Implementing a CRM: what to prepare before the project starts
The most common question we hear once a company has decided to implement a CRM is: "What do we need to prepare on our side?" The short answer: not much, but the right things. You do not need a requirements document or a complete list of fields. You need a handful of clear answers, and you can gather them in a single afternoon. Below is the list we usually send before the first conversation, with an explanation of why each point matters.
1. People and roles
Who talks to customers, and what does each person do? Not the org chart — the reality. Who answers the phone in the morning, who picks up Facebook messages, who sends quotes, who delivers, who handles complaints. In a small company one person may do four things; in a larger one, a single role may be split across three people.
Why it matters: roles become permissions, notifications and screens in the CRM. If we do not know who does what, we configure something generic that nobody recognises as their own work.
What to prepare: a list of names (or job titles) and, next to each, two or three sentences about what that person does with customers every day.
2. Lead sources and rough monthly volumes
Where do enquiries come from? Website, Facebook and Instagram, phone, Viber or Telegram, referrals, a physical shop, trade fairs, partners. For each one, an order of magnitude per month: "about 30 from the website, 50–80 from Facebook, nobody has ever counted the phone." Exact figures are not required; we need to know which two or three channels are the big ones.
Why it matters: every lead source is an integration, and integrations largely determine how long the project takes. We connect them in order of volume — the channels that bring the most enquiries first.
3. The real sales stages — including where deals get stuck
Not the ideal stages, the ones that actually happen. What comes after first contact? Is a quote sent? Is there a site visit, a measurement, a trial? How long does it usually take to reach a decision? And, most importantly: where do customers drop off? "After the quote they stop answering", "we wait for the supplier's confirmation and forget about them", "they come back with questions after delivery and nobody knows who picks those up".
Why it matters: the CRM pipeline has to mirror these stages, and the sticking points become automations — a reminder, a task, an escalation to the manager. If we draw the process "as it should be", the team will not use it.
4. The 3–5 questions the manager wants answered at any time
What would you like to see on your phone on a Tuesday at 4 pm, without asking anyone? The usual ones: how many enquiries came in this week and from where; how many have not been answered; how many quotes are pending; who is working on what; why we lost the last few deals.
Why it matters: these questions define the mandatory fields and the reports. If you want to know "why we lose", the loss reason becomes mandatory when a deal is closed. If you do not have the question, we do not add the field.
5. Existing data
Where do contacts and history live today? In the sales team's Excel, in a separate Excel kept by accounting, in an old CRM nobody opens any more, in the owner's phone contacts, in Viber chats. You do not need to clean it beforehand — we handle that together during migration, duplicates and missing fields included. You only need to know where it is and who has access.
A common mistake: the company stops everything for two weeks to "tidy up the Excel" before the project. Wasted time — we will map the fields to the structure of the new CRM anyway, not to the old one.
6. Technical accesses and who holds them
Who administers the website (an agency, a freelancer, someone in-house)? Who is admin on the Facebook page and the ad account? Who is the telephony provider, or who manages the PBX? Does the company have its own email domain, and who manages it?
Why it matters: for the integrations we will ask for specific, limited accesses, and tracking down the person who "built the website four years ago" can delay a project more than the configuration itself. We do not need passwords now — we need a name and a phone number.
7. An internal owner and how fast they can validate
The project needs one person in the company who answers questions, validates the proposed structure and decides when there are two options on the table. It can be the owner or the head of sales. What does not work: "we'll all discuss it and get back to you next week".
Decide from the start who this person is and how quickly they can respond — a day, two? The pace of validation is one of the factors that most influences how long the implementation takes.
8. Who will use the CRM daily — and on what
Does the team work at a desk, in a browser, or from a phone, in the car and at the customer's premises? This question decides more than it seems. For field teams, a Telegram interface — the lead arriving as a message with buttons, the card updated from the chat — has a much better chance of actually being used than an app you have to navigate through. For office teams a web interface is the better fit. The two can be combined. See what a Telegram CRM is and when it makes sense.
9. What NOT to prepare
- A requirements document. Specifications written before seeing the system are, almost always, rewritten after the first demo. The 45–60 minute conversation replaces them.
- The complete list of fields. That emerges in the process-mapping workshop, when we look together at what is mandatory and what is optional. A list drawn up in advance tends to have 40 fields, of which 8 get used.
- The platform choice. Custom CRM or Bitrix24 — we recommend after seeing the process, the team and the integrations, not before. Details on both: custom CRM and Bitrix24 implementation.
- Cleaned data. See point 5.
Two companies, the same week — an example
A fictional example, to make clear how preparation changes the pace of a project.
Company A, a distributor with six people, arrives at the first conversation with the list above written on a single page: three salespeople and a dispatcher, enquiries from the website and Facebook plus the phone, four real stages and one clear bottleneck ("after the quote, if the customer does not come back, nobody calls them again"), three questions from the director, an Excel of contacts and the name of the agency that manages the website. The head of sales is the internal owner and replies the same day. The process map is approved within two days, integrations start on day three, and parallel testing begins at the end of the first week.
Company B, similar in size, arrives with "we want a CRM so we can have some order". The first conversation turns into discovery: who picks up Facebook messages only becomes clear at the second meeting, the website access is held by a former employee, and the director validates the structure after "the accountant has had a look too". Nothing serious — it all gets resolved — but each point adds days of waiting, and the same two weeks of configuration stretch over five or six.
The difference is not our effort; it is the waiting time between stages.
How long it takes, if the points above are clear
A customised standard CRM can typically be implemented in around 14 days, depending on the integrations and the complexity of the processes. Projects with many integrations, migration from several sources or specific business logic take longer, and we say so at the first conversation. The nine points above do not shorten the configuration itself; they shorten the pauses between stages — which, in practice, are what stretches a project.
The full methodology, with all 10 stages: CRM implementation · what a CRM means for a company in Moldova: CRM Moldova. If you would like to go through the list together, the first conversation comes with no obligation.