As a lead progresses through your sales pipeline, you're hopeful at some point, that lead will convert to an open job. What then? Well as you likely know, that now allows you to transition your effort from one that is sales & business development minded to sourcing, pipelining and submitting candidates.

But what does this all mean for your opportunity? And when does this occur in Crelate?

A Lead will convert when the stage type is equal to In Progress. As a result, we recommend all stages prior to your OPEN stage to have a type equal to New Leads.

Any opportunity that resides in a New Leads type stage will remain a sales only opportunity. Meaning that it's not yet an active job that needs to be recruited.

Pro Tip: You may always manually override this by Allowing Recruiting for this lead.

However, the idea here those opportunities in your New Leads type stages are those you're actively pursuing while those in an In Progress type are those that you're now actively recruiting for. As a result, when moving an opportunity to an In Progress type, this creates an active job dashboard and will now default to show that opportunity on your Recruiting home page.

Whatever status an opportunity may reside in, you'll always have the ability, within the opportunity record, to view its workflow status.

The value here is always allowing access to view what status an opportunity is in. Additionally, what if a job becomes open but later is put on hold or cancelled by the client? The ability to track the status doesn't stop when something is marked as open, instead it still has several outcome steps remaining (Filled, Lost, On Hold, etc).

We strongly encourage that you utilize the pipeline in this fashion track beyond a job being open. Many of our customers will also look to later re-engage older lost or on hold leads as part of an engagement cadence. This will ultimately allow you to review your pipeline and sort based on Last Reach Out or Last Engagement (More on Crelate's Date Fields).

For more information on managing leads and using Crelate's CRM, check out our full Business Development guide!