Knowledge Base

Within Teamwork CRM, there are some key terms to understand when setting up and using your site.

Users are considered to be the people using the software, e.g. members of your sales team.

A company is the target you are looking to acquire business from, using the contact in the company to get the company on board.

Each company can have multiple contacts, but a contact can only be associated with one company.

A lead is considered to be any potential prospect you have identified - a company or person who has expressed interest in one of your products or services in some way.

The threshold for what is considered a lead is up to you. For example, filling out a form, subscribing to a blog, or referral by an existing customer.

Once a lead has been identified, the next step is to establishing whether the prospective customer has potential as a sale or not.

You can define the stages a lead has to go through in order to be qualified. For example, you may decide that when a lead is first identified, there needs to be 3 contacts/touches with the customer before they are considered qualified.

Once a contact has opted in to receive communication from your company, has become educated about your product or service, and is interested in learning more, they are considered a qualified lead.

Sales qualified leads are prospective customers that have been researched and vetted, first by an organization's marketing team, and then by its sales team.

These contacts are deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process.

Every company has a different process for defining their criteria, in general, opportunities are considered to be leads with a strong chance of acquiring.

For a lead to become an opportunity it has to be qualified.

A deal is a collective term for both leads and opportunities.

For some businesses, they would regard 2 leads and 3 opportunities as 5 deals. In Teamwork CRM, leads and opportunities are managed in separate sections of your account, which allows you to do deeper reporting for both, rather than solely for deals as a whole.

Leads in your pipelines can either be qualified as opportunities or lost.

Opportunities in your pipelines can be marked as won, lost, or disqualified.

A pipeline represents the stages in your sales process, i.e. the step-by-step process your sales representatives go through to convert a prospect into a customer.

The sales pipeline is often divided into stages for each step of the sales process, with the sales representatives responsible for moving opportunities through the stages.

It can also refer to a visual representation of the sales process, where every open opportunity is arranged based on the sales stage it is in.

At some point, all active sales should flow throw your pipeline.

A stage represents a step in the sales process.

Sales representatives will move leads and opportunities between the relevant stages, depending on the progress.

Companies define their sales stages differently, but each one has a set of requirements behind it that need to be completed in order for an opportunity to move to the next stage.

Products are what you’re selling (physical products, software, subscriptions etc.)

You can create product items in your CRM with associated pricing. When you then create a deal, you can attach the relevant product(s).

For example, a particular customer may require two products, and you can add both to the one deal.

Anything the sales person does in trying to get the sale is considered activity, e.g phone/email correspondence, lunch with the lead,  meeting with a team member to discuss options, follow up with the contact.

Activities can be logged in the past/present. For example, if a member of your sales team organizes a call with a lead for next week, they would log that activity as a future event, whereas if they just received email follow up from the lead, that activity has already occurred so can be logged in the past.

Lead and opportunity cards are ordered based on the status of their activities.

Each lead/opportunity card will have a status icon to the right. There are four status states:

An owner is a user that is assigned to a particular item. Owners can be linked to:

For more information, see: Understanding the Sales Process