Skip to main content

Leads v Opportunities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales





Updated: 1/27/2022

When my company InfoStrat implements Dynamics 365 Sales (formerly CRM) for a client, one of the first questions we are likely to hear is when to use the Leads entity and when to use Opportunities.

Leads is a smaller entity whose fields include topic, name, job title, email, company name, phone numbers and address.

Opportunities has more detailed information: topic and name information along with more fields such as the estimated close date, estimated revenue, and win probability.  Depending on the nature of your sales, you may have other fields such as proposed date.  It is related to Accounts and Contacts, and has lookups into each of these related entities.

The following are my thoughts on when to use each:

  1. Leads are for prospecting.  This is where you would put a mailing list from business cards that you gather at a trade show, or website visitors who register for an event or white paper.
  2. I don't mind having a large number of leads even knowing that most will never convert to opportunities.  In general, I do not want to clutter up my Accounts and Contacts with those low probability customers.
  3. When leads are qualified, they are converted into opportunities along with related account and contact records. 
  4. Opportunities are won or lost, but you would not want to count leads that go nowhere in the same way as a proposal that was lost.  This is a good reason to distinguish between leads and opportunities. 
  5. Opportunities are the heart of sales activity.  You will use opportunities as the basis for sales pipeline meetings, and a trigger to check in with customers and prospects regarding opportunities and bids.  
  6. If you know the value and estimated date for a customer purchase, it is an opportunity rather than a lead.   
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales has a built-in function to convert a lead into an Account, Contact, and Opportunity record.  This process is used during the qualification process.  Once you understand that the prospective customer has a demonstrated interest in a specific offering, you may want to convert the lead to an opportunity. 

You can build marketing lists for both leads and contacts (as well as accounts).  This means that you may end up with a parallel set of marketing lists for each.  Be sure to send marketing outreach to both leads and contacts where appropriate.

If you use an account-based marketing strategy, you will start with activities directed to Accounts which, when successful, will create Opportunities. 

Dynamics includes different dashboards and reports relating to opportunities and leads. 


Popular posts from this blog

Key Concepts for Microsoft Dynamics 365: Tenant, Instance, App and Solution

Updated 8/15/2022 To understand Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) and Power Apps, you need to learn some new terms and concepts that may be a bit different from what you know from databases and solutions that are hosted on premises.  These concepts also apply to Power Apps.  The main difference is that with Power Apps you are not starting with a Microsoft app but more of a blank canvas for your custom apps.  This post introduces some key terms and how these concepts are important for planning your implementation. While Dynamics 365 is still available on premises, it is most commonly deployed on the Microsoft cloud.  This blog post discusses only cloud implementations. Microsoft has multiple clouds such as commercial and government community clouds in several countries. We start with a Microsoft tenant .  A tenant is the account you create in the Microsoft Online Services environment (such as Office 365) when you sign up for a subscription. A tenant contains uni

Understanding Dynamics 365 and Office 365 Admin Roles

Managing Dynamics 365 instances If you run Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) in the Microsoft cloud, you need to understand how your Dynamics instances relate to Office 365 and choose which of your administrators receives which roles and permissions to manage Dynamics 365. In on premises deployments, your network administrator would create and delete user accounts.  The Dynamics 365 admin would then assign permissions to users in Dynamics 365. This post explains three administrator roles: Office 365 Global Administrator Dynamics 365 System Administrator Dynamics 365 Service Administrator You may think that the Dynamics 365 system administrator would have power to do all the actions needed to manage Dynamics 365, but this is not the case. What's different in Microsoft cloud deployments is that licenses and user accounts are managed in Office 365 by an Office 365 Global Administrator.  This role is analogous to a network administrator for an on premises

My Favorite Microsoft Power Apps Bloggers and their Blogs

  by James Townsend Updated 7/5/2022 Microsoft Power Apps is one of my favorite subjects, and I enjoy reading blog posts from members of this thriving technical community.  Here are some of my favorite bloggers and their blogs: The Official Microsoft Power Apps Blog   I have to start with the official Microsoft Power Apps blog.  It has many contributors, largely Microsoft program manager, including frequent posters Denise Moran ,  Greg Lindhorst , Kartik Kanakasabesan , and  Adrian Orth .  This is the place to go for product announcements, updates and technical how-to for a broad range of Power Apps topics.  April Dunnam April Dunnam was formerly focused on SharePoint and now devoting herself to Power Platform.  April offers highly understandable explanations of Power Platform, Dataverse and other top Power Apps topics. She joined Microsoft in late 2019 and has a thriving YouTube channel .  Carl De Souza Power Apps Blog and eBook This is one of the most extensive and best organized blo