Understand contacts, opportunities and pipeline totals

Choose the right record type

A contact records a relationship. An opportunity describes sales work and its next decision. CRM opportunities distinguish verified commercial records from review and demo records so examples and unreviewed leads do not enter commercial totals.

1. Confirm the contact or company linked to the opportunity.
2. Choose the record type that matches the evidence.
3. Set a stage, owner and useful next step.

• A new website enquiry is not automatically a won deal.
• Demo and review opportunities cannot be recorded as won or lost commercial business.

Read value and stage carefully

An open opportunity value describes recorded pipeline, not collected payment or recognized revenue. Mark a commercial opportunity won only when the team has evidence for that decision. Archive and restore affect visibility and should preserve a useful history.

• Review the stage and expected close date.
• Assign follow-up work to the responsible person.
• Keep notes specific to the conversation and use activity history for context.

Check before leaving an earlier CRM

Contact CSV import is one migration step. Companies, deals, associations, activities, forms and automations require their own inventory and validation before retiring a source CRM.

• The original source and the records included in an import.
• Duplicate, invalid and skipped rows from the preview.
• The reconciliation and workflow checks still needed for cutover.