①The first days

Three things, no more, and in this order:

1. Connect your mailbox. Without a sender, nothing goes out, and everything else depends on it.
2. Create or import five contacts. Not the whole list — five, which show you what a contact file looks like.
3. Create yourself as a contact. That way you can play through every sending run completely to yourself.

What you should not do on the first day: import the entire address list, write all the templates, define all the categories. All three will change as soon as you have worked with it for a week.

Allow one hour. If it takes longer, you have taken on too much at once.

After the first day, spread over the week:

• Import contacts — now the whole list, with a dry run.
• Define categories. Only now, when you have the database in front of you.
• Write one template for the first mail. One, not three.
• Create a campaign — and do not start it. Just to go through the wizard once.
• Send a test mail to yourself and read it on your phone.
• Check deliverability and commission the three DNS entries. This takes the longest externally, so get it started early.

At the end of the week, you have a clean database, a checked template and a sending run that could go. That is enough.

Create yourself as a contact, with an address you can read — ideally a private one, so that you see what a stranger sees.

This lets you play through the whole route:

• Create a contact, assign a category, write a note.
• Write a template and look at the preview.
• Send a test mail and read it in the real mailbox.
• Reply, and see whether the reply is assigned to the contact in the inbox.
• Set a follow-up and work through it.

That is the complete induction, and it takes half an hour. Everything you learn after that, you learn on the job.

What is safe: creating, changing, deleting, templates, creating campaigns, test mails. What is not: switching a campaign live.

When these five things are in place:

1. Mailbox connected, and a test mail has arrived.
2. Deliverability checked — SPF, DKIM, DMARC set. Without that, the first sending run is very likely to end up in spam, and the first impression of a new sender address counts.
3. Template checked — sent to yourself, read on your phone, placeholders checked.
4. Recipient list looked at. Not the number, the list. Really looked through it.
5. Legal basis clarified. Why are you allowed to write to these people?

And then: start small. Twenty to fifty recipients for the first campaign. If something is wrong, it affects twenty people and not two thousand.

Almost everything except the mailbox, contacts and one template. Specifically:

• All three stages of templates. You only need the second once the first campaign is running.
• Fine-grained categories. Start with three; more will follow.
• Task lists and follow-ups. Useful, but not at the beginning.
• Reports, evaluations, location maps. Without data, they show nothing.
• The add-on modules — opportunity search, visibility, candidates, contracts. Each of them is a topic of its own.
• Tidying up the navigation. Only once you know what you need every day.

The most common mistake during introduction is wanting to set everything up at the same time. You cannot judge what you do not use.

Very few. To begin with, there are four:

• Contacts — the address book.
• Templates — what you write.
• Sending centre and campaigns — how it goes out.
• Inbox — what comes back.

Everything else is added when you need it: opportunities when you track enquiries and projects, contracts when you have documents signed, opportunity search for new enquiries, visibility when you look after websites.

Your way of keeping it clear: tidy up the sidebar. Whatever you do not need, you hide — that only applies to you and can be undone at any time.

And: hidden does not mean switched off. The area remains accessible if you look for it.

With three to five, and ones you would actually send by.

A split that works almost everywhere:

• Existing customer — knows you, has bought.
• Prospect — knows you, has not bought.
• New contact — does not know you.

Everything else is a refinement that emerges from the work. What you should not do: take over the categories from your old system. They were made for a different tool.

The touchstone is always the same: would you write a different email to this group? If not, it is not a category of its own but a tag.

With a single idea: a CRM is an address book that remembers what happened.

Everything else follows from that:

• Contacts are the addresses.
• Notes and activities are what happened.
• Follow-ups are what is still to come.
• Campaigns are mail merges to a selection of them.

You do not need to understand more at the start. The terms you come across — stage, category, template, deliverability — explain themselves as soon as you have used them once.

The quickest way in is the tour: at the top right of every area, and it shows things on the real interface instead of in a text.

Not with training. With a benefit that someone notices in their own working day.

What works:

• Enable one thing that saves work first. Usually that is the follow-up — it replaces slips of paper and mental reminders.
• Thin out the sidebar. Twenty entries are off-putting.
• Use it yourself. If the boss keeps making her notes in Outlook, nobody else will do it differently.
• Two weeks of transition in which both are allowed. After that, a cut-off date.

What does not work: everyone at once, everything at once, with a two-hour demonstration. What sticks from that is the impression that it is complicated.

And: name one person who answers questions. Not you.

Five minutes in the morning, then alongside your work:

In the morning: 1. Open the overview. What is due today — follow-ups, tasks, appointments. 2. Go through the inbox. What has come in overnight, and whose is it.

During the day: - After every phone call, a note on the contact and, if necessary, a follow-up. - Create new contacts straight away, do not collect them.

At the end of the week: - Take a quick look at the running campaigns. - Reschedule whatever has been left undone instead of ignoring it.

The whole trick lies in the note after the phone call. Anyone who leaves it out has an address book instead of a CRM after three months.

The note directly after the conversation. Two sentences, while you still have the receiver in your hand.

Why this one in particular: it is the only information that cannot be reconstructed. Addresses can be added later, categories updated, campaigns repeated. What was said in a phone call is gone after two days.

The second most important: set the follow-up at the same moment. “I will get back to you in three weeks” is an intention; a follow-up is an appointment with yourself.

Together, both take forty seconds per conversation. That is the entire effort a CRM costs in everyday work — and the difference between one that holds up and one that stays empty.

Six, and all of them cost time rather than money:

1. Wanting to set everything up at once. Leads to nothing getting finished.
2. Importing the whole old list unchecked. Dead records and duplicates come along and get in the way from day one.
3. Too many categories. Twenty categories are no longer maintained after four weeks.
4. Forgetting deliverability. Only noticed when the first campaign lands in spam.
5. Starting too big. The first campaign to two thousand recipients.
6. No notes. The mistake that only shows after months and then cannot be made up.

Numbers 4 and 5 are the expensive ones: a burnt sender address and an unfortunate first campaign have a long after-effect.

After about six to eight weeks — and the tipping point can be recognised:

• You look something up in the system instead of asking someone.
• You create a note without thinking about it.
• You notice that a follow-up has reminded you of something you would have forgotten.

Until then, it feels like extra work. That is normal and passes — provided the basics are right: a clean database, few categories, a mailbox that works.

If it is still not running smoothly after three months, it is almost never the program. Then either the habit is missing or the agreement on who maintains what.