How to track sales: from opportunity to quote, and from quote to contract

Example scenario: picture a firm in Konya that sells spare parts for farm machinery. Price questions arrive from a dealer by phone, from a farmer on WhatsApp, and from a cooperative met at a trade fair by email. Each question is a sales opportunity; an unrecorded one is remembered only when the customer calls again. When the firm starts tracking sales, the first job is to put all these questions on the same list.

The source becomes valuable later. Which channel turns into quotes and which only into questions can be seen only if the source was written on every opportunity. The stage says where the opportunity stands in the sales process; the owner decides whom the customer turns to. The next step is the tracking itself. A next step with no date does not count as a step.

Official statistics also treat CRM as the home of this information: Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, defines CRM as applications for managing information about customers when it measures software use in enterprises. The definition is on Eurostat's e-business integration page. Sales tracking is the fastest-changing part of that information.

Keep the card short. A card that is hard to fill in does not get filled in, and after a while empty fields tell nobody anything. For most sales teams these fields are enough to start with:

• Source: the channel the opportunity came through (phone, WhatsApp, web form, trade fair, referral).
• Stage: where the opportunity sits in the sales process.
• Owner: the person the customer deals with.
• Next step and its date: what will be done, and on which day.
• Quote: if one was sent, which version and its validity date.
• Last contact: when, and through which channel, you last spoke.

At the Konya firm, the most useful line on the list would be the next step. If a salesperson who tells a dealer 'I'll send the price list on Thursday' writes it on the card, the list reminds them on Thursday; if not, the promise stays in their memory. An estimated value can be written too. But an estimate also carries the optimism of whoever filled in the card, which is why the weekly review looks at the next step before the value.

Stage names are similar in most companies: new enquiry, quote to prepare, quote sent, won, lost. The names cause no trouble; the trouble is in the rule for moving between them. One salesperson moves an opportunity forward because the customer 'seemed positive', another leaves it where it is in the same situation. The same list then shows two different realities, and the manager cannot tell which stage to trust.

The fix is to tie every move to an event. If the quote was sent, the stage changes; if the customer says they received it, that becomes a note, not a stage. This ordered set of stages is called a sales funnel, and you can see how the stages line up in the sales funnel glossary entry.

The lost stage needs as much care as the won stage. If lost opportunities are not closed, the list swells, and some of the deals that look open have in fact long been over.

An untracked opportunity is quiet. Nobody decides to lose it; nobody simply takes the next step. The customer waits for a while, then asks another firm for a quote. For the salesperson it does not even count as a lost deal, because it still shows as open on the list.

The weekly review breaks that silence. The meeting does not go through every opportunity; it looks only at those with no next step, those past their date, and those nobody has spoken to for a long time. At the Konya firm this meeting could take place on Monday morning, so the opportunities that need a call before the dealers place their weekly orders come into view. A good share of untracked opportunities are often quotes that were sent but never answered. How to follow the waiting period after a quote goes out is covered in detail in what quote follow-up is.

The reason for a loss is often left blank or filled in as 'price'. Price may really be the reason, but putting every loss down to price also hides missing follow-up behind it. A short list to choose from reduces the problem: price, delivery time, product fit, an ongoing relationship with another supplier, no reply. The last item says the most, because it points to a reason within the team's own control.

Loss reasons also change how you look at negotiation. If the Konya firm saw that a good share of its losses came from delivery times, it would look at its stock arrangements instead of cutting prices. That decision can only be made if the reason was written down every time.

In Corex360 CRM, customers, contacts, opportunities, quotes, and contracts sit in one record. Where an opportunity came from shows on the card: WhatsApp, the website, email, phone, an office visit, a referral, Instagram, or a site visit. When the quote form on your website is filled in, an opportunity card opens by itself and shows how long the opportunity has been waiting. A thread in the Messaging window can also be converted into an opportunity, and the converted conversation carries the opportunity number badge.

The sales pipeline opens in a kanban view; in a sample pipeline the stages run from new enquiry to quote preparation, from approval to sending to the customer, and on to won or lost. The quote is prepared from the opportunity card using a template and goes through an approval step where one is needed; the quote and the contract sit in the tabs of the same customer card. X AI follows up a quote that gets no reply, but it does not send a quote to a customer on its own. The Corex360 CRM page shows the module as a whole.

There is no need to prepare a separate spreadsheet for the weekly review: the opportunities screen counts hot opportunities without follow-up and those with no planned activity separately. The manager opens the Monday meeting with those counts.

Sales tracking starts with a habit, and software comes after. A team that does not write a next step on each opportunity will not write it in software either. The card fields and stage rules are agreed first; the tool is chosen afterwards.

A spreadsheet struggles once several people start updating the same file. It is unclear who changed which row, the conversation history does not fit in a cell, and reminders sit outside the sheet. From that point on, a shared record is needed. In the demo we compare your process with the sample pipeline and move an opportunity together to a quote, and from there to a contract.