Setting Up For Success
Ahoy builds your CRM from your email, calendar, and meetings, so what you get out of it depends on what reaches it. A handful of settings and habits make the difference between a CRM that fills itself in and one with gaps. Most take a minute, and all of them are easier to get right at the start than to fix later.
This guide covers:
- Four settings every team member should check
- Linking records so they stay connected
- Agreeing conventions as a team
- Keeping records clean
- A setup checklist
Before you begin, you'll need:
- A connected Google or Microsoft 365 account. See Getting started with Ahoy.
- About ten minutes. Each team member checks their own settings – they apply to your connected account, not to your whole team.
- An account admin for the pipeline and field decisions later in this guide.
Four settings every team member should check
These decide how much of your work reaches Ahoy, and how much of it your team can see. Each person checks their own, so it's worth doing together – one teammate who's missed a step leaves a gap in what the rest of the team sees.
1. Share your calendar and email with your team
Go to Settings > Email & Calendar. On your connected account, make sure Make calendar events public to team by default and Make emails public to team by default are both set to On.
This is what lets a teammate opening a shared contact, company, or deal see the meetings and emails behind it. Without it, the record is shared but its timeline isn't, so two people can open the same deal and see very different histories.
Both settings also apply to everything that's already synced, so turning them on later brings your past emails and meetings into view for the team too.
Any event you've marked as private in Google Calendar or Outlook stays private in Ahoy, even with calendar sharing on.
If you've connected more than one account, check the settings on each one.
2. Turn on the Ahoy Notetaker
The Ahoy Notetaker is the setup we recommend for every team. It gives the most complete and consistent summaries of any source – a written summary, action items, and key topics, with names checked against the invite. Those summaries feed follow-up AI Actions and future prep briefs.
Go to Settings > Notetaker, under AI, and turn on the recording toggle. Next set it to External only. External only records your calls with customers and prospects and leaves internal meetings alone. You can still skip any individual meeting from its header, or keep a list of people and domains to always skip.
If everyone on your team uses the Notetaker, summaries look the same whoever ran the call, which makes them much easier to compare.
3. Connect any other recorders properly
Go to Settings > Meeting Summaries and connect any recorder you want in your meetings. Before you connect each one, check the What you'll need section on its card.
This step is important. If a recording tool isn't set up correctly on its own side – auto-record off, transcription not enabled by your admin, the desktop app not running – nothing reaches Ahoy, even if the connection itself looks fine.
After your first recorded call, check the recorder's card. It should say Receiving summaries, with a recent time for the last summary. Each source gives you something different – see Meeting summaries for what each one provides.
4. Capture calls that weren't on your calendar
At the very bottom of the Meeting Summaries page, set Capture notes without a calendar meeting to On. It's off by default.
When it's on, Ahoy saves notes from calls that weren't on your calendar – the quick "let's jump on a call" kind – and creates a meeting for them, so they don't slip through.
Link records so they stay connected
Ahoy connects records through links – a deal to its company, its contacts, and its owner. Ahoy’s AI actions will prompt you or automatically update CRM like contacts, companies and deal entries based on context from your meetings, emails, and other sources. However, the below is general information on keeping your CRM data clean.
Give every deal an owner. The owner is a teammate in Ahoy, not a name. If you're importing deals, use an email column for the owner – it's matched against people who already have an Ahoy account, so invite your team first.
Link every deal to a company and at least one contact. Linking a contact brings their emails and meetings onto the deal's timeline, and it's how the deal shows up in your prep brief before the next call. When you import deals, map both.
Give every company a domain. Companies Ahoy creates from email always have one, but companies added by hand or imported may not. Imports match companies on domain, so include a domain column in your file to avoid duplicates – a website column on its own won't do it.
Copy names exactly as they appear in Ahoy and match on email for owners and domain for companies wherever you can.
Keep close dates current. Moving a deal between stages doesn't change its close date, so update it as the deal moves. A deal with no close date doesn't appear in your forecast at all.
Agree your conventions as a team
Account admins set up pipelines, stages, and fields, and these are the decisions worth making once, early. They're simple to agree before your team builds its own habits, and much harder to untangle after.
Make stages mean the same thing to everyone. Fill in each stage's description in Settings > Pipelines. Ahoy reads it to judge whether a deal belongs in that stage, and it tells your team what the stage means.
