This is the order to do things in when rolling Salesmotion out to a team. The sequence matters: several steps block others, and two of them commonly cause multi-week delays when discovered late.
For an individual getting started alone, see Getting started with Salesmotion instead.
Before anything else
1. Start the IT email allowlist request. Do this first, on day one, before you touch anything else in the platform.
Corporate email filtering blocking invitations and alerts is the most common cause of delayed rollouts, and it has cost teams weeks. It is also entirely avoidable if raised early, because the request itself is routine and the delay is queue time on your IT team's side.
Welcome emails and alerts not arriving contains a request template written to answer the questions your security team will ask. Send it now and continue with the rest while it processes.
2. If you plan to use MCP with a managed Claude deployment, start that approval too. Enterprise connector approval is also queue time. See Connecting Salesmotion MCP to a company Claude deployment.
Both of these run in the background while you do the real setup work.
Configuration
3. Set up company information. Tell the platform what you sell and to whom, which informs research and outreach drafting. See Setting up company information.
4. Add a small set of accounts. Five to ten representative accounts, not your full list. You need a readable volume of output to judge whether configuration is right, and eight hundred accounts produces a feed nobody can evaluate. See Managing accounts and Bulk importing accounts.
5. Configure keywords. Budget an hour. This is the single highest-leverage step in the entire rollout and the one most commonly rushed. Work through Keyword strategy: a worked example rather than guessing at a settings page.
If different teams sell different things, plan separate keyword sets now. Retrofitting this after a full rollout means every team has already formed an impression from a diluted feed.
6. Set contact and hiring titles. These determine which people and which job postings are treated as relevant. See Setting up relevant contact titles and Setting up relevant hiring titles.
Validation
7. Wait a week and read the output. Do not skip this. Signals accumulate over several days, and a day-one feed tells you nothing.
After a week, judge each keyword: producing useful signals, producing noise, or producing nothing. Cut the noisy ones. Rewrite the silent ones if they were written as long phrases.
8. Test with two or three real users. Confirm they receive the welcome email and a test alert. This validates the allowlist work from step 1 while it still affects three people rather than eighty.
Rollout
9. Expand the account list. Once configuration produces signals you would act on, scale to the full list. Expect one more round of keyword tuning at scale, since terms that were quiet across ten accounts can be noisy across a thousand.
10. Invite the team. Only now. See Inviting users and troubleshooting invites and Managing users and seats.
Consider inviting in waves by team rather than all at once, so any remaining configuration problem affects a group you can support directly.
11. Set up alerts. Alerts are what bring people back without needing to remember to log in. See Using search and search alerts.
12. Connect your CRM. Salesforce or HubSpot. If you have duplicate domains across Salesforce records, read Salesforce sync: duplicate domains, tiers, and filtering before rolling out widely.
After launch
13. Give people specific prompts, not a feature tour. Adoption follows from someone getting a useful answer in their first session. Concrete starting points work far better than an announcement that a tool is available. See Getting your team to adopt Salesmotion.
14. Check weekly active users after three weeks. Not total logins, which flatter. If a small fraction of licensed users are active, the cause is usually keyword configuration for their segment rather than lack of training. Contact us and we will look at it with you.
The two-week version
If you need a compressed timeline:
| Day | Step |
|---|---|
| 1 | IT allowlist request, MCP approval if needed |
| 1 | Company info, 5 to 10 accounts, keywords |
| 2 to 7 | Signals accumulate |
| 8 | Review output, tune keywords, test with 2 to 3 users |
| 9 | Expand accounts, invite first team |
| 10 | Alerts, CRM integration |
| 11 to 14 | Remaining teams in waves |
The week of waiting in the middle is not padding. Rolling out on unvalidated configuration is what produces a large group of people whose first impression is a feed of irrelevant signals.
Common mistakes
Inviting everyone on day one. Before keywords are tuned, before the allowlist is confirmed. Guarantees a poor first impression at scale, and first impressions are what determine whether people come back.
Skipping the tuning week. Understandable under time pressure, and the most expensive shortcut available.
One keyword set for teams with different motions. Every team gets a feed that is partly irrelevant, and all of them conclude the tool is generic.
Treating low adoption as a training problem. It is nearly always a relevance problem. Fix the configuration for that team's segment before scheduling more enablement.