Hello
A conversion sync reverts all your changes you have done after powering on the VM. Actually it reverts even more, I'll explain in a moment. However you can do all these steps as a preliminary test to verify that everything works fine.
Now about why sync-ing reverts the VM. Conversion roughly consist of two parts - cloning and reconfiguration, In this case cloning copies disk blocks. For the sync to work, a driver on the source machine tracks the changed blocks so that only they are being copied during the sync. Reconfiguration makes tweaks to system files and registry in order for the VM to boot in a virtual hardware environment. By doing so, it changes some blocks which might have been changed on the source machine, too. That's why, after each cloning and right before the reconfiguration, the destination VM is being snapshotted. It is reverted to that snapshot right before the cloning of the next sync. The stuff you have done in step 2) is logically also a kind of reconfiguration, though some of not done automatically by Converter.
OTOH installing tools and setting IP address are being done automatically. However a few things are done only on the final sync, like stopping services on the source, powering off the source VM, and customization steps, part of which is setting a static IP address. I am not completely sure but think that installing tools is also done on final sync only.
HTH
Plmane