Keep 0% and 100% for closed stages. Ahoy treats a 100% stage as won and a 0% stage as lost. An early stage set to 0% will be read as lost, however open the deal is. See Pipelines and deals.
It can be good practice to give separate sales motions separate pipelines. If you win new customers and also grow existing ones, give each its own pipeline – one for new business and one for renewals and expansion, for example. You can then view them apart on the Board, or filter by pipeline in the Table, instead of relying on stage names to tell them apart. If your deals are already mixed together and you’d like to change that, select them in the Table and use Move to pipeline.
Agree what a deal amount means. Decide whether it's annual value or total contract value, which currency to use, and, if you track downgrades or churn as deals, whether those are entered as negative amounts.
Check for an existing field before creating a new one. Custom fields are easy to create, including mid-import, which is how teams end up with two fields for the same thing – or one field name meaning different things to different people. Check the built-in fields first, like lifecycle stage on contacts. If you do need a new one, give it a fixed list of options rather than free text, with an option for every answer. A field that only ever says "Yes" can't tell you who's a no.
Decide how you'll mark customers. Closing a deal doesn't automatically mark its company or contacts as customers. Lifecycle stage is a contact field – when a deal reaches a won stage, Ahoy may suggest moving its contacts to Customer as an AI Action for you to approve. There's no equivalent for companies, so if you want to see which companies are customers, agree one custom field as a team, set up as above, and decide who keeps it up to date.
If you run Ahoy across several teams or companies and report across them, agree these conventions once for all of them. Differences that look harmless inside one account make combined reporting unreliable.
Tips on keeping records clean
Merge duplicates rather than deleting one. Merges come to you as an AI Action. Approve the merge rather than deleting one of the duplicates yourself, so the two records are combined instead of one being lost.
Move deals through stages as things happen. The timeline records each stage change as it's made, so a deal that jumps from the first stage straight to won shows none of the steps in between.
Test imports before running the full file. There's no one-click undo for an import, so run a handful of rows first and check the results. See Importing your contacts and accounts.
Setup checklist
Work through the first group with each team member, the second before any import, and the third once as a team.
Every team member
- Calendar and email sharing both on in Settings > Email & Calendar, for every connected account
- The Ahoy Notetaker on, recording external meetings only
- Any other recorders connected, with What you'll need checked on each card
- Capture notes without a calendar meeting turned on
- After your first recorded call, summary checked on the meeting, and the recorder's card showing Receiving summaries
Before you import
- Teammates invited, so deal owners can be matched
- Pipelines and stages set up – import won't create them
- Company, owner, and stage names in your file matching Ahoy exactly, capitalization included
- A domain column for every company
- Owner email, company, contact, and close date columns for every deal
- A small test import run and checked first
As a team, once
- Stage names agreed and descriptions filled in
- 0% and 100% kept for closed stages only
- Separate pipelines for separate sales motions, if you need them
- What a deal amount means, and which currency to use, agreed
- Existing fields checked before any new field is created
- Agreed how companies are marked as customers, and who keeps it up to date
FAQs
Will sharing my calendar expose my private meetings?
No. Any event you've marked as private in Google Calendar or Outlook stays private in Ahoy, even with calendar sharing on.
I've been using Ahoy with sharing off. Is it too late to turn it on?
No. Both sharing settings also apply to emails and events that have already synced, so your team can see your history as soon as you turn them on.
Why record external meetings only?
It captures your calls with customers and prospects – the ones your CRM needs – and leaves internal meetings like one-to-ones and team syncs alone. You can change it anytime, and skip any single meeting from its header.
I connected my recorder, but nothing's arriving. What's wrong?
This is usually the tool's own setup. Check What you'll need on its card in Settings > Meeting Summaries, then whether the card says Receiving summaries and when the last one arrived. Meeting summaries covers each source's requirements.
Can Ahoy capture a call that wasn't on my calendar?
Yes – turn on Capture notes without a calendar meeting at the bottom of the Meeting Summaries page. Ahoy saves the notes and creates a meeting for the call.
Do I need to do all of this before I start?
No. The four settings take a few minutes and are worth doing on day one. The team conventions can be agreed as you go, but they're much easier to set before everyone has built up their own habits.
Need help?
We're hands-on. Reach out anytime:
- Email – help@ahoy.ai