

Because receiving doesn't mortgage any later decision. The three things that do force you to redo work if done at the wrong time are importing your history, creating your own fields and turning on AI. Receiving a lead isn't on that list.

And because a CRM that already has something inside gets finished; an empty one gets abandoned.

What do I touch before the first lead?

Only two things, and both live in the same place: CRM > Settings > Pipelines.

1. The currency. Open your pipeline and change the Default currency to yours. It comes in dollars and defines the currency of every new deal, of the forecast and of all totals.

2. The stages. MB Suite already created a pipeline called Pipeline principal the first time someone entered the CRM, with stages and lost reasons loaded. Edit that one, don't create a new one: if you create another you end up with two, and the default one pointing at nothing.

Rename the stages in Stage name so they're your real process, use Add stage if one is missing and delete the ones you won't use. Then, Save changes.

Three rules and move on:

• Few stages. Each one has to represent a real change in the conversation, not an internal nuance.
• A single won stage, marked with Won stage.
• Don't create a "Lost" stage. In MB Suite losing isn't a stage: a lost deal keeps the stage it was in, and that's how you can see at which point of the funnel people drop off. If you create that stage, you hide that data from yourself.

Don't obsess over probabilities or rotting days yet: that's fine-tuned in Set up the CRM foundations: team, funnel and custom fields, with the numbers already recommended for your type of business.

How the editor works in detail: Build your sales funnel: pipelines, stages and deals.

Which source do I connect first?

Just one: the channel through which inquiries already reach you today. A source is what turns a contact into a lead; without it, a message is just a chat and a form is just an email.

They're created in CRM > Settings > Lead sources with New source. Choose the one you can resolve right now:

Whichever it is, in the source choose Destination: Prospect inbox. Today you want to see the lead come in and convert it yourself; Direct deal comes later, once you know what enters through each channel.

How do I check it worked?

Send yourself an inquiry, from a phone or an email that does not exist in your base.

• The inquiry shows up in CRM > Prospects.
• It carries its origin, that is, you can see which source it came from.
• You can open it and use Convert to deal: you choose pipeline, Initial stage and owner, and confirm with Create deal.
• The deal shows up in CRM > Pipelines, in the column you chose, and with your currency.

If the inquiry doesn't show up anywhere, the source isn't receiving: check Leads don't come into the CRM or don't sync. If the WhatsApp conversation shows up but nothing was created, the source tied to that line is missing.

How the inbox is worked every day: The Prospect inbox: receive, qualify and convert into a deal.

What's better left undone for now?

Waiting here isn't laziness: it's the right order, and each of these has a concrete reason.

• Don't import your history yet. If you create a custom field after importing, that field stays empty for everything old and there's no bulk edit to fill it. First you decide your fields, then you import.
• Don't wrestle with custom fields yet. You need to know what data you'll want to filter and cross, and that's decided much better with your type of business's starting configuration in front of you. That's the next article.
• Don't turn on the AI Team yet. An AI seat without approved templates, without a source or without an assignment rule stays active and does absolutely nothing, without any error. It's the hardest thing to diagnose in the whole product, and it's not worth doing today.

What's next?

This already works. What's next is making it yours: choosing the configuration that matches the way you sell, in Choose your CRM's initial configuration by type of business. It's forty-five minutes of decisions, not screens, and it's what avoids the two weeks of designing a funnel from scratch.