What Is a CRM?
Hello, doers! It's time to focus on Odoo CRM application. Now, CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a process that tracks all of a business's interactions with leads and customers and compiles all that info in one place. Now, since CRMs look at across a different range of communication channels, they can be pretty handy for a variety of roles. For the customer-facing roles like sales, CRMs provide a more holistic picture of the customer journey and help plan or schedule activities.
And on that back end, CRMs can analyze vast amounts of information such as web visits, purchase history, attributed revenue, and more at an increasing scale over time. Now here at Stealthy Wood, we use Odoo CRM pipeline to track leads and opportunities as they progress through the various stages of our sales flow. Odoo CRM also keeps track of client info for us and helps us see where we stand with each of our customers.
Exploring the Odoo CRM Pipeline
So this is the main CRM dashboard. Now, by default, Odoo has various stages in it that are shown in Kanban view. Also by default, Odoo only shows the opportunities currently assigned to you, as indicated by the 'My Pipeline' filter up here in the search bar. Of course, if I click on that X right there, boom, all of the opportunities are appearing now. And as you can see, we have different stages in place to track our business opportunities.
Customizing Pipeline Stages
Now these stages themselves are each customizable, and we even have the option to add additional stages as well. If we'd like to customize any of these stages over here, we'd simply actually hover over them and select this little gear icon that appears. Now we have a couple options when you click that: we have the option to fold, edit, automations, and delete. If we select the fold stage, look at that! Boom, it's folded the stage right there in the Kanban view, which means it's just hidden. And to unfold it, we just select it there, and boom, it's back to normal.
If we reopen that gear icon up here, I want to show you something. Look at that. Inside of this menu, if we select 'Edit', we're given a bunch of options to customize a few other things related to this stage, like if it's a Won stage or folded. But for now, let's select that X over here. Great. Going back into the menu, I want to talk about automations over here. Now, what can you do in here? Well, inside of here we can customize a fully automated workflow with preconfigured automation rules for this stage, but don't worry, we'll get into all of that in a different video. For now, let's click back into our pipeline because I want to talk about more stuff over here.
Now from here on the far right over here, do you see that there's a plus stage button? This can be used to add a new stage to the pipeline. So let's click on that right now, and it's giving us the option to give it a title. So we're going to click 'Second Proposition' right there. Boom, we have our stage. Now we can place it wherever we want to in our pipeline. For this, let's drag it over to where it sounds like it would belong: after 'First Proposition' and before 'Won'. Boom, we've created a new stage.
Creating a New Opportunity
All right, but we've made stages. Now, let's take a look at a couple of different ways an opportunity can be created for these stages. Now first, we could click on any of these plus signs above one of these stages, and doing so allows us to create an actual opportunity within that specific stage. For instance, the 'Qualified' one over here will appear inside of here after I fill out this form. And if I wanted to, I can discard this and instead do a new one up here by selecting 'New' in the top left, creating an opportunity in the 'New' stage. And let's do that.
So from here, we're going to enter the organization or contact name associated with the opportunity. So let's select, in our case, Abigail, Abby for short. Now, since this customer is already in our database, the rest of the information has been automatically input in the fields below right there. But if this was a new customer, we'd have to input things such as the email and the phone number if we had those, manually, of course.
Up next, we'll give this opportunity a more unique title besides Abigail's opportunity just so it'll be easier to recognize as it moves through the pipeline and it's easier for me to find. So we're going to type in 'Abby wants 200 lamps'. Great. Why does she want them? We don't know. Now, since our lamps are $10 a piece, let's enter an expected revenue of $2,000 because, math. Great. And I could also change this at any time if I want to. Also, I want to make this opportunity a priority, which I can actually designate with these star icons over here, and give it the two stars for a high priority.
And with everything in place, we select 'Add'. And look at that. Just like that, Odoo has added our opportunity to the 'New' stage and presented us with a fresh opportunity to fill out if we needed. But we're good for now, so we're going to close this out. And there it is, look at that.
Scheduling and Managing Activities
Now I'm noticing something on a lot of these, and what is it, Odooers? It's a gray little clock icon. What does that mean? Well, that represents an activity that can be assigned to the opportunity. You'll see opportunities have different icons on this spot on their cards. Some represent a phone call, others a scheduled activity. And if we click on that clock icon, such as the one for Abby, we have the option to schedule an activity, which prompts us to a pop-up.
