Sales pipeline · ASRR Tech
What is the difference between a contact and an opportunity?
A contact describes the relationship; an opportunity describes a potential journey with a need and outcome. One contact can have several opportunities.
A practical example
A business customer discusses renovations for two locations separately.
This is an illustrative situation for assessing your own process.
Checklist for your team
- Keep relationship data central.
- Separate needs.
- Assign opportunity actions.
What does success look like?
Contact history stays coherent while journeys remain separately trackable.
Test this with a recognisable record and have a colleague review the outcome. Note missing information or decisions. Use that finding to improve a working agreement before applying the process more broadly.
Sales pipeline: the wider process
A pipeline describes the progress of a sales opportunity. Choose stages that represent a business change, such as a completed conversation or a quotation sent. Define the evidence required at each stage and who takes the next action. Separate activities from outcomes: a call attempt is different from a completed intake. Review old and new opportunities before fixing the configuration. Include lost, cancelled and reopened journeys. Those exceptions show whether the definitions are clear enough for the whole team.