CRM: leads, opportunities and pipelines

Leads vs opportunities, pipeline stages, assignment rules, lead scoring, lost reasons and activities.

In this lesson

Leads and opportunities
Where leads come from and who gets them
Activities and the hand-off to Sales

Key points

crm.lead holds both leads and opportunities
Stages per team; predictive lead scoring sets probability
Assignment rules by domain and capacity; lost reasons for learning
Activities drive follow-up; won opportunities become quotations

Real-world example

A solar installer in Ibadan got 300 web enquiries a month and answered only half. An email alias and web form fed leads into CRM, assignment rules split them by state across three salespeople, and an automated activity created a call within two hours. Response time fell from three days to under four hours and conversion doubled.

Questions and answers

How do enquiries emailed to sales@ become leads?

An email alias on the sales team creates crm.lead records from incoming mail.

What does marking an opportunity lost ask for?

A lost reason (and optional note).

Read the full lesson, worked example and quiz