Opportunities vs Projects

Once you have moved through the various Stages of your Pipeline, you will inevitably need to change the Opportunity's state from Open to Won, Lost, Abandoned or Suspended.

Although both Opportunities and Projects work in a very similar way, and they share many features, there is one defining difference between the two:

• An Opportunity is used to track the steps towards winning a new deal.

• A Project is used for tracking the steps involved with actually delivering the service or product.

An Opportunity does not have to be Won in order to convert it.

You can convert an Opportunity to a Project at any time, although this most often happens once they agree to purchase your service or product.

Did you know?

A Project is not automatically created when an Opportunity state is set to Won. This must be done manually.

When an Opportunity is converted into a Project, the following occurs:

• A new Project is created using the name of the original Opportunity.

• The linked People and Companies in the Opportunity will be added to the resulting Project.

• The original Opportunity will be linked to the Project.

• The Status of the new Project will be set to New.

• If the Category for both Opportunities and Projects is the same then the Opportunity's Category will be applied to the Project too.

Pro Tip:

Setting a default Pipeline for new Projects ensures the resulting Pipeline appears on the Projects Board.

For more information about Projects, please refer to our article Starting a New Project.

To learn how to use Projects Boards more effectively, please check out our article Using Projects Board.

Key Similarities:

• Opportunities and Projects have their own respective Pipelines to track the different activities associated with each.

• Support for Category & Keywords.

• Both let you add a Start & End Date, which is added automatically.

You can enter and update:

• The State of an Opportunity, such as Open, Won, Suspended, Abandoned or Lost.

• The Status of a Project, such as New, In Progress, Deferred, Cancelled, Abandoned, or Done.

Key Differences:

• Only Opportunities have the ability to add a Total Value or Estimate with a list of products and services being offered.

• You can add a Probability percentage that your Opportunity will close.

• An Opportunity has an anticipated date that the customer will decide to go ahead with your products or services offering. This is called the Forecasted Close Date.

• There is a drop-down field called Opportunity Type which is used to further segment an Opportunity. For example, the Opportunity Type could distinguish between Opportunities that are national or international, new business or repeat business, direct leads or through an introducer.