This article outlines five essential tips to improve your CRM setup. Each tip is designed to build on what you already have, helping you capture the key fields and structure needed to turn your CRM into a powerful financial and operational tool.

A well-structured CRM is critical not just for sales, but for your entire business. Accurate CRM data enables smarter decision-making across teams — from invoicing and revenue forecasting to customer success and renewals. 

If you are new to CRM data, this article provides clear and simple definitions. 

Tip 1: Create Separate Pipelines for New Sales and Renewals

Having separate Sales and Renewals pipelines is critical to understanding:

• Performance of your Sales and Customer Success Teams
• Accurately forecasting the probability of closing deals
• Ensuring you can easily track all renewals (and that none slip through the cracks) 

If all your deals are in 1 pipeline, your forecast will be consolidated, which means that you will loose the ability to assign realistic probability weights for closing each type of deal.

Your CRM Help section can explain how to create a new pipeline. The Tips below will guide you through auto-creating deals for this pipeline.

Tip 2: If your CRM data is a mess, start with these 2 steps

We frequently hear that CRM data can be messy. It can be time-consuming and even overwhelming to clean up the entire CRM system, so we recommend that you start with these two steps:

First, ensure that you have a few active pipelines.  If you have old or unused pipelines, this doesn’t matter. This data can be parked until you need it. ScaleXP will ignore any pipelines that are not in active use.

Second, for your active pipelines, ensure that you have a clean view of:

• Deals Closed Won, including the actual contract value and the close date
• Last 2 stages of the sales pipeline

Deals Closed Won is important because it indicates what needs to be invoices. 

The last 2 stages of a sales pipeline are the most likely to close or convert to actual revenue.  In building a revenue forecast, these stages have valuable information. If you can include more stages, this is helpful, but the last 2 stages are essential.

ScaleXP makes it easy to include specific pipelines and stages in your forecast, giving you the flexibility to start with a few deal stages and extend to include more when you are ready.

Tip 3: Ensure all deals include these fields

We highly recommend ensuring that all deals include:

• Contract Start Date
• Contract End Date
• Total Contract Value
• ARR (if relevant to your business)

These fields are essential to understanding when your sales will convert to revenue. 

Some CRM systems come with these fields pre-created. In other cases, you will need to create a custom field. Your CRM Help section will explain how this can be done.

Tip 4: Use Automation to save time

We recommend automating as much as you can using the workflows/processes in your CRM. Your CRM Knowledge Base will explain how this is done.

The best Automations to create initially are:

• Auto-populate Contract Start Date and Contract End Date
• Auto-create a Renewal deal as soon as a New Sales is Closed Won. The Renewal deal should be in your Renewals pipeline and include a Contract Start Date and Contract End Date.

Tip 5: Talk to us

When in doubt, talk to our team because there are a lot of variables between your CRM and your accounting platform. If you have questions about your specific business context, just drop us a quick email - support@scalexp.com.

How ScaleXP uses your CRM data

ScaleXP connects directly to your CRM and accounting software to unify deal, contract, and invoice data. 

Once set up, ScaleXP automatically builds a detailed revenue forecast using fields like contract value, start/end dates, and pipeline stages. You can easily filter by pipeline, stage, or probability to create a live forecast that updates in real time — no spreadsheets required. 

This automation gives your finance and leadership teams instant visibility into future revenue and renewals.