Every mainstream CRM shares some fundamental building blocks. The flow from a cold or warm lead to a client/customer and beyond gets broken down into some basic steps, which frequently get misused or misunderstood. Leads get dropped straight into contacts, deals and/or accounts don't get used, and sales opportunities begin slipping through the cracks. If you aren't familiar with this workflow, I'm here to help.
Lead: a maybe
A lead is a person or inquiry you haven't checked yet. A form fill, trade-show badge scan, or referral in the call queue. Leads are separate from Contacts for a reason: they keep unvetted names from cluttering your real database. Once you or your sales team validates that lead is actionable (is a real person that could become a client or customer), you "convert" the lead to a contact and proceed to set up a deal.
A common mistake is skipping leads and creating a full contact for every form submission. Six months later your contact list is 40% spam and dead inquiries, and every report needs a filter just to be usable.
Contact: a person
A contact is a person that works at a company. Their name, phone, email, and communication history live here. A company/account can be associated with them, but if they change jobs the Contact record is still there and the company association changes. If they buy from you a second time, a new deal would be attached to the same contact, with no new contact created.
Company: the organization
The company record (some CRMs call it an "account") holds what's true about the business itself â address, industry, contract terms â so it lives in one place instead of being copy-pasted onto every employee's record. It's also your insurance policy: when your main contact at a client quits, the company record keeps the relationship history that wasn't about them personally.
Sell to individuals rather than businesses? You may not need company records at all. Don't force them.
Deal: a transaction in progress
A deal (or "opportunity") is one specific potential sale: this customer, this scope, roughly this timeline. Deals are the only record built to end â they close won or close lost â and that's what makes pipeline reports possible. A contact never "closes," which is why tracking sales progress on contact records produces reports that can't answer basic questions.
Biggest money-loser here: reopening an old won deal when a customer comes back. That corrupts your history. New purchase, new deal. Every time.
The one-sentence version
A lead is a maybe, a contact is a person, a company is an organization, and a deal is a sale in motion. File things onto the right one and duplicates drop, reports start making sense, and nobody has to read a novel of notes to figure out what's going on.