Before configuring anything, it’s important to understand how Sales are structured in Tribe. In this first step, you learn how leads are captured and qualified before entering your formal pipeline, and how relationships, opportunities, pipelines, and commercial context fit together. This gives you a shared foundation before you start shaping the system to your own process.
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Table of Contents
Introduction to Sales
What is a Lead
What is a sales opportunity
How to create a sales opportunity
The four building blocks of a sales opportunity
Commercial relationship types: when to use what?
1. Introduction to sales
You start with a high-level overview of how Tribe structures sales. Relationships represent long-term connections, while sales opportunities represent individual deals that can repeat over time. One relationship can contain multiple opportunities, each with its own details, phases, products, and activities.
From this release onwards, Tribe also introduces a dedicated step before the formal sales pipeline: Lead Management. Leads sit between your marketing activity and your opportunities — giving your team a structured place to capture inbound interest, qualify it, and convert only the right contacts into prospects with an attached opportunity. This keeps your pipeline clean and your forecasts reliable.
Exploring this structure yourself helps you understand how Tribe separates lead qualification, long-term relationship management from active sales work.
2. What is a Lead
A lead represents a potential customer who has not yet been qualified as a prospect. Leads have their own dedicated pipeline in Tribe, separate from your sales opportunities.
They move through a set of statuses: New → Working → MQL → SQL → Qualified or Disqualified, as your team engages and evaluates them.
Once a lead is qualified, Tribe automatically converts it into a prospect and creates a linked sales opportunity. From that point on, the deal is tracked as a normal opportunity in your pipeline.
Understanding this distinction matters because it determines where you capture new contacts and how your pipeline data stays accurate. Not every inbound contact should immediately become an opportunity — leads give your team a controlled space to make that call first.
3. What is a sales opportunity
Sales opportunities are the central place where individual deals are tracked. They store all deal-specific information, progress, and communication while keeping long-term relationship data separate.
Using opportunities consistently helps you maintain a complete sales history per relationship and gives you a clear overview of all ongoing deals.
4. How to create a sales opportunity
Next, you learn how opportunities are created and used in practice. An opportunity brings together communication, products, follow-ups, and expected revenue in one place.
By creating opportunities consistently, you ensure every potential deal is tracked clearly, improving collaboration and giving you reliable insight into your pipeline.
5. The four building blocks of a sales opportunity
Each opportunity is structured using four elements: details, phases, products, and activities. Together, they define what you are selling, where the deal stands, and what actions are taking place.
Using these building blocks consistently keeps your sales process transparent and easy to follow.
6. Commercial relationship types: when to use what?
Commercial relationship types indicate the maturity of a relationship in your funnel. They provide context for how relationships should be approached, but they don’t replace opportunities for tracking individual deals.
By using them consistently and keeping the setup simple, you create clarity in your CRM without adding unnecessary complexity.
Note: The Lead Activity replaces the previous Lead Organisation and Individual Lead relationship types. If your account was activated before 30 April 2026, these types are still available until Lead Management is rolled out to your environment.
Quick Summary
By completing Step 1, you understand how sales is structured in Tribe— from capturing and qualifying leads, to tracking deals as opportunities, to managing long-term relationships and commercial context. Now it’s time to configure the system to match your own process.
Continue to the next step: Configure your sales process