CRM: from lead to won deal

The CRM app organises commercial activity: it records incoming contacts, tracks open deals in a visual pipeline, plans follow-up actions and measures the team's performance.

Configuring the CRM

Enabling the features you need

1. Open CRM › Configuration › Settings.
2. Enable the options that match your organisation: - Leads: separates raw, unqualified contacts from actual deals. Without this option, everything lands straight in the pipeline as an opportunity. - Lead Enrichment: automatically completes company information from the professional email address. - Recurring Revenues: tracks a recurring revenue alongside the one-off amount of the deal.

The Predictive Lead Scoring block sits in the same place, but it has no checkbox: scoring is always on. The block is there to review the criteria used and to re-run the computation (see chapitre 8). 1. Save.

Defining the pipeline stages

Stages represent how far a deal has progressed through your sales cycle.

1. Enable developer mode (see chapitre 3): without it, the Stages entry does not appear in the configuration menu.
2. Open CRM › Configuration › Pipeline › Stages.
3. Click New to add a stage, or open an existing stage to edit it.
4. Fill in: - Stage Name: the label shown at the top of the column in the pipeline; - Sequence: the display order, from lowest to highest; - Is Won Stage?: tick this on the stage that marks the deal as closed; - Folded in Pipeline: hides the column when it is empty; - Sales Teams: restricts the stage to a single team, if cycles differ from one team to another; - Requirements: describes the conditions to be met to reach the stage. This text appears in the pipeline when hovering over the question mark.

Organising the sales teams

1. Open CRM › Configuration › Sales Teams.
2. Click New.
3. Fill in the team name, the Team Leader and the Email Alias if the team is to receive requests by email.
4. In the Members tab, add the salespeople concerned.
5. Save.

Recording and qualifying a lead

Creating a lead

1. Open CRM › Leads.
2. Click New.
3. Fill in: - the subject of the request in the main field; - the Contact and the company concerned; - the Email and the Phone; - the Sales Team and the Salesperson responsible; - the Tags that will let you find the lead by topic.
4. In the Extra Info tab, Marketing block, fill in the Source and the Campaign so that you can later measure where deals come from. This tab exists only on a lead: it disappears as soon as the lead is converted into an opportunity.
5. Describe the need in the Notes tab.
6. Save.

Converting a lead into an opportunity

Once the lead is qualified (the need is real, the contact is the right one, the budget exists) it becomes an opportunity and joins the pipeline.

1. Open the lead.
2. Click Convert to Opportunity.
3. In the window that opens, choose: - Convert to opportunity to create a deal, or Merge with existing opportunities if a deal is already open for this customer; - the customer to link: select it if it already exists, create one otherwise.
4. Check the Salesperson and the Sales Team assigned.
5. Click Create Opportunity.

Moving an opportunity forward

The pipeline

Open CRM › Sales › My Pipeline. Deals appear as cards, spread across columns corresponding to the stages.

• Drag a card to the next column to move the deal forward.
• Click a card to open the deal and complete its information.
• Use the colour dots and the tags to spot priorities at a glance.

Filling in the steering information

On every opportunity, keep the following up to date:

• Expected Revenue: the amount of the deal;
• Probability: the chances of closing, as a percentage;
• Expected Closing: the date by which the decision is expected.

Planning the next action

An activity is an action to be carried out, dated and assigned to someone, attached to a document. It is Odoo's internal follow-up mechanism, shared by every app; how it works in general is described in section 4.2.

1. Open the opportunity.
2. In the chatter, at the bottom of the form, click Activity.
3. Choose the type among the tiles offered: call, meeting, email, to-do. This field has no label.
4. Fill in the Due Date, the Assigned To user and a summary.
5. Click Save.

Once the action is done, click Mark Done and immediately plan the next one.

Tracking the activity workload

From the pipeline, switch to the Activity view using the view icons at the top right. The screen is laid out as a table: one row per opportunity, one column per activity type, each header carrying the count of activities of that type. Clicking a cell lets you plan or review the corresponding activity.

The colour dots indicate urgency: overdue activities appear in red, today's in orange, later ones in green. This colour code is the same throughout the database, including on the clock icon in the top bar that gathers your activities across all apps (see section 4.2).

Closing the deal

Drawing up the quotation

1. Open the opportunity.
2. Click New Quotation.
3. The quotation opens, pre-filled with the customer, the salesperson and a reference to the opportunity.
4. Complete the product lines, the payment terms and the expiration date.
5. Save, then send the quotation to the customer (see chapitre 11).

The quotation stays attached to the opportunity: the Quotations smart button, at the top of the form, shows how many proposals have been sent and their amount. Smart buttons give access to the documents linked to the one you are looking at (see section 3.4.2).

Marking the deal as won

1. Open the opportunity, or drag it to the stage marked as won.
2. Click Won.

Recording a lost deal

1. Open the opportunity.
2. Click Lost.
3. Select a Lost Reason and, if useful, add an explanation.
4. Confirm.

The opportunity is archived but remains available: it feeds the analysis of lost reasons. To reopen it, display it through the Lost filter, then click Restore.

Analysing sales activity

The pipeline report

1. Open CRM › Reporting › Pipeline.
2. Choose the view that suits the question: graph for a trend, pivot table for figures, list for detail.
3. Use Filters and Group By to cross period, team, salesperson, stage or lost reason.

The forecast

Open CRM › Reporting › Forecast to project the expected revenue by month, based on the expected closing dates and the probabilities entered.

Good practice