A CRM is not an address book. You already have one of those.<\/p>\n
A CRM answers a different question: which deals are we likely to win, and what needs to happen next on each one?<\/strong><\/p>\n Odoo CRM does this with a pipeline. Every opportunity sits in a stage, moves forward as things happen, and eventually is won or lost. That simple structure is what turns a pile of enquiries into something you can manage.<\/p>\n Odoo separates these two, and understanding the difference saves confusion later.<\/p>\n A lead<\/strong> is raw and unqualified. Somebody filled in your website form. A business card came back from a trade show. You do not yet know if there is a real deal here.<\/p>\n An opportunity<\/strong> is a lead you have qualified. There is a real customer, a real need, and a realistic chance of a sale.<\/p>\n Leads are optional. In Settings you can turn them off, and every enquiry becomes an opportunity directly.<\/p>\n Use leads if:<\/strong> you get a lot of low-quality enquiries and someone needs to filter them first.<\/p>\n Skip leads if:<\/strong> most of what comes in is worth pursuing. The extra step will just annoy your sales team.<\/p>\n The pipeline is the heart of the system, and this is the setup decision worth thinking about properly.<\/p>\n Stages should describe what has happened, not what you hope will happen.<\/strong><\/p>\n A common working set:<\/p>\n Three rules for good stages:<\/p>\n Keep it under seven.<\/strong> More than that and people stop updating them properly.<\/p>\n Make each one a fact, not a feeling.<\/strong> “Proposal Sent” is checkable. “Interested” is an opinion, and everybody will interpret it differently.<\/p>\n Match how you actually sell.<\/strong> If your process has a site visit, that is a stage. Do not copy someone else’s pipeline.<\/p>\n FIGURE 1: A WORKING PIPELINE<\/p>\n New<\/p>\n Qualified<\/p>\n Proposal Sent<\/p>\n Negotiation<\/p>\n Won or Lost<\/p>\n They arrive four ways: typed in manually, from your website contact form, from incoming email to a sales alias, or imported.<\/p>\n The website route is worth setting up early. A form submission becomes an opportunity automatically, with the customer’s details already filled in.<\/p>\n This is the single most important habit in the whole system.<\/p>\n Odoo has activities<\/strong> \u2014 a call, a meeting, an email, a to-do, each with a date and an owner. When you finish one, you schedule the next.<\/p>\n An opportunity with no scheduled activity is an opportunity nobody is working on. Odoo will show these to you clearly, and that list is usually where forgotten deals are hiding.<\/p>\n Make it a rule: no opportunity leaves your screen without a next activity on it.<\/strong><\/p>\n FIGURE 2: WHAT MAKES A PIPELINE USEFUL<\/p>\n A working pipeline<\/p>\n A pipeline nobody trusts<\/p>\n Every opportunity has a chatter \u2014 the message thread at the bottom. Log calls there, send emails from there, and the whole history stays on the record.<\/p>\n The reason this matters is not tidiness. It is that when the salesperson is on leave and the customer calls, somebody else can pick it up in thirty seconds.<\/p>\n Fill both in. They are what makes forecasting possible.<\/p>\n Expected revenue is the deal value. Expected closing is your honest estimate of when it lands. Odoo weights the forecast by each stage’s probability.<\/p>\n The forecast is only as honest as these two fields. A pipeline where everything closes “next month” forever is worse than no forecast at all.<\/p>\n When you win, click New Quotation<\/strong> from the opportunity.<\/p>\n The customer, contact and address carry across. The quotation is linked back to the opportunity, so you can always trace which sales effort produced which order.<\/p>\n Confirm the quotation and it becomes a sales order \u2014 which creates the delivery and prepares the invoice, all from the same record.<\/p>\n That link is the reason to run CRM inside Odoo rather than in a separate tool. There is no export, no re-entry, and no gap between “we won it” and “we are delivering it”.<\/p>\n Losing deals is normal. Losing them without recording why is a waste.<\/p>\n When you mark an opportunity lost, Odoo asks for a lost reason<\/strong>. Set up a short list that reflects reality \u2014 price, timing, competitor, no budget, no response.<\/p>\n Then look at that report every quarter. It is one of the few genuinely useful reports in a CRM. If half your losses are “price”, that is a pricing conversation. If half are “no response”, that is a follow-up problem.<\/p>\n Pipeline by stage.<\/strong> Where the value is sitting right now. Watch for stages that are clogged.<\/p>\n Expected revenue by month.<\/strong> Your forecast. Compare it to what actually closed and you will learn how optimistic your team is.<\/p>\n Won versus lost.<\/strong> Your conversion rate, by salesperson and by source.<\/p>\n Activities overdue.<\/strong> Not really a sales report \u2014 it is a discipline report. A long list here means the pipeline data cannot be trusted.<\/p>\n Too many stages.<\/strong> People stop moving deals properly and the pipeline stops reflecting reality.<\/p>\n Stale opportunities.<\/strong> Deals from eight months ago sitting in “Negotiation”. Either work them or lose them. A pipeline full of dead deals makes the forecast meaningless.<\/p>\n No next activity.<\/strong> Covered above, and worth repeating. This is the difference between a pipeline and a list.<\/p>\n Using it as a reporting tool only.<\/strong> If the sales team updates the CRM once a month so management can run a report, you have a spreadsheet with extra steps. It has to be useful to the person selling, or it will not be maintained.<\/p>\n Do not configure everything at once. Start here:<\/p>\n Run it that way for a month. Then add automation, scoring and email campaigns once the basics are a habit.<\/p>\n Want a pipeline your sales team will actually use?<\/p>\n Get in touch. We set up stages around how you really sell, and connect the pipeline to your quotations so nothing is retyped.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What CRM is for A CRM is not an address book. You already have one of those. A CRM answers a different question: which deals are we likely to win, and what needs to happen next on each one? Odoo CRM does this with a pipeline. Every opportunity sits in a stage, moves forward as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-odoo"],"yoast_head":"\nLeads and opportunities<\/h2>\n
Setting up your pipeline<\/h2>\n
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Working the pipeline day to day<\/h2>\n
Creating opportunities<\/h3>\n
Every opportunity needs a next activity<\/h3>\n
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Logging what happened<\/h3>\n
Expected revenue and close date<\/h3>\n
Turning an opportunity into a sale<\/h2>\n
Losing well<\/h2>\n
Reports worth looking at<\/h2>\n
Common mistakes<\/h2>\n
Getting started<\/h2>\n
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