How accounts and opportunities drive each other
CRM has two ladders that look confusingly alike. An account runs suspect → qualified → prospect → customer. An opportunity runs suspect → qualified → prospect → proposal → negotiation → verbal → won. They share three stage names, which is the source of most of the confusion, and they are not the same thing.
The account ladder is about a relationship. How well do we know this company, and do they buy from us?
The opportunity ladder is about a deal. How close is this particular piece of business to being signed?
One company can have several opportunities at once, at different stages. It has only one status.
The link
They are not tracked independently. Advancing an opportunity promotes its account, as far as that stage warrants:
| Opportunity reaches | Account becomes |
|---|---|
| Qualified | Qualified, if it was still a suspect |
| Prospect | Prospect, if it was a suspect or qualified |
| Won | Customer |
The promotion only ever moves an account up, and only if it is behind. An account already at customer is not demoted because a new opportunity starts at suspect — which is right: one lost deal does not stop someone being a customer.
Why it works that way
Because the account status is a conclusion, not an input. "Is this a prospect?" is not a judgement anyone should have to make and maintain separately — it is already implied by whether there is live business being worked. Deriving it from opportunity progress means the pipeline is the single place work is recorded, and the account list stays true without anyone curating it.
The consequence worth knowing: if you find yourself progressing an account by hand, something upstream has not been updated. The manual control exists for the cases the automatic path cannot see — an account that became a customer through a channel that never had an opportunity — not as the normal route.
Why probability is not editable
Each opportunity stage carries a fixed probability: 0, 10, 30, 50, 70, 90, 100. The figure is set from the stage and cannot be typed.
That is a deliberate trade. Per-rep judgement would be more accurate for any one deal and useless in aggregate, because two reps' "60%" would mean different things and the pipeline total would be the sum of their differing optimism. A fixed ladder makes the number mean exactly one thing — how far along the process this deal is — so totals across reps are comparable.
It also means the pipeline is moved by doing the work, not by adjusting a forecast.
One trap in the figures: lost opportunities are also recorded at 100%. The number is recording that the outcome is settled, not the chance of a win. Any weighted total has to exclude closed opportunities.