CRM Essentials

3 areas

CRM Essentials

Three areas make up your daily-use core. Tap one to see what it covers.

01

Contacts

Your smart address book, every client, lead, and prospect with their full history attached.

02

Conversations

Your unified inbox, every email, text, and call in one centralized place.

03

Opportunities

Your pipeline, every deal tracked through the stages it actually moves through.

Key terms

Definitions

Tap any term to expand it.

The digital profile holding everything about a person: details, communication history, notes, tasks, and activities.

The conversations area, showing every email, text, and call in one centralized location tied to the right contact.

The stages a lead moves through, from new lead to closed.

Labels added to contacts for organization and filtering, which can also trigger automated workflows.

Settings that respect a contact's preferences by specifying which channels, text, email, or call, they don't want to receive.

In practice

Common Use Cases

👤

Getting Comfortable with Contacts

Add a real contact, add a tag, add a note. This is your database, and it only gets useful once it has real people in it.

💬

Getting Comfortable with Conversations

Reply to a real message from inside the system instead of your outside email, so the whole team sees the history.

📊

Getting Comfortable with Opportunities

Create one real opportunity and move it through a stage, so you can see the pipeline actually update.

🔍

Learning to Search and Filter

Quick Search and Smart Lists are how you find things fast once your database has more than a handful of contacts.

Help me do it

Things To Do

Finish these before moving to the next lesson. They only take a few minutes.

0 of 3 done

Add one real contact and give them a tag and a note

Reply to one real conversation from inside the system

Create one opportunity and move it to the correct stage

⚡ Tips

You get out of it what you put into it. The more contacts and conversations you add, the more useful the system becomes.
Always archive a conversation instead of deleting it, deleting is permanent and takes the history with it.
Set yourself as the contact owner whenever you bring someone in, it keeps accountability clear.
Move opportunities out of the New Lead stage as soon as you make first contact, don't let that column pile up.
This is the area you'll return to daily. Everything else in onboarding only has to be set up once.

Check yourself

Quick Knowledge Check

Answer a few quick questions to lock in what you just learned. Miss one and we'll show you the right answer.

0 of 4 answered

What should you do with a conversation you're finished with but might need again later?

Labels you add to a contact for organization, filtering, and to trigger workflows are called ____.

True or false: the unified inbox brings together email, text, and calls in one place.

A contact's preferences for which channels they don't want to be reached on is called ____.

Help me apply it

Try This With Your Favorite AI

Copy a prompt below and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever AI tool you use. Fill in the bracketed details and it'll help you write your own version for your business.

👤 New-Contact Capture Checklist

You are a CRM operations consultant helping me decide what to capture every time a new person enters my database. My context: - Where my new contacts usually come from: [referrals, forms, events, cold outreach] Give me: - A "capture every time" list of fields I should never skip - A "capture when you can" list of nice-to-haves - One line on what to write in the notes field right after a first conversation Finish by asking me: "What's your most common contact source? Tell me and I will tailor the list to it.".

📊 Pipeline Stage Designer

You are a sales operations consultant helping me define opportunity stages that match how my deals actually move. My context: - What I sell and my typical sales cycle length: [describe] Give me: - A recommended stage list, five to seven stages, each with a one-line definition - For each stage, the thing that must be true before a deal moves forward - Which stage is most likely to become a graveyard, and one habit to prevent it Finish by asking me: "Where do deals currently stall for you? Tell me and I will tighten that stage's criteria.".