CRM: Leads, Opportunities and the Pipeline

A lead is someone who might buy but is not yet a customer. Open Sales, Leads, New Lead and record the person and company, how to reach them, the source — Website, Referral, Event, Cold call, Email campaign, Social media, Partner or Other — and the owner, the person responsible for following it up. Every lead carries a status: New, Contacted, Qualified, Disqualified or Converted. The list filters by status, owner and source, so each salesperson can open their own leads and a manager can see which source actually produces business.

Each lead has an activity log. Log a call, meeting, email, note or task with a subject and details; a task can carry a due date and is ticked done when it is finished. The log is what makes a lead hand-overable: if the owner goes on leave, whoever picks it up reads what was promised and when, instead of calling the prospect to ask. Move the status as the conversation moves — Contacted after the first real conversation, Qualified once you know there is a need, a budget and a decision-maker, and Disqualified when there is not, so the list stays honest.

In practice: a solar installer in Nakuru meets a dairy cooperative at the Nakuru ASK show. The sales rep creates a lead with source Event and herself as owner, logs a meeting note (“wants 40 kW for the chilling plant, board meets on the 20th”), and adds a task due on the 21st to call the chairman. After the call she sets the lead to Qualified. Three months later the sales manager filters leads by source and sees that Event leads convert at twice the rate of Social media leads, and moves next quarter’s marketing money accordingly.

When a lead is real, click Convert on the lead. Conversion does two things in one step. It makes the lead a customer — either a new customer record built from the lead’s details, or a link to a customer you already have, which is the right choice when the person works for an existing account. And it can open an opportunity for that customer at the same time, with a title, an amount and the stage it starts in. The lead’s status becomes Converted and it keeps a link to the customer, so its history is not lost.

Choosing between a new and an existing customer matters more than it looks. Creating a second record for a company you already invoice splits its history: its statement, its credit limit and its aging are then in two places, and the dunning ladder chases the two separately. So check the customer list before converting, and link to the existing customer when there is one. A lead that does not need a deal yet can be converted without an opportunity, and one can be added from the customer later.

In practice: the cooperative’s board approves the project. The rep clicks Convert, chooses New customer because the cooperative has never bought before, ticks Create opportunity, and enters “40 kW chilling plant system”, KES 4,800,000, starting in Proposal. A week later a second lead comes in from the cooperative’s Molo branch; the rep converts it by linking it to the existing cooperative customer instead of creating another one, so all their invoices and payments stay on one statement.

Opportunities live under Sales, Opportunities, and the Pipeline board shows the open ones as columns by stage. A workspace starts with New (10%), Qualified (25%), Proposal (50%), Negotiation (75%), Won (100%) and Lost (0%); the stages, their order and their probabilities are edited under Pipeline stages. Each column shows how many deals it holds and their total value, and the board shows the open total and the weighted forecast: each deal’s amount multiplied by its stage’s probability, then added up. It can be filtered by owner or searched.

Money is kept per currency and never added across currencies. A pipeline with shilling and dollar deals shows each currency’s total separately rather than converting one into the other at a rate nobody chose. The weighted forecast is a planning number, not a promise: it says what the pipeline is worth if your stage probabilities are right. If deals in Negotiation actually close half the time, set that stage to 50% so the forecast stops overstating the quarter.

In practice: the installer’s sales manager opens the board on Monday. Proposal holds five deals worth KES 12,000,000 and Negotiation two worth KES 6,000,000; the weighted forecast is 12,000,000 × 50% + 6,000,000 × 75% = KES 10,500,000, plus the smaller New and Qualified deals. One export deal is in US dollars and is shown on its own line. Filtering by owner, she sees one rep has nine deals stuck in Qualified for two months and sets up a review with him.

Moving a deal to a stage marked Won or Lost closes it; moving it to any other stage reopens it. A loss asks for a reason, which is the most useful field in the CRM when it is filled in honestly — price, timing, a competitor, no budget — because it is the only record of why business was not won. Closed deals stay on the board for 90 days and then fall off it, so the board shows what is live, while the opportunity list still holds every deal.

A won deal linked to a customer has a Create quote button, which opens a new customer quote for that customer. From there the normal sales flow takes over: the quote is approved and sent, the customer accepts it online, it becomes a sales order or an invoice, and the invoice files to eTIMS and is chased by the dunning ladder if it goes overdue. If a won deal has no customer yet, link one first. The CRM and its pipeline are on the web and in the mobile app, so a rep can log a meeting and move a deal from the field.

In practice: the cooperative signs. The rep moves the deal to Won and clicks Create quote, which opens a quote for the cooperative; she adds the panels, inverters and installation as lines, it is approved, and the cooperative accepts it from the emailed link. Meanwhile a hotel deal is lost to a cheaper competitor; she moves it to Lost with the reason “price — competitor 12% lower”. At the quarter review the sales manager reads the loss reasons and finds price was given on six of nine losses.