Validation rules, contact roles, and the ARR field the CRM won't give you

The problem

The play

1. 1
   Stage gates pushed to production

   Built and pushed opportunity-stage validation rules to production, a proposal link required at the late-stage gate, signed-contract enforcement on closed-won, and a conditional revisit trigger on closed-lost so lost deals get a defined follow-up instead of disappearing from the system.

2. 2
   Contact-role governance simple enough to be used

   Deployed contact-role validation rules that reduce the buying committee to three roles, champion, economic buyer, signatory, on the reasoning that a short list gets filled in accurately while a long one gets skipped entirely.

3. 3
   Amount and revenue-recognition architecture

   Scoped a clean opportunity amount model separating ARR, total contract value and implementation fees, then diagnosed that the CRM's standard amount field is effectively locked to total contract value and recommended a dedicated ARR field plus per-year ARR fields to support prepaid multi-year commitments.

4. 4
   Top-of-funnel lifecycle logic

   Mapped lead-stage transition logic, scoring and automation triggers for the top of the funnel, which had no defined stages before.

5. 5
   Post-sale lifecycle scoped with the CS owner

   Scoped a customer lifecycle from qualified opportunity through to customer alongside the customer-success lead, so the handoff has defined stages on both sides of it rather than a gap at closed-won.

What it moved

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