Odoo separates leads from opportunities, and understanding why saves a lot of confusion.<\/p>\n
A lead is raw.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n An opportunity is qualified.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Leads are optional. In Settings you can switch them off entirely, and every enquiry becomes an opportunity straight away.<\/p>\n Use leads if<\/strong> you get a lot of low-quality enquiries and somebody needs to filter first.<\/p>\n Skip leads if<\/strong> most of what arrives is worth pursuing. The extra stage will just be a step people click through without thinking.<\/p>\n FIGURE 1: LEAD OR OPPORTUNITY?<\/p>\n A lead<\/p>\n An opportunity<\/p>\n Four routes, and setting up the first two covers most businesses.<\/p>\n Website form.<\/strong> A contact form on your site creates a lead or opportunity directly, with the details already filled in.<\/p>\n Email alias.<\/strong> Anything sent to a sales address becomes a record, and replies thread onto it.<\/p>\n Manually.<\/strong> After a phone call or a meeting.<\/p>\n Import.<\/strong> From an event list or a previous system \u2014 and only with proper consent.<\/p>\n Set up the website form first.<\/strong> It is the route most enquiries take, and it removes the gap where someone forgets to record a form submission.<\/p>\n When a lead arrives, somebody has to decide whether it becomes an opportunity.<\/p>\n Four questions:<\/p>\n Record what happens to the ones you reject.<\/strong> Not just deleting them. A short reason \u2014 not a fit, no budget, competitor, student enquiry.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Stages are the heart of it, and this is the setup decision worth thinking about.<\/p>\n Stages should describe what has happened, not what you hope will happen.<\/strong><\/p>\n A working set:<\/p>\n Three rules:<\/strong><\/p>\n Keep it under seven.<\/strong> More than that and people stop updating them properly.<\/p>\n Each stage must be checkable.<\/strong> “Proposal Sent” is a fact. “Interested” is an opinion, and every person reads it differently.<\/p>\n Match how you really sell.<\/strong> If your process includes a site visit, that is a stage. Do not copy somebody else’s pipeline.<\/p>\n FIGURE 2: A PIPELINE THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY UPDATE<\/p>\n New<\/p>\n Qualified<\/p>\n Proposal Sent<\/p>\n Negotiation<\/p>\n Won or Lost<\/p>\n Every opportunity needs a next scheduled activity.<\/strong><\/p>\n Odoo has activities \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.<\/strong> Odoo will show you these clearly, and that list is where forgotten deals hide.<\/p>\n Make it a rule with no exceptions: no opportunity leaves your screen without a next activity on it.<\/p>\n If your team adopts nothing else from this article, adopt this. It is the single difference between a pipeline and a list.<\/p>\n Log calls in the chatter.<\/strong> The message thread at the bottom of the opportunity. Send emails from there too.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Fill in expected revenue and close date.<\/strong> These are what make forecasting possible. A pipeline where everything closes “next month” forever is worse than no forecast at all.<\/p>\n Move stages when something happens<\/strong>, not in a monthly tidy-up. A pipeline updated once a month tells you nothing about timing.<\/p>\n Click New Quotation<\/strong> from the opportunity.<\/p>\n The customer, contact and address carry across. The quotation links back, so you can always trace which sales effort produced which order.<\/p>\n Confirm it and you have a sales order, which creates the delivery and prepares the invoice.<\/p>\n That link is the reason to run CRM inside Odoo.<\/strong> No export, no re-entry, and no gap between winning it and delivering it.<\/p>\n Losing is normal. Losing without recording why is 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 read that report every quarter. It is one of the few genuinely useful CRM reports:<\/p>\n FIGURE 3: WHAT MAKES A PIPELINE USEFUL<\/p>\n A working pipeline<\/p>\n A pipeline nobody trusts<\/p>\n Pipeline by stage.<\/strong> Where the value is sitting. Watch for stages that clog.<\/p>\n Expected revenue by month.<\/strong> Your forecast. Compare it against what actually closed and you learn how optimistic your team is.<\/p>\n Won versus lost.<\/strong> Conversion rate, by person and by source.<\/p>\n Activities overdue.<\/strong> Not really a sales report \u2014 a discipline report. A long list here means the pipeline data cannot be trusted.<\/p>\n Lost reasons.<\/strong> The most actionable of the five.<\/p>\n Too many stages.<\/strong> People stop moving deals and the board stops reflecting reality.<\/p>\n Stale opportunities.<\/strong> Deals from eight months ago sitting in Negotiation. Either work them or lose them.<\/p>\n No next activity.<\/strong> Covered above and worth repeating.<\/p>\n Updating for management only.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Run it that way for a month before adding scoring, automation or campaigns. The basics have to be habit first.<\/p>\n Enquiries going cold before anyone follows up?<\/p>\n Get in touch. We set up pipelines around how you actually sell, and the one habit that stops deals being forgotten.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-odoo"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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How enquiries arrive<\/h2>\n
Qualifying a lead<\/h2>\n
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Building the pipeline<\/h2>\n
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The one habit that matters<\/h2>\n
Keeping the record useful<\/h2>\n
Winning<\/h2>\n
Losing well<\/h2>\n
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Reports worth reading<\/h2>\n
What goes wrong<\/h2>\n
Getting started<\/h2>\n
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