1. Before you touch Salesforce

  • Write your sales process on one page first: how a deal actually moves from first call to signature. If the team can't agree on paper, Salesforce will only automate the disagreement.
  • Define your stages by exit criteria ("demo completed AND economic buyer identified"), not by activity or hope ("Negotiation").
  • Decide your one source of truth for revenue numbers. If the board deck comes from a spreadsheet, fix that decision now.
  • Pick a single owner for the org — even at 10 people. Shared ownership is how orgs rot.

2. Pipeline architecture

  • 5–7 opportunity stages, maximum. More than that and reps guess.
  • Every stage has a written definition visible in Salesforce (use stage descriptions or a help field).
  • Probability percentages reflect your actual historical conversion, not the defaults.
  • A "Closed Lost" reason field with a short, fixed picklist — free-text lost reasons are unreadable at scale.
  • Renewal/expansion tracked separately from new business from day one. Untangling them at Series B is miserable.

3. Fields and hygiene

  • Under 25 custom fields per object at this stage. Every field is a tax on every rep, every day.
  • Required fields only where a deal literally cannot progress without them — three or four per stage transition, max.
  • Picklists over free text everywhere you'll ever want to report on the answer.
  • Validation rules that block bad data at entry (close dates in the past, deals closing with empty amounts).
  • A documented naming convention for Accounts and Opportunities.

4. Forecasting you can show a board

  • Forecast categories (Commit / Best Case / Pipeline) defined in writing and reviewed in every pipeline meeting — categories nobody maintains are worse than none.
  • One pipeline dashboard the CEO/CRO actually opens: coverage vs. target, stage movement, deals stuck >30 days, closed vs. quota.
  • Close dates that mean something: a rule (human or automated) that flags any deal whose close date has slipped 3+ times.
  • Weekly pipeline snapshot (even a simple reporting snapshot) so you can answer "what changed since last month?" with data.

5. The minimum automation set

  • Lead routing that matches how you actually sell — round robin is fine; broken territory logic is not.
  • Auto-create follow-up tasks on stage changes where a next step is non-negotiable.
  • Email integration (Gmail/Outlook) connected for every rep, so activity logs itself.
  • Slack (or equivalent) notifications for closed-won and for deals entering Commit.
  • Nothing else. Every automation you add now is something you'll rebuild when the process changes at Series B. Automate what's stable, not what's aspirational.

6. What to deliberately skip at this stage

  • CPQ — quote out of documents until pricing stabilizes.
  • Territory management — you don't have territories, you have reps.
  • Custom objects for things a field would handle.
  • Marketing attribution modeling — get UTM-to-lead-source basics right and move on.
  • Any AppExchange package you can't name a weekly use for.

The test

When this checklist is done, three things should be true: a new rep can learn your pipeline in an afternoon, your CEO opens one dashboard instead of asking anyone for numbers, and your forecast for the quarter is a number you'd defend to an investor. If any of those aren't true, something above is broken.

— Max Dubravin, Founder, Soleil Consulting Group. I do this setup as a fixed-scope two-week engagement, and it's just me — you work directly with the person doing the build. Get in touch if you want it done right the first time.