CRM holds the part of a sale that happens before there is anything to invoice: the enquiry, the company it came from, the deal you are working and the quote you send. Everything downstream — the order, the invoice, the project — starts from a record that lives here.
Leads, accounts, deals and quotes, with a price list behind them.
A lead is an enquiry that has not yet become a company you deal with. You create it, work it, and close it one way or the other — a lost lead is a record, not a deletion, because next quarter somebody will ask why it was lost.
An account is the organisation; the contacts are the people in it. Keeping them apart is what lets a person move job without taking the history with them, and lets an account survive everybody you knew there leaving.
Deals sit on a pipeline and advance by stage. The stage is the forecast: if the board is not honest, nothing downstream of it is either, so move a deal when the customer moves, not when you hope they will.
Quotes are created from the deal rather than from a blank page, so the quote and the pipeline cannot disagree about what was offered. What it costs comes from the price list behind it.
Settings and the price list are permissioned separately from selling. A salesperson can quote from the list without being able to change what is on it, which is the whole point of having one.
The capability list this guide is written against, unabridged. Nothing above adds to it.
CRM on the Sales pageThe modules CRM hands work to, or takes it from. Most problems that look like one module are a handover between two.