Leads, Opportunities, Pipelines & Projects: FAQ

A lead is someone who might be interested in what you sell, before they've been qualified into your pipeline. Leads keep unqualified prospects separate from your actual contacts and organizations until they're ready to convert. See Leads.

Insightly marks the lead "CLOSED - Converted," creates or links a contact and an organization, and creates an open opportunity linked to all three. Custom field values can be copied through the conversion. See Leads, Converting.

Yes. This can only be done one lead at a time, and it deletes the original lead. Most information transfers, but tags, custom fields, and other lead-only fields do not. See Leads, Changing a lead to a contact.

Yes, from the Actions menu. This creates a new lead and deletes the original contact record, and it isn't available for bulk editing. See Leads, Changing a contact to a lead.

With a Lead Assignment Rule. Rules can route by geography, employee count, any custom field, or round-robin across a team, and setting one requires administrator access. See Lead Assignment Rules.

A queue holds records that any assigned user can take ownership of, rather than assigning each record to one person up front. Administrators create queues; users assigned to a queue can claim any record in it. See Creating and Managing CRM Queues.

The opportunity's status: Open, Suspended, Abandoned, Lost, or Won. Open and Suspended are the two open states; the rest are closed. See Opportunities.

State reasons record why an opportunity's state changed, and administrators add them account-wide from System Settings > Opportunity States. Once added, the reason appears whenever an opportunity moves to that state. See Opportunities, State reasons.

Yes, two ways: a detailed stage-duration table, or a single Time in Stage field an administrator can add to the highlights bar for a quicker read. See Opportunities, Stage duration tracking.

Open the opportunity, click Actions, and select Convert To Project. You choose the project name, the reason for winning, the new project owner, and whether to copy over emails, files, and notes. See Opportunities, Converting to a project.

A pipeline maps out the stages a record moves through for work you repeat. Only one pipeline can be applied to each record, and every pipeline must include at least one stage. See Pipelines.

Yes, by attaching an activity set to a stage. When a record reaches that stage, the set triggers and creates its predefined tasks and events automatically. See Pipelines, Combining pipelines and activity sets.

You must be an administrator. Write out all the stages first, and create any activity sets a stage will trigger before you build the pipeline, or you'll have to come back and edit it later. See Pipelines, Setting up a pipeline.

Because it's still in use. Check any tasks, opportunities, and projects using it, and your Recycle Bin for deleted records that used it. See Pipelines, Deleting a pipeline or stage.

Opportunities track potential deals; projects track the delivery work once a deal closes. A project can be created automatically when a won opportunity converts, or manually on its own. See Projects.

One or the other, never both. Pipelines suit work that follows the same fixed sequence of stages every time; milestones suit work with its own one-off set of dated checkpoints. See Projects.

Open the project, click the Milestones subtab, click Add Milestone, enter a title, a date, and who it's assigned to, then save. See Milestones.

Your own milestones appear on your Insightly calendar automatically. To see a whole project's milestones together, click the calendar icon in the project's Milestones subtab. See Milestones, The milestone calendar.