Lifecycle stages that mean something, routing and ownership, a handover both sides trust, and a way to bring back the deals that went quiet. The other module people come for.
A CRM nobody trusts is worse than no CRM, because the team keeps a private spreadsheet and the reporting quietly describes a company that does not exist. This module rebuilds the parts that decide whether a lead becomes a customer, and it does it in a way that survives the next reorganisation.
The test for a lifecycle stage. Show the definition to one person in sales and one in marketing, separately, with ten real records. If they sort them the same way, the stage is defined. If not, you have a label rather than a stage, and every report built on it is fiction.
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Week 3 | Audit of what exists, which fields are actually used, and where records currently get stuck. |
| Week 4 | Lifecycle stages and properties agreed and built. First workflow live. |
| Weeks 5 to 6 | Routing, ownership, handover and rejection paths. |
| Weeks 7 to 8 | Reactivation, plus the migration of historical records onto the new stages. |
If you have no pipeline yet because you have no leads, build lead sources first. A perfect lifecycle model with nothing flowing through it is an expensive diagram.
The first two weeks produce a status map of your own stack. Every piece named, colour coded by how proven it is, gaps included. You keep it whether or not we work together.