The difference between the two
Odoo separates leads from opportunities, and understanding why saves a lot of confusion.
A lead is raw. Somebody filled in your website form. A card came back from an event. You do not yet know whether there is a real deal here, or even a real person.
An opportunity is qualified. You have spoken to them, there is a genuine need, and there is a realistic chance of a sale. It has an estimated value and a likely close date.
Leads are optional. In Settings you can switch them off entirely, and every enquiry becomes an opportunity straight away.
Use leads if you get a lot of low-quality enquiries and somebody needs to filter first.
Skip leads if most of what arrives is worth pursuing. The extra stage will just be a step people click through without thinking.
FIGURE 1: LEAD OR OPPORTUNITY?
A lead
- Unqualified and unverified
- Might be a student, a competitor, a wrong number
- Needs someone to check before any effort goes in
An opportunity
- A real customer with a real need
- Has an estimated value and close date
- Sits in your pipeline and gets worked
How enquiries arrive
Four routes, and setting up the first two covers most businesses.
Website form. A contact form on your site creates a lead or opportunity directly, with the details already filled in.
Email alias. Anything sent to a sales address becomes a record, and replies thread onto it.
Manually. After a phone call or a meeting.
Import. From an event list or a previous system — and only with proper consent.
Set up the website form first. It is the route most enquiries take, and it removes the gap where someone forgets to record a form submission.
Qualifying a lead
When a lead arrives, somebody has to decide whether it becomes an opportunity.
Four questions:
- Is there a real business here, or is this research?
- Do they have a need we can actually serve?
- Is there any indication of budget or timing?
- Are they the right size and type of customer for us?
Record what happens to the ones you reject. Not just deleting them. A short reason — not a fit, no budget, competitor, student enquiry.
That record is useful twice: it tells you where your enquiry quality is poor, and if you ever use lead scoring it is the training data.
Building the pipeline
Stages are the heart of it, and this is the setup decision worth thinking about.
Stages should describe what has happened, not what you hope will happen.
A working set:
- New — an opportunity exists, nothing has happened yet
- Qualified — you have spoken to them and confirmed a real need
- Proposal Sent — a quotation is with the customer
- Negotiation — they are engaged and discussing terms
- Won / Lost — closed
Three rules:
Keep it under seven. More than that and people stop updating them properly.
Each stage must be checkable. “Proposal Sent” is a fact. “Interested” is an opinion, and every person reads it differently.
Match how you really sell. If your process includes a site visit, that is a stage. Do not copy somebody else’s pipeline.
FIGURE 2: A PIPELINE THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY UPDATE
New
- Nothing done yet
Qualified
- Real need confirmed
Proposal Sent
- Quotation with the customer
Negotiation
- Discussing terms
Won or Lost
- Closed with a reason
The one habit that matters
Every opportunity needs a next scheduled activity.
Odoo has activities — a call, a meeting, an email, a to-do, each with a date and an owner. When you finish one, you schedule the next.
An opportunity with no scheduled activity is an opportunity nobody is working on. Odoo will show you these clearly, and that list is where forgotten deals hide.
Make it a rule with no exceptions: no opportunity leaves your screen without a next activity on it.
If your team adopts nothing else from this article, adopt this. It is the single difference between a pipeline and a list.
Keeping the record useful
Log calls in the chatter. The message thread at the bottom of the opportunity. Send emails from there too.
The reason is not tidiness. It is that when the salesperson is on leave and the customer rings, somebody else can pick it up in thirty seconds.
Fill in expected revenue and close date. These are what make forecasting possible. A pipeline where everything closes “next month” forever is worse than no forecast at all.
Move stages when something happens, not in a monthly tidy-up. A pipeline updated once a month tells you nothing about timing.
Winning
Click New Quotation from the opportunity.
The customer, contact and address carry across. The quotation links back, so you can always trace which sales effort produced which order.
Confirm it and you have a sales order, which creates the delivery and prepares the invoice.
That link is the reason to run CRM inside Odoo. No export, no re-entry, and no gap between winning it and delivering it.
Losing well
Losing is normal. Losing without recording why is waste.
When you mark an opportunity lost, Odoo asks for a lost reason. Set up a short list that reflects reality — price, timing, competitor, no budget, no response.
Then read that report every quarter. It is one of the few genuinely useful CRM reports:
- Half your losses are “price” → that is a pricing conversation
- Half are “no response” → that is a follow-up problem, and it is fixable
- Half are “timing” → those are worth revisiting later
FIGURE 3: WHAT MAKES A PIPELINE USEFUL
A working pipeline
- Under seven checkable stages
- Every opportunity has a next activity
- Stages moved when something happens
- Losses recorded with a reason
A pipeline nobody trusts
- Twelve stages nobody updates
- Deals untouched for months
- Tidied up once a month
- Losses closed with no explanation
Reports worth reading
Pipeline by stage. Where the value is sitting. Watch for stages that clog.
Expected revenue by month. Your forecast. Compare it against what actually closed and you learn how optimistic your team is.
Won versus lost. Conversion rate, by person and by source.
Activities overdue. Not really a sales report — a discipline report. A long list here means the pipeline data cannot be trusted.
Lost reasons. The most actionable of the five.
What goes wrong
Too many stages. People stop moving deals and the board stops reflecting reality.
Stale opportunities. Deals from eight months ago sitting in Negotiation. Either work them or lose them.
No next activity. Covered above and worth repeating.
Updating for management only. If the team updates the CRM once a month so somebody can run a report, you have a spreadsheet with extra steps. It has to help the person selling.
Getting started
- Decide whether you need leads, or go straight to opportunities
- Set up five or six stages that match how you really sell
- Connect your website contact form
- Create a short list of lost reasons
- Make “always schedule the next activity” a firm rule
- Review overdue activities weekly
Run it that way for a month before adding scoring, automation or campaigns. The basics have to be habit first.
Enquiries going cold before anyone follows up?
Get in touch. We set up pipelines around how you actually sell, and the one habit that stops deals being forgotten.
