CRM setup checklist: what setting up a CRM involves, and what it costs

At Elivance, a single enquiry-to-CRM setup starts at €800 and the full lead system at €3,000, excluding VAT and software subscriptions. Most setups go wrong in the decisions made, or skipped, before the software.

Below is the checklist I use, in the order I use it, for a business of 10 to 100 people. It works for any CRM, from a large vendor's product to an open-source one.

Before you touch the software

1. Name the one problem the CRM must solve first. "Enquiries get lost between the website and sales" is a good first problem. "Everything about customers in one place" is a wish, and it produces a CRM with forty fields nobody fills in.
2. Define a lead, a contact and a deal in your own words. Is someone who downloaded a price list a lead? Is a returning customer asking for a quote a new deal? Write the answers down, because the team will ask and you want everyone to hear the same answer.
3. Draw your stages. Usually four to six, from "new" to "won" or "lost", each with a clear rule for moving to the next one. If two people would put the same deal in different stages, the rule needs another sentence.
4. Decide who owns what. Every new enquiry needs a named owner and a deadline for the first personal reply. This is also where your speed to lead target comes from; more on handling enquiries is in enquiries, CRM and customer support.
5. List your sources. Website form, email, phone, messenger, events, referrals. Each one should be recorded on the lead, otherwise you will never know which channel is worth paying for.
6. Choose the minimum set of fields. Name, company, contact, source, owner, stage, next step and its date. Anything else stays out until someone can name the decision or the report it will be used in.

Data and privacy

7. Collect only what you need, and decide how long you keep it. The GDPR principles include data minimisation and storage limitation (Article 5(1)(c) and (e)): personal data should be limited to what is necessary, and kept no longer than needed. Define retention and review periods, and a process for handling erasure requests, including cases where a legal obligation requires some data to be retained.
8. Clean before you import. Old spreadsheets usually hold the same company under three spellings and contacts who left years ago. Merge duplicates and remove dead records first; importing a mess makes the new CRM untrustworthy from day one.
9. Set access rights. Who can see all deals, who sees only their own, who can export. It is much easier to decide this before the import than to take rights away later.
10. Put a processing agreement in place where it is needed. If a provider will process personal data on your behalf, put an Article 28-compliant processing agreement in place before that processing starts. Confirm the parties' roles, subprocessors and any international transfers with your adviser. This is not legal advice.

Setting it up

11. Configure stages, fields and owners exactly as decided above, and nothing more for now.
12. Connect your entry points. Website form and email first, other channels after. Each enquiry should arrive with its source, without anyone retyping it. If tools need a connector between them, n8n is one option; its costs are in n8n pricing for a small business.
13. Set up the automatic acknowledgement: an instant message to the person confirming that the enquiry arrived, who will reply and by when, marked as automatic.
14. Create the task rule: every new enquiry creates a task for its owner, with the deadline you promised. Then define the stop rules in your lead follow-up system.
15. Prevent duplicates: a repeated form submission or a double click should update one record, not create two.
16. Decide what AI may do, if anything. Drafting replies to common questions for a person to check is a reasonable start; see AI email replies for customer service. Sending to customers without a person's yes is not where I would start.

Testing and go-live

17. Test with records marked TEST. Send a test enquiry through every channel and check: one record, correct source, one acknowledgement, one task. Then delete the test records.
18. Test failure. What happens if the email service is down when an enquiry arrives? The enquiry should still be saved and the step retried, with someone alerted.
19. Train the team on one page. What to do with a new enquiry, how to move a deal, where to write the next step. In my experience a one-hour session and a short written guide get read, and a long manual does not.
20. Look at it after two weeks. Which fields are empty, which stages are skipped, how long enquiries wait. Adjust the setup to the way people work, not the other way round.

How much does it cost to set up a CRM?

The cost has three parts, and it helps to see them separately:

• The subscription. Per user or per account, depending on the vendor. It should be on your account and paid by you, so you keep control of the tool and your data.
• The setup work. The decisions above, configuration, connecting channels and testing. This depends mostly on how many entry points you have and how messy the existing data is.
• Data cleanup and integrations. Often the part people forget to budget for. Merging three spreadsheets or connecting an old accounting system can take longer than configuring the CRM itself.

For reference, my own prices: a single setup, such as website enquiries going into your CRM with an automatic reply, is from €800; the full lead system (enquiries from several channels, acknowledgement and tasks, missed call text back, agreed follow-ups) is from €3,000. Both are excluding VAT, quoted as a fixed price with a written scope; the details are on the lead system page.

From our own system: how I am setting up the CRM for this site

For elivance.eu I am setting up Frappe CRM, an open-source CRM (AGPL-3.0 licence), on a server in the EU. The plan:

• each enquiry from the site form or the site assistant is saved first, then added to the CRM as a lead with its source;
• before creating a lead, the system checks whether that enquiry already exists, so a repeat does not create a duplicate;
• the person gets an instant confirmation, I get a task, and I reply personally within one business day;
• test records are marked TEST and deleted after the test.

This is the intended workflow. It must pass an end-to-end test with TEST records before launch; I am not presenting it as a working system or a measured result.

The short version of the checklist

Decide the problem, the definitions, the stages, the owners, the sources and the minimum fields. Limit and clean the data. Configure only what you decided. Connect channels, add the acknowledgement and tasks, block duplicates. Test with TEST records, test failure, train on one page, review after two weeks.

Want help setting up your CRM?

If you would like this done for you, or checked before you start, the lead system covers it. The first conversation is free.

Sources

• Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), Article 5, EUR-Lex, accessed 18 October 2026.
• Frappe CRM, github.com/frappe/crm, licence AGPL-3.0, accessed 18 October 2026.
• Elivance lead system, elivance.eu/services/lead-system (our own page). Prices from the Elivance service specification dated 17 October 2026; excl. VAT.