Understanding Leads vs Opportunities

Overview

Capturing potential new business in Sugar may entail creating both an opportunity and a lead record, though each serves a unique purpose.

Beginning with version 9.1.0, each user's license type (e.g. Sugar Serve) determines what functionality is available as described in the License Types Matrix documentation. Please note that the Leads and Opportunities modules are not available for Sugar Serve users.

Leads vs Opportunities

A Lead is a person who is a sales prospect. An Opportunity is the specific sales deal being pursued including the estimated dollar amount. The Opportunity record will be related to the Lead or Contact record of the person with whom you are hoping to do business.

Please note that the Opportunity record requires a relationship to an account. If you do not wish to create an Account record for the organization associated with an opportunity, you can either attach the opportunity to a placeholder account (i.e. an Account record named "Does Not Exist") or you can make a code-level customization to your instance so that the accounts relationship is no longer required for opportunities.

When the opportunity is successfully closed, you can change its status to "Closed Won". Likewise, if the associated person is still a lead, you can convert their Lead record to a Contact record to signify that this is now a person with whom you have done business.