Creating contacts, companies, leads and opportunities
How CRM records relate to each other, and the day-to-day workflow for capturing and progressing them.
- Audience
- Sales & CRM teams, Support teams
- Permissions needed
- crm leads/companies/contacts/deals: create, read, update
- Prerequisites
- CRM access granted by your administrator
- Environment
- Production and staging
- Product version
- Current
- Last reviewed
- Owner
- Propulsive Product Team
CRM in Propulsive is built around four connected record types: Contacts, Prospect Companies, Leads and Deals. Understanding how they relate makes the day-to-day workflow much faster.
The record model
- A Contact is a person - a buyer, decision-maker or point of contact.
- A Prospect Company is the organisation that contact belongs to (for B2B; for direct-to-consumer work you can operate on contacts alone).
- A Lead is an early-stage enquiry - not yet qualified into a real opportunity.
- A Deal is a qualified opportunity moving through your pipeline stages toward a close.
A lead converts into a deal once it’s qualified; the deal then carries forward the linked contact and company, plus every follow-up, appointment and communication logged against it.
Day-to-day workflow
- Capture the lead - from an enquiry, a call, or a web form - under CRM → Leads.
- Qualify and convert - once it’s a real opportunity, convert the lead into a deal in your pipeline.
- Log activity - follow-ups, appointments and calendar entries against the deal keep a full history, so anyone picking it up later has context.
- Move it through stages - the deal pipeline is stage-based, and the Forecast view rolls up expected revenue by stage.
- Hand off to Sales - once a deal is ready to quote, Sales’ estimates and quotations reference the same contact/company record, so pricing doesn’t start from a blank slate.
Deduplication
Today, checking for an existing contact or company before creating a new one is a manual step - search first, then create only if it’s genuinely new. Automated duplicate detection isn’t part of the current CRM.
Where this data goes next
Once a deal is quoted and won, the same contact/company carries into Sales’ order and invoice records, and eventually into Accounting’s customer ledger - so the record you create here is the one the rest of the business ends up using.