What is the difference between a lead, a contact and a deal?
The three words are often used loosely, and that is when pipelines and reports stop making sense. If every inquiry becomes a contact and every contact counts as a deal, nobody can say how many real opportunities there are.
Lead: a request nobody has checked yet
A lead is where sales work starts: a filled-in website form, an entry from an ad lead form, a call, a message, a business card from a trade fair. It shows possible interest, nothing more.
The job with a lead is to respond quickly and qualify it: is there a real need, a budget, a person who decides, a time frame? The outcome is simple. The lead is converted, or it is closed with a reason such as spam, wrong region, no need or no response.
Contact: a person you keep
A contact is the record of a real person you have a relationship with: name, phone, email, role, consent and the history of your conversations. In B2B work a contact belongs to an organization, which can have several contacts: the buyer, the accountant, the director. A contact does not close. It stays and collects history.
Deal: one opportunity with a value
A deal, also called an opportunity, is one specific thing you are trying to sell to a contact or an organization: this order, this project, this contract. It has an amount, a stage in your pipeline (for example new, offer sent, negotiation, won, lost) and a person responsible for it. A deal ends: it is won or lost.
A short example
A request arrives from a website form: “We need 200 branded mugs by March.” That is a lead. After a call it turns out the sender is an office manager with a budget. She becomes a contact, her company becomes an organization, and “200 mugs by March” becomes a deal with an amount and a stage. When she comes back in autumn for calendars, you do not create a new lead or a new contact. You open a second deal for the same contact.
How OrgLines handles it
In OrgLines, leads from Meta lead forms, forms and quizzes on your website and manual entry land in the Lead Center, where they are assigned and qualified. A qualified lead becomes a contact linked to its organization, and where you work with orders you can prepare an order straight from the lead, with a preview before anything is created. The orders of an organization are shown as a pipeline on its card.