Opportunities & the pipeline

An opportunity is CRM’s core record, a tracked sales prospect against a real customer, owned by a sales engineer, with a product interest, a potential value and an outcome. It is the record every sales dashboard aggregates, and the record a Sales offer originates from.

Converting a lead

When a lead is Qualified, you convert it into a customer master record (and optionally, an initial opportunity).

Open the qualified lead’s detail page.
Choose Convert. Conversion is only offered once the lead is Qualified.
The system creates a customer record, carrying the lead’s contact, company and notes forward. A reference back to the source lead is stored on the customer for traceability.
Optionally, create the first opportunity in the same flow, pre-populated with the lead’s context.
The lead is marked Converted.

Before the customer is created, the system checks for an existing customer with the same email. If one exists, conversion is blocked so you don’t create a duplicate customer.

Only roles with customer-create permission can convert a lead, and the conversion is recorded in the audit log.

Creating an opportunity

You can also create an opportunity directly against an existing customer.

Open CRM → Opportunities and choose New opportunity.
Select the customer from the customer master (customers are never re-typed).
Set the region. The state and city default from the customer but can be edited note that a region is not the same as a state (“Coimbatore” and “Outer Chennai” are sub-state regions). The region must be one from the configured region list.
Choose the product interest (Pump / Valve) and enter the potential value in INR (it must be zero or more).
The sales engineer defaults to you as the creator (this drives who can see the opportunity). An application engineer is optional. Both must be active users.
Save. The opportunity is created with status Open and a creation timestamp.

The form rejects invalid input with a clear message, for example a negative value, a missing customer or region, or a region that isn’t on the list.

The opportunity lifecycle

An opportunity moves through these stages and records an outcome:

Open  →  Offer Made  →  Won
   └──────────────────→  Lost / Rejected

Open → Offer Made: the sales handoff. You can link the offer once it exists.
Offer Made → Won: marking Won requires a won value (INR).
Open / Offer Made → Lost or Rejected: marking Lost or Rejected requires an outcome reason.

Only valid transitions are allowed; an illegal jump (for example Open straight to Won) is rejected. Every transition records who changed it and when.

Terminal outcomes (Won, Lost, Rejected) cannot be silently reopened, only a manager or org admin can reopen a closed opportunity, and the reopen is audited.

The opportunity list & pipeline

CRM → Opportunities lists opportunities filtered to your scope, showing customer region, sales engineer, application engineer, product, potential value, status and created date.

A sales engineer sees only the opportunities they own; a manager or org admin sees them all.
The list supports deep-linking by status, business unit, region and owner, so when you click a tile on a dashboard the list opens pre-filtered to exactly that slice.
A Won opportunity’s linked offer opens the underlying Sales offer when present.

Click any opportunity to open its detail, which shows the created date, customer, sales and application engineers, the outcome (status and reason) and the potential value. An empty selection shows a clear “no opportunities for this selection” message rather than an error.