GoHighLevel CRM Tutorial: How to Set Up and Use the CRM

How the GHL CRM is structured

The GHL CRM has five main components that work together. Contacts are the records for every person or business in your database. Pipelines track where each contact sits in your sales or service process. Opportunities are the specific deals associated with contacts in pipelines. Conversations is the unified inbox where all communication with contacts appears regardless of channel. And Tags are the labelling system that lets you segment and filter your contacts for campaigns, smart lists and automations.

Understanding how these five components relate to each other is the key to using the CRM effectively. A contact can exist without being in a pipeline. Adding a contact to a pipeline creates an opportunity. Moving that opportunity through pipeline stages triggers automations. All communication with the contact appears in their conversation thread. Tags applied to the contact determine which campaigns and smart lists they appear in.

Contacts: creating and managing records

Go to Contacts in the left sidebar. This is your full contact database. Every form submission, every Facebook lead, every imported CSV row and every manually created record appears here.

To create a contact manually, click Add Contact. Fill in the name, email and phone number at minimum. Phone number is the most important field for service businesses because it is required for SMS automation. A contact without a phone number cannot receive automated SMS messages regardless of what workflows are running.

Click any contact name to open their record. The contact record shows all their details on the left, their conversation history in the centre and their associated opportunities, appointments, tasks and notes on the right. This single view gives you everything you need to understand a contact's relationship with your business without navigating to multiple sections.

Use the Notes field to record context from phone conversations. Use Tasks to create follow-up reminders assigned to team members. Use the Activity log at the bottom to see a chronological record of every automated message sent, every form submitted and every pipeline stage change for this contact.

Tags and smart lists

Tags are the most flexible organisational tool in the GHL CRM. A contact can have any number of tags and tags can be added or removed by automations, bulk actions or manually. Good tag strategy is the difference between a CRM that is searchable and actionable and one that is just a pile of contact records.

Build a consistent tag taxonomy before you start using the CRM at scale. At minimum, every contact should have a source tag (how they came into your system), a status tag (lead, customer, past customer, cold lead) and a service tag (what they need or have purchased). These three tag types let you build meaningful smart lists and targeted campaigns.

To create a smart list, go to Contacts and use the filter options on the left to define your criteria. Filter by tag, by pipeline stage, by date range, by custom field value or by any combination. Click Save as Smart List and give it a descriptive name. The smart list updates automatically as contacts are added or removed from the filter criteria. Use smart lists as the audience for campaign broadcasts, seasonal outreach and re-engagement sequences.

Pipelines and opportunities

Go to Opportunities in the left sidebar to access your pipelines. If you have not already created a pipeline, see our full pipeline setup guide for the step-by-step process.

To add a contact to a pipeline, open their contact record and click Add Opportunity on the right side panel. Select the pipeline, the starting stage, and enter the opportunity value if known. The contact card now appears in your pipeline board at the selected stage.

Drag opportunities between stages as they progress. Each drag-and-drop stage change is recorded in the contact's activity log and triggers any workflow connected to that stage. The pipeline board view gives you an instant visual of your full sales situation: how many opportunities are in each stage and what the total value of each stage is.

Use the List view under Opportunities for bulk management. Sort by last activity to find stale opportunities that have not been touched recently. Filter by stage to focus on specific parts of your pipeline. Export the opportunity list to a CSV for reporting outside GHL.

The conversations inbox

The Conversations section is GHL's unified inbox. Every SMS, email, Facebook message, Google Business message and Instagram DM sent to or from a contact appears in one thread. No more switching between platforms to piece together a conversation history.

In the left panel of Conversations, you see a list of all active conversation threads sorted by most recent activity. Click any thread to see the full conversation history for that contact across all channels. Each message is labelled with its channel (SMS, email, Facebook) so you know exactly how the communication happened.

Use the reply box at the bottom to respond to any contact directly from GHL. Switch the reply channel using the channel selector. A contact who originally messaged via SMS can receive an email reply if that is the more appropriate channel for a longer response.

Assign conversations to specific team members using the assignee field. This lets you distribute incoming conversations across your team and track who is responsible for each active lead. Filter conversations by status (open, unread, assigned to me) to manage your workload without missing anything.

Custom fields

Custom fields let you store information specific to your business that GHL's default contact fields do not cover. A roofing company might need fields for roof age, insurance carrier and claim number. A coaching business might need fields for niche, programme of interest and referral source. A real estate agent might need fields for pre-approval status and target move date.

Go to Settings, then Custom Fields to create new fields. Choose the field type: text, number, date, dropdown, checkbox or radio button. Name the field descriptively. Once created, custom fields appear in every contact record and can be used as filters in smart lists and as personalisation tokens in automated messages.

Use custom field tokens in your SMS and email templates to personalise messages with business-specific information. A roofing company sending an insurance follow-up can reference the specific claim number from the contact record: "Hi {{contact.first_name}}, following up on your insurance claim {{custom.claim_number}}."

Bulk actions and importing contacts

Select multiple contacts in the contact list using the checkboxes on the left. The bulk action menu appears at the top of the list. Available bulk actions include: add or remove tags, send to a campaign, add to a pipeline, assign to a team member, send a one-off SMS or email and delete contacts.

To import existing contacts, go to Contacts, then Import. Download the CSV template to see the required column format. Map your data to the template columns. Upload the completed CSV. GHL processes the import and creates contact records. Duplicates are handled based on email or phone number matching: if a contact with the same email already exists, GHL updates the existing record rather than creating a duplicate.

After importing, apply a tag to the imported batch immediately: "imported [date]" or "existing customer import." This tag lets you segment the imported contacts from contacts that came through your automations and treat them appropriately. Imported contacts have not opted into your automated sequences and should receive an opt-in confirmation before being enrolled in ongoing sequences.

Connecting the CRM to automations

The CRM and the automation system connect through triggers and actions. Workflows can trigger when a contact is created, when a tag is added, when an opportunity moves to a specific pipeline stage, when an appointment is booked or when a form is submitted. Workflow actions can update contact fields, add or remove tags, move opportunities between stages and create tasks.

The most powerful CRM automation pattern is the stage-triggered sequence. When a contact moves to the Estimate Sent stage, the follow-up sequence starts. When they move to Won, the onboarding sequence starts. When they move to Completed, the review request starts. Each stage in your pipeline becomes a trigger point for the relevant automation. See our 10 workflow examples guide for the complete automation structures that connect to your pipeline.