This is the view from above. Each milestone has its own article with the steps.
If you've never used a CRM, first read From prospect to close: how your CRM works. It's ten minutes and gives you the vocabulary — prospect, deal, funnel, stage, source — that the rest of this path takes for granted.
What are the milestones and what do I have when each one is done?
Don't think in "work phases": think about what you'll be able to check when you close each one.
| Milestone | When you finish you'll have… |
|---|---|
| 1. The first lead | A real inquiry coming into the CRM on its own and converted into a deal. See Receive your first lead today, before setting up everything else |
| 2. Your starting configuration chosen | Decided which stages, which fields and which destination your type of business uses. See Choose your CRM's initial configuration by type of business |
| 3. The foundations | Your team with its roles, your funnel with your stages and your own fields created. See Set up the CRM foundations: team, funnel and custom fields |
| 4. Your history inside | Your old companies, people and deals loaded, with their totals verified. See Prepare and verify loading your historical base into the CRM |
| 5. Every channel coming in | WhatsApp, forms and ads creating leads on their own, each with its origin. Two articles, one per chain: Connect WhatsApp to the CRM: number, line and source and Connect forms and ads, and know which campaign each lead came from |
| 6. The team operating | Every lead with an automatic owner and a notification, and every rep with their email and their calendar. See Distribute leads and get your team operating the CRM every day |
| 7. AI working (optional) | A seat that converses, qualifies and hands you the lead ready. See Put the AI Team to work: the preconditions nobody validates for you |
| 8. The implementation closed | Seven end-to-end tests that pass. See Check that your CRM was set up correctly: the final tests |
After milestone 8 begins the only thing that decides whether the CRM is useful: Sustain the CRM for the first 30 days so your team really uses it.
How much work is it really?
It's worth knowing before you start, because it doesn't get solved in one afternoon: one week if you're not bringing history, two or three if you are. And it isn't one person's time: there are steps only each rep can do from their own session, and others that depend on whoever manages your website and your domain.
What stretches the calendar is almost never the work itself. Each milestone tells you how long its part takes.
What doesn't depend on me?
Two waits belong to Meta and only appear if you're going to use WhatsApp. That's why they're triggered on day one, not the last day.
- Business verification of your Meta portfolio. It usually takes between two and five days. It's what unlocks the cap on WhatsApp numbers you can register; it's done once per portfolio, and if your business was already verified for something else, there's no need to redo it. It runs in parallel with everything else.
- Approval of your WhatsApp templates. Meta reviews them and usually answers within an hour to a day. It can approve them, reject them or change their category. See WhatsApp templates: create, categories, and Meta approval.
What access do I need to secure before starting?
It's the number one cause of implementations left half-done for weeks: in most companies these five accesses are in the hands of five different people.
| Access | What for | Who usually has it |
|---|---|---|
| Administrator of the MB Suite account | Practically every step | Whoever signed up |
| Administrator of the Meta portfolio | WhatsApp and Meta ads | Marketing, or the agency |
| Whoever edits the website, or the tag manager | The pixel and the form | Development, or the agency |
| Whoever manages the domain's DNS | Your own email domain | IT, or whoever bought the domain |
| A card that accepts international charges in dollars | WhatsApp billing, which Meta charges | Administration |
Who does what if an agency implements it for me?
Three things are worth settling in writing before starting. It's the conversation almost nobody has, and the one that hurts when the relationship changes.
- The Meta portfolio, the WhatsApp number and the payment method stay in your name, with the agency inside as administrator. It's the only thing in the whole implementation that doesn't live in MB Suite, and therefore the only thing you could lose.
- The CRM Admin role is always held by someone on your side, in addition to the agency. Without it you can't touch your own CRM's configuration.
- The agency does the configuration and you approve it. Your conversations, contacts and deals live in your Account: in MB Suite a Workspace is the agency's home, and each of its clients is an Account inside that Workspace. See Workspace and Account: how your clients are organized.
What happens if I skip the order?
Four decisions are taken before others for a product reason, not bureaucracy. None of the four gives an error message: you simply find out late.
- Custom fields and pipelines go before loading data. A field created after importing stays empty for everything old, and there's no bulk edit to fill it in afterwards (at most, in People, you can re-import the file with Merge data to fill the blanks; for deals and companies, no).
- The historical load goes in cascade: companies, then people, then deals. The other way around, deals end up loose, with no contact or company.
- Each pipeline's default currency is defined before the first deal. It comes in dollars and can't be corrected in bulk: if you don't invoice in dollars, all your reports end up wrong.
- AI goes last. A seat missing a precondition doesn't fail with an error: it does nothing, and finding that out takes days.
Where is each thing configured?
The CRM isn't configured entirely from the CRM. If at any point you get lost, come back to this table.
| Where | What lives there |
|---|---|
| CRM > Settings | Team, AI Team, Pipelines, Lead sources, Assignment, Territories, Lines, Products, Quotes, Conversions and Custom fields |
| CRM (the module) | Importing your data, creating WhatsApp templates, working deals and verifying |
| Settings (for the whole account) | Members, Integrations, Data Sources, Tracking and Branding |
| Management > Web Forms | Your website's form |
| Outside MB Suite | The Meta portfolio and your ad platforms |
Where do I start today?
With milestone 1, today: Receive your first lead today, before setting up everything else. It's about forty minutes and ends with a real inquiry inside the CRM.
Before starting, write down on a sheet today's numbers, even if they're estimates: how many leads you receive per month, how many you contact, how many you win and your average ticket. Without that "before", in thirty days you won't be able to show whether the CRM was worth it — and that conversation will happen.
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.