Two CRM words that trip everybody up. Let's land them now.
Before this, your leads lived in your head. You knew who you'd called and who you hadn't because you remembered. This is your book of in-progress work, on one screen, in order. Nothing slips.
An opportunity is a contact with context.
Click any tile and the edit drawer opens. Contact details at the top: who they are. Opportunity details below: where they are. Pipeline, stage, status, value, owner. On the left, the same things you learned on the contact record. Tasks, Notes, Appointments, Payments, Associated Objects.
The contact tells you who. The opportunity tells you where they are in your process. That's the difference. That's why both exist.
Drag sideways to update the stage. Drag down to close the deal.
Two different things, two different motions. Stage is where in the process. Status is how it ended. Mix them up and the board lies to you.
Click, call, drag, next.
Every tile has a row of small icons at the bottom. Call. Message. Email. Note. Task. Appointment. You don't have to open the contact for the simple things. See a tile, hit the phone icon, the call goes out. Disposition the call when it ends, drag the tile to its new stage, move on.
On a heavy lead day you are not opening 30 contact pages. You are working the board. The whole loop happens here.
Note what was said. Task what comes next. Document what you signed.
Three words, three habits. Do these every time and the system runs itself. Skip them and the board starts lying to you within a week.
All three are one click from the tile, or one click from inside the opportunity. You learned the buttons on the contact record. This is the rhythm.
Most opportunities make themselves. The rest, you add.
Vendor leads come in through the Inbound Lead Pipeline automatically. But the referral your sister called you about, the walk-in at the office, the name your barber gave you, those need a tile. Top right of the board, Add opportunity.
That's the foundation.
You've covered the three things every Forge agent has to know: how leads reach you, what a prospect looks like in the system, and how prospects move through your process.
What gets on the board gets worked. What doesn't, doesn't.