Milestone 3 of 8 · The foundations

In two lines: with your starting configuration in hand, you get the team, the complete funnel and your own fields ready. It's the last thing you do before loading data, because a field created after importing stays empty forever in everything old.

When you finish you'll have: every rep with their role, your funnel with probabilities, rotting days and lost reasons, and your custom fields created and visible.

How long it takes: about seventy-five minutes — fifteen for team roles, thirty for the funnel and thirty for custom fields.

What do I need before starting?

Your starting configuration in front of you, with its stages, probabilities and rotting days. Without it you'll improvise the numbers, which is exactly what this article avoids. Open it in another tab and keep yours at hand: companies, per project · many inquiries · recurring subscriptions · online sales. Haven't chosen yet? Choose your CRM's initial configuration by type of business.
Be an account administrator, or have the CRM Admin role.
The name and work email of every rep.

How do I add my team?

It's two steps and the order is not negotiable: first the person is a member of the account, then they are a CRM sales rep.

Invite them to the account in Settings > Members, with their work email. That's their role across the whole account, not in the CRM. See Invite your team and manage access and Roles and permissions: who can see and do what.
Add them to the CRM in CRM > Settings > Team, with Add member, and give them their CRM role.

The three CRM roles:

Sales rep — only sees their own deals and contacts. Eligible as assigned owner.
Manager — sees the deals, contacts and mailboxes of all sales reps.
CRM Admin — full CRM access: manages the sales reps list, sees all mailboxes and configures the module. Not a workspace admin.

Anyone who isn't a member of the account cannot be a CRM sales rep: they won't show up in the list to add. And account administrators already appear as CRM Admin by inheritance, so that role can't be changed for them from here.

For now, create the rows and set the roles. Each rep connects their own email, signature, calendar and booking page later, from their own session: that's in Distribute leads and get your team operating the CRM every day. Module detail: Add your sales team to the CRM.

How do I finish the funnel?

In CRM > Settings > Pipelines, open your pipeline. If you haven't touched it yet, edit the Pipeline principal that MB Suite already created instead of building a new one.

With the numbers from your starting configuration, complete the six controls of the editor:

Default currency — yours, not dollars. If you already changed it at the start, check it anyway: it defines the currency of every new deal, of the forecast and of all totals.
Stages — the name of each one in the Name column, and Add stage for the missing ones. Minimum two.
Probability % — the typical close percentage of each stage. It's what feeds the Weighted value of the Forecast; without it, the forecast means nothing.
Rotting days — after how many days without movement you want the deal to be flagged as stalled. It's the most useful alert in the product and almost nobody sets it up. Your starting configuration already gives you the numbers.
Won stage — only one per pipeline.
Lost reasons, with Add reason — they belong to each pipeline.

Close with Save changes.

Don't create a "Lost" stage. In MB Suite losing is not a stage: the lost deal keeps the stage it was in, and that's why you can see at which point of the funnel people drop off. If you create it, you hide that data from yourself.

If your configuration calls for two pipelines (for example new sales and portfolio), create both now — with New pipeline — and decide from the start in which one each deal is born. Moving a deal later is possible (from the deal, with Move to other pipeline, or in bulk with Move pipeline), but the deal leaves the first pipeline's funnel: it stops counting in its statistics and its journey through the previous pipeline's stages doesn't carry over, so stage-to-stage conversion rates across two different pipelines cannot be calculated. If you don't want to lose that statistic, the simple decision is to have a single pipeline. If you accept losing the overall metric but not the first pipeline's, the option is to create a new deal in the second pipeline and leave the original where it was.

How to work the funnel day to day: Build your sales funnel: pipelines, stages and deals.

How do I create my custom fields?

This is the step most often skipped and the most expensive one. A field created after importing three thousand deals stays empty in those three thousand deals.

In CRM > Settings > Custom fields, first pick the Entity in the selector at the top of the page — Deals, People, Companies, Prospects or Products — and then use New field:

CRM > Settings > Custom fields: New field dialog with a Select field and its options

Entity first, before opening the dialog: it's the decision that can't be changed later. A field is born in one entity and stays there; if you get it wrong, you delete it and create it again in the right one.
Name — what your reps will see. The internal key is generated on its own from the name (you'll see it under the field in the list): don't worry about it.
Type next. There are many types available and each brings its description; if in doubt, See examples shows you the full catalog with a use case per type. The type can't be changed once created either.
If you chose Select (or multi-select), load the Options with Add option: write the Label of each one — what your reps will see — and pick its color. The internal value is generated on its own.
Help text — what the rep sees under the field. Use it: it's what prevents everyone from filling it in differently.
Required — think twice. A required field the rep can't know when creating the deal forces them to make something up.
Show in spreadsheet and Show in detail — where it appears. It comes with detail on and spreadsheet off: turn on the spreadsheet if you want it as a column in the list.

Three rules worth more than the list of types:

Prefer Select over Short text whenever you can. A list can be filtered, grouped and cross-referenced in reports.
Don't create an Amount-type field if you sell subscriptions or quote by lines. The deal has its own Quote, which calculates the total and the monthly recurring revenue on its own — on screen you'll see it as MRR — and lets you analyze by product line. A custom field does neither.
Don't overdo it. Eight fields that get filled in are worth more than thirty empty ones.

Deleting a field removes it from the spreadsheet and the detail, and the data already loaded stays stored — but you stop seeing it and being able to filter by it. So, if a field isn't being used, first remove Required and take it out of the spreadsheet; delete it only when you're sure.

Do I load the products?

Only if you sell a defined catalog or subscriptions. It's what enables the line-by-line Quote inside the deal and the analysis by product line; if you sell subscriptions, load them here with Recurring charge on, because that's where the monthly recurring revenue comes from.

It's done in CRM > Settings > Products. See Products and catalogs: your manual list and synced feeds.

If you sell custom services without a catalog, skip it: you can add free lines to each quote.

How do I check it turned out right?

Every rep appears in CRM > Settings > Team with the correct role.
The pipeline shows your currency, not dollars.
Every stage has its Probability % and Rotting days loaded.
There is exactly one stage marked as Won stage, and no "Lost" stage exists.
The Lost reasons are yours, not the ones that came by default.
You create a test deal and see your custom fields in its detail, with their help text.
The Select fields offer the options you loaded.

What if something doesn't show?

The field doesn't appear in the deals list. It's missing Show in spreadsheet. It appears in the deal detail anyway.
The field doesn't appear in the detail. It's missing Show in detail.
You created the field in the wrong entity. Create it in the right one and delete the other before importing anything: afterwards it's much more expensive.
You don't see the settings section. You don't have the CRM Admin role and you're not an account administrator.

What's next?

With the foundations ready, you can now load your history without fear: Prepare and verify loading your historical base into the CRM. If you're not bringing history, jump straight to milestone 5: Connect WhatsApp to the CRM: number, line and source and Connect forms and ads, and know which campaign each lead came from.

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.

Set up the CRM foundations: team, funnel and custom fields