Contacts, companies and pipeline: what goes where
A person, an organisation, and a possible deal. Most CRM confusion is one of these three being used for another one's job.
Nearly every "the CRM is a mess" complaint comes down to one of three records being used to do another one's job. They describe genuinely different things, and once that is clear most of the confusion goes away.
| Record | Describes | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | A person | Who do I email, and what have we said? |
| Company | An organisation | Who else works there, and is this the kind of business we sell to? |
| Opportunity | A possible deal | How much, and how close? |
Contacts are people, and only people
A contact is a human with an email address. Every activity attaches here: emails sent, opens, replies, calls, notes.
The single most common mistake is creating a contact for info@company.com and treating it as a person. It is not one. Nobody reads it, it will not reply, and it drags down every metric it appears in.
Companies are the account, not a label
A company groups the people who work there and holds what is true about the organisation: size, sector, what it sells, who it sells to.
This is what makes real targeting possible. "Everyone at a company that sells into retail grocery" is a company-level question. A contact record cannot answer it, which is exactly why the company link matters at import time.
Opportunities are conversations about money
An opportunity is a specific possible deal, with a value and a stage. Create one when a real conversation has started, not when you decide you would like to sell to someone.
A pipeline full of opportunities created on hope is worse than an empty one, because it produces a forecast everybody quietly knows is fiction and then nobody trusts any number on the page.
The rule that keeps it clean
- Every contact belongs to a company. No orphans.
- A company can exist with no contacts yet. That is a target account, and it is legitimate.
- An opportunity is created only after a real reply from a real person.
- If an opportunity has not moved stage in a month, it is not a live deal. Close it or admit it.
That last one is the one nobody enjoys. A pipeline that only ever grows is a list of wishes, and its main effect is to hide the deals that are genuinely moving.
Do
- Link every contact to a company, at import time where possible.
- Keep company-level facts on the company, not repeated on each contact.
- Create an opportunity when a conversation starts, not when you start hoping.
- Close stale opportunities honestly. A smaller true pipeline is worth more.
Don't
- Do not create contacts for shared inboxes like info@ or sales@.
- Do not use an opportunity as a reminder. That is a task.
- Do not keep duplicate companies for the same organisation. Every list built afterwards splits in two.
- Do not move a deal to a later stage because it has been sitting a while. Stage means what is true, not what you would like.
What if a contact changes jobs?
Update their company. The activity history follows the person, which is correct, because the relationship is with them rather than with the logo on their old badge.
Can one company have several opportunities?
Yes, and it is normal for anything sold per site, per team or per renewal. Keep them separate rather than inflating one.
Do I have to use the pipeline?
No. If you are only doing outreach, contacts and companies are enough. Add the pipeline when you have enough live conversations that you cannot hold them in your head.