Salesforce leads vs. opportunities
Tips to help you manage the transition between leads and opportunities inside your Salesforce CRM
Understanding Salesforce's taxonomy of data and functions is essential for unlocking the potential of your CRM. Whether it’s acting on Leads as they enter your funnel or calculating revenue based on existing Opportunities, knowing how to classify and segment data is critical for success.
One area that often creates confusion is Salesforce Opportunity Stages. While Lead Stages in your sales funnel help marketing and sales, Opportunity Stages are used for revenue prediction and financial health.
This guide explores the differences between Salesforce Leads and Opportunities and gives tips for managing the transition inside your Salesforce CRM.
What’s the difference between Salesforce leads & opportunities?
A Salesforce Lead is an individual or company inside your CRM that is not yet qualified by your Lead score criteria.
Leads are typically acquired through marketing channels like email, SEO, or advertising. They need to be converted into Contacts or Accounts via a qualification process.
Once qualified, you can attach an Opportunity to a Lead if there’s potential to generate revenue from a deal.
Definitions:
- Lead: A person or organization first acquired in Salesforce via marketing efforts.
- Contact: A qualified and converted Lead with marketable information attached to its record. Contacts represent individual people.
- Account: A qualified and converted Lead that represents a business or organization.
- Opportunity: A qualified Lead with the potential to complete a sale.
How do opportunity stages relate to your sales funnel?
An Opportunity serves a different function from a Lead. Both move through stages, but Opportunity Stages are designed to forecast revenue.
Changes in your sales funnel often correspond with changes in Opportunity Stage, but the metrics differ.
- Sales reps may use conversion rate to measure funnel performance from Lead to deal.
- Executives use Opportunity Stages to evaluate performance based on past and expected revenue.
Key differences:
- Leads represent unqualified individuals or businesses in your CRM.
- Opportunities represent qualified Leads with buying potential.
- Lead Stages track the steps a Lead must take before becoming a deal.
- Opportunity Stages track revenue probability and deal forecasting.
Understanding opportunity stages
Once a Lead is qualified as an Opportunity, it is divided into several stages. Salesforce’s default Opportunity Stages include:
- Prospecting/Qualification: The Lead is being qualified as an Opportunity.
- Needs Analysis: The Lead is qualified but needs further analysis.
- Value Proposition/Identify Decision Maker: The Lead is midway through the funnel and engaging with the business.
- Proposal/Negotiation: The Lead is being actively pursued in a potential sale.
- Closed Won: The Lead completed a deal.
- Closed Lost: The Lead did not complete the deal.
Each stage comes with a probability of success. For example:
- Prospecting: ~10%
- Proposal: up to 90%
These probabilities feed directly into the Forecast Stage, which includes categories such as:
- Pipeline: Early stage, low probability.
- Best case: Likely to advance and close.
- Commit: Very high probability of closing.
- Omitted: Lost deals.
- Closed: Deals successfully won.
Recap: Opportunities are qualified Leads tied to Contacts or Accounts. Opportunity Stages track likelihood of conversion and forecast revenue.
If you use a HubSpot Salesforce integration, Opportunities will sync as Deals in HubSpot.
How to convert leads into opportunities in Salesforce
Before converting every Lead into an Opportunity, define what makes an Opportunity in your business. Common factors include:
- Budget
- Purchase timeframe
- Product interest
Clear lead scoring criteria help cut out unqualified Leads. Not every Lead should be converted. For example, vendors or affiliates in your CRM should not move into Opportunity Stages.
Best practices:
- Configure record types in Salesforce to reduce confusion.
- Configure Opportunity Stages so converted Leads fall into the correct stage for forecasting.
- Standardize your sales and marketing process after conversion to improve conversion ratios.
With proper configuration, Salesforce Opportunities let you focus on revenue, forecast with accuracy, and act on data to win more deals.
