Leads vs. deals
Understanding the difference between leads and deals can help you structure your sales process more effectively.
While both represent stages of potential revenue, they serve different purposes in your sales cycle. Learn more about lead management in this post.
Leads
A lead represents a potential sales opportunity linked to a contact or organization that has yet to be qualified. They’re perfect for initial outreach when you’re not ready to actively track these opportunities in your pipeline.
Leads Inbox is a dedicated space to organize and work on your prequalified leads before they become deals. Here are a few things to keep in mind about leads:
- You must link a lead with either a contact person or organization, or both
- You can use leads to organize potential clients, converting them into deals
You can learn more about lead management in this post.

When you click on the “...”, you can:
- Find any deleted lead on the restore data page within the first 30 days after deletion
- Export and import leads, with correct global permissions access
- Access the data cleanup page with deal admin permission

Deals
Deals represent qualified sales opportunities linked to a person or organization that you’re actively working on. They move through the stages of your pipeline until it’s either won or lost.

Clicking on a deal opens its detail view, where you can see any linked contacts, products, projects and activities.

You can learn more about deal management in this post.
Leads vs. deals
You can think of a lead as a starting point and a deal as the next step when you’re confident the opportunity is worth pursuing.
The table below shows the main differences between leads and deals, helping to understand how each can best serve your sales process.
Feature | Leads | Deals |
Link to projects and products | No | Yes |
Create documents and upload files | No | Yes |
Can be created through Leadbooster tools | Yes | No |
Can be archived | Yes | Yes |
Invoicing | No | Yes |
Formula fields | No | Yes |
Participants | No | Yes |
Goes in a pipeline/stage | No | Yes |
Changelog | No | Yes |
Converting leads to deals
List view
Once you decide which leads should be qualified, you can easily convert the highlighted selection to deals and add them directly into your pipeline to start your sales process. Select them in the list view and click “Convert to deals.”

To confirm your choice, hit ”Convert leads” and the leads will be deleted and replaced by deals in the specified pipeline.

Detail view
You can convert a single lead from its detail view by clicking the “Convert to deal” button in the bottom left corner.

Was this article helpful?
Yes
No