Inside of this pop-up, when we click the activity type drop-down over here, we have the option to change it to something else: meeting, reminder, a couple other ones such as a call. Now, I want to make a quick note for this. It's important to know that the fields on the activity form will vary depending on the chosen activity type. Some of them disappeared or appeared. For instance, with a call, we can add a summary. Like in our case, I know that they might want two times the order. Great. We can also add a due date in the event that we want to make sure this gets done in a timely manner so our customer isn't kept waiting. We're going to select something like a Saturday. I'm going to make them come in on a Saturday.
And for now, we also have an 'Assigned to' field over here, and I'm going to keep this activity assigned to Mitchell Admin for now. Also, if I have any notes, I can log them right here. Like, "rich person". And we're done. Now, below these fields, once everything's been done, I have the option to 'Open Calendar', 'Schedule', and 'Mark as Done', 'Done and Schedule Next', and 'Cancel'. Now, marking the activity as 'Done' over here would mean that I've already done the activity and I'm just logging it in the database. For now, we're actually just going to click 'Open Calendar' and something cool happens. Look at that, Odooers!
Understanding Pipeline Indicators
We basically opened the calendar, and I can specify a date and a time for this activity on a calendar view. From here, we'll select the date and time slot in the future. Now, this is happening on Saturday, so why don't we do something tomorrow? Great. And you'll notice a pop-up window appeared. I'm going to keep the default settings for now, so I'm going to just hit Save and Close over here. Now, once that we do that, look at that. Our new activity is right there, and if we click into it, it gives us some more information that we wanted, along with the opportunity that it's associated with, as you could tell. Ah, great.
And when we return to the CRM pipeline over here, you'll notice something really cool happened right there. Boom! It's no longer that little gray clock. It's now a phone icon that represents the scheduled call that we just configured. Okay, now let's imagine that Abigail just told me they definitely want to get the deal done. Knowing that, I'm going to drag this over here to the 'Qualified' stage. We can quickly move an opportunity back and forth between stages whenever we want, and keep that in mind.
You'll also notice that above each stage, there are color-coded bars indicating how many activities are scheduled for opportunities in that stage, along with their current status. Now, for instance, the color green, it represents planned activities. We have yellow over here, which represents activities that are scheduled for today. It could also be closer to like an orange or something, yellow-orange. And finally, red, which means you're overdue, Mitchell. Do not let this one get overdue. And finally, gray, which represents no scheduled activities.
Now to the right of the activity bar, there's a huge number, and that is the projected expected revenue for that specific stage. That number instantly changes to adhere to any new opportunities that are added to or that you removed from that specific stage.
Updating and Progressing Opportunities
And now I'm feeling kind of spicy. So if we click into Abby's opportunity, we're taken to the opportunity's form. Now from here, we can check out and adjust all sorts of things, like the probability of winning this, for example, which Odoo calculated for us, by the way, but we'll cover that in another video, so stay tuned for that.
Now, below these fields, we have a couple of tabs. First up is 'Internal Notes', where I could leave notes for my sales team regarding this opportunity. And if we click 'Extra Info' tab, there's a lot of information right there and tons of additional fields. Some are related to contact information of the client while others are focused on marketing and tracking. We can even move this opportunity to another stage from this opportunity form. If we go up to the top right and we select where it goes... Abby's moving forward, so we're at the 'Proposition' stage.
Oh, and guess what, Odooers? I just got a quick phone call, and it turns out my hunch was right: they do want double their order. Knowing that, let's quickly adjust this opportunity info to reflect that change. So let's change the title to 'Abby wants 400 lamps', and because it's double, this has also doubled over here. Boom, look at that, Odooers! Now, as we just saw, this change was actually a second proposition. So let's select our new stage for 'Second Proposition' up there. And just like we did before, our pipeline is now completely up to date. If we go back over here... ah, look at that, Odooers!
I know that is a lot to take in at once, so how about you let all of this new CRM information marinate a little, and we'll reconnect in the next video to go over even more cool stuff found in the CRM app. Sound good? Of course it does. Now go grab a snack.
