4.1 CRM: leads, opportunities & the pipeline

The CRM app and the sales pipeline

The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) app in Odoo 19 tracks every commercial deal from first contact to a signed order. Its centerpiece is the pipeline — a Kanban board where each card is an opportunity and each column is a stage. Salespeople drag cards left to right as deals mature, giving managers an instant read on where revenue is concentrated and where it is stuck. The default stages are New, Qualified, Proposition, and Won, but stages are fully configurable: you can rename them, reorder them, add stages such as "Negotiation," restrict a stage to a specific sales team, or fold a stage in the Kanban to keep the board tidy. By default the pipeline opens filtered to My Pipeline, so a rep sees only their own opportunities.

Leads versus opportunities

By default, Odoo captures incoming interest directly as an opportunity. A separate Leads step is optional and must be switched on under CRM ▸ Configuration ▸ Settings ▸ Leads. When Leads are enabled, unqualified contacts — from website forms, incoming email to a team alias, imports, or purchased lists — land first as leads. A salesperson reviews, enriches, and converts a qualified lead into an opportunity that then enters the pipeline; during conversion Odoo can also create or link the customer contact and detect duplicates to merge.

The distinction is heavily tested. Two rules to memorize: leads never appear on the pipeline Kanban (only opportunities do), and lead scoring plus automated assignment operate on leads, so those features require the Leads setting to be on. Disabling Leads suits small teams that want every contact visible immediately; enabling Leads gives high-volume inbound a triage buffer before it clutters the pipeline.

Salespeople, sales teams, and activities

Every opportunity is assigned a Salesperson and a Sales Team (for example, "Direct Sales" or a regional group). Teams have their own pipeline, members, targets, and can own an email alias so messages sent to it generate leads or opportunities automatically. Reassigning a card is as simple as editing these fields or dragging between team views.

Progress is driven by activities — the next scheduled action on a record. Instead of relying on memory, a rep schedules a Call, Email, Meeting, or To-Do with a due date and note. Activities surface in the rep's Activities view and color the Kanban card: green means planned, yellow means due today, red means overdue. Completing one activity typically prompts scheduling the next, so no opportunity goes cold. Activity types and chained next-activity suggestions can be configured to enforce a consistent follow-up cadence across the team.

Expected revenue and probability

Each opportunity carries an Expected Revenue amount and a Probability percentage. Odoo 19 uses predictive lead scoring to compute probability automatically from historical won/lost data, weighing configurable variables such as source, medium, country, language, and assigned team. The weighted forecast — Expected Revenue × Probability — feeds the pipeline forecast and dashboards, so managers can judge realistic expected income rather than a raw pipeline total. You enable predictive scoring and pick its variables in the CRM settings; probability can also be entered manually when scoring is off. Optional recurring revenue (MRR) fields let subscription-style deals report monthly and yearly recurring amounts.

Assignment rules and lead scoring

With Leads enabled, Odoo can automatically assign incoming leads to teams and members. Each sales team defines a domain (a filter such as country or expected revenue) and a per-member capacity (how many leads each person should receive per run). A scheduled action distributes matching leads, balancing them across members. Combined with predictive scoring, this routes the highest-probability leads to the right reps without manual triage — a core reason to turn Leads on.

Marking won and lost

When a deal closes, the rep moves the card to a Won stage — a stage flagged Is Won, which sets probability to 100%. Losing a deal is different: clicking Lost opens a dialog requiring a Lost Reason (for example, "Too expensive" or "Competitor"). Marking an opportunity lost archives it (removing it from the active pipeline) and records the reason, so managers can analyze why deals fall through. Lost opportunities are not deleted — they can be restored, and lost-reason reporting is a standard CRM analysis. Lost Reasons are a configurable list.

A quick reference to anchor these mechanics:

For the functional certification, be sure you can explain where leads sit relative to the pipeline, how stages and activities move deals forward, how probability and expected revenue produce a weighted forecast, and exactly what happens — archive plus mandatory reason — when an opportunity is marked lost.