Your first-week checklist

The first week is when CRM rollouts succeed or fail. Spend a few hours each day doing the right setup, in the right order, and your team will use TatvaCRM in month two. Skip the setup and it becomes another tool nobody opens. This checklist is the day-by-day playbook.

Day 1: foundation

• Create your workspace (guide)
• Verify your email — check spam if it doesn’t arrive in 2 minutes
• Set up your profile (name, photo) — this is what your team sees
• Promote one trusted person to Admin or co-Owner
• Spend 30 minutes clicking around — Contacts, Companies, Deals, Pipelines, Settings
• Make a note of every question you couldn’t answer yourself — those are the things to fix this week

Day 2: configure for your business

Don’t skip this. A workspace that looks generic from day one is one your team will resist using.

• Edit your default pipeline. The 5 default stages (Discovery → Qualified → Proposal → Negotiation → Closed) won’t match your business. Rename them. Add 1-2 stages if needed. Don’t go above 8 stages.
• Add 3-5 custom fields. Whatever fields your team currently tracks in Excel — sector, deal source, decision-maker name, target close date, competitor — add them. See Custom fields.
• Set up your lifecycle stages. The default (Subscriber, Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist) is HubSpot’s. If your business uses different terms (Enquiry, Prospect, Client, Lost), rename them.
• Configure email signature. Settings → Profile → Email signature — what shows up on emails sent from TatvaCRM.

Day 3: import existing data

Do this before inviting the team. Empty workspaces feel useless; workspaces with your real data feel essential.

• Clean your Excel sheet. Remove duplicates. Standardise phone formats. Decide which columns matter.
• Import Companies first (if B2B), then Contacts, then active Deals.
• Assign owners during import. Don’t skip — see Import existing data.
• Spot-check 20 random records after import. Did names import correctly? Phone numbers cleaned? Companies linked to contacts?
• If something looks off, use the import history page to undo and re-import. The first hour of fixing data is much cheaper than the next year of bad reports.

Day 4: invite sales leadership

• Invite your sales head + one senior rep + your Sales Ops person. Three people, max.
• Walk them through your custom-configured workspace. Show them the pipeline, your custom fields, the imported data.
• Ask them: “What’s missing? What’s wrong?” Fix everything they flag today.
• Get the sales head to confirm the pipeline matches their definition of how deals actually flow. Get them to add 1-2 of their real deals manually to see what it feels like.
• Get them to commit to using the CRM for the next 5 days as a personal experiment. They become the role model for the rest of the team.

Day 5: invite the rest of the team

• Send invitations in batches of 5. Bigger batches mean nobody gets individual attention.
• Schedule a 30-minute live walk-through — Zoom or in-person. Don’t leave them to figure it out from emails alone.
• During the walk-through, have each rep open one of their own records and update it live. Pick a real customer they spoke to yesterday. The experience of seeing their work in the CRM is the unlock.
• Set a small day-one expectation: “By end of today, every active deal you’re working should be in TatvaCRM with the next step recorded.”

Days 6-7: real work, not training

• Have your team do their actual job — calls, emails, follow-ups — through TatvaCRM. No parallel Excel sheets allowed.
• Hold a daily stand-up reviewing the pipeline view together for 10 minutes. “What’s in Discovery? What’s stuck in Negotiation?”
• End of week 1, ask each rep: what’s working, what’s painful, what’s missing? Fix everything reasonable before week 2.
• Spend an hour reviewing dashboards. Is the data clean enough to make decisions on? If not, your team needs more discipline next week.

Things to avoid in week 1

• Don’t over-customise. 50 custom fields on day one is a graveyard. 5 is a starting point.
• Don’t invite the whole team on day one. Stagger by role.
• Don’t skip the data import. Empty workspaces feel useless.
• Don’t allow parallel Excel sheets. One source of truth or none.
• Don’t expect adoption without enforcement. Pipeline reviews in TatvaCRM, not in WhatsApp.
• Don’t enable every module. Start with the core. Add modules when there’s real demand.

What week 2 looks like

• Daily 10-minute pipeline stand-up via TatvaCRM
• Weekly review: deals by stage, deals stuck, deals won, deals lost — all from the dashboard
• Custom fields refined based on what your team actually used and what was noise
• Custom reports built for the specific KPIs your business tracks
• Integrations switched on (email, WhatsApp, calendar) once the basics are running

What to read next

• Create your tenant
• Invite your team
• Import existing data
• Custom fields
• Pipelines and stages