Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Opportunities & Leads.

If you’ve ever wondered how NZRT tracks deals from the moment a potential client makes contact all the way through to closing a sale, this is the episode for you. The Opportunities and Leads section of the wiki covers the sales pipeline — a structured way to manage deals, keep tabs on where each one sits, and get a clear picture of what revenue might be coming in and when.

So let’s start with the big picture. A pipeline is essentially a visual and organisational tool that shows you every active deal and what stage it’s at. Think of it like a series of checkpoints a deal passes through on its way to either being won or lost. And the good news is that in NZRT’s setup, those stages are customisable — you can adapt them to fit how your team actually works.

Out of the box, there are five pipeline stages. The first is Qualification, where you’re figuring out whether a lead is even worth pursuing. Does this prospect have a real need? Do they have the budget? Is the timing right? If the answers look promising, you move into the second stage, Needs Analysis, where you dig deeper into what the client actually requires. Stage three is Proposal Sent — this is when you’ve put together a formal offer and it’s sitting in the client’s inbox. Stage four is Negotiation, where you’re going back and forth on terms, pricing, or scope. And finally, stage five is either Won or Lost — the deal either closes in your favour or it doesn’t, and either way you record the outcome so you can learn from it.

Now, within each opportunity record, there are a handful of key fields you’ll be working with regularly. First, you link the opportunity to a customer or prospect — this keeps everything connected so you always know who a deal belongs to. Then you record the estimated amount, which is the value of the deal if it closes. Alongside that, you set a closing date — your best estimate of when the deal will wrap up. And here’s a really useful one: the probability percentage. This is a number that reflects how confident you are that the deal will close. A deal in early qualification might sit at twenty or thirty percent, while something in negotiation might be at seventy or eighty. That probability figure is what makes pipeline reporting meaningful, because it lets you calculate a weighted forecast of expected revenue rather than just adding up everything optimistically.

You also assign a sales rep to each opportunity, so it’s always clear who owns the relationship and is responsible for moving things forward. And there’s a next action date field, which is basically a built-in reminder — it tells you when you’re supposed to follow up, send something, or take the next step. This stops deals from going quiet and falling through the cracks.

Now let’s talk about how opportunities connect to the rest of the system, because this is where things get powerful. Once you’ve done the groundwork and you’re ready to put a formal offer in front of a client, you can create a Commercial Proposal directly from the opportunity. You don’t have to start from scratch — the information already in the opportunity record feeds into the proposal, saving you time and reducing the chance of errors.

And once a deal moves to Won, you can convert it into a Customer Order. That’s the moment the deal stops being a sales record and becomes an operational one — it triggers the next phase of delivery. So the pipeline isn’t just a reporting tool, it’s actually the starting point for the whole client engagement workflow.

A couple of practical tips worth keeping in mind. Keep your probability percentages honest and up to date — they’re only useful if they reflect reality. If a deal has been sitting in Negotiation for three months without movement, the probability probably needs to come down. And make sure next action dates don’t lapse — an overdue action date is a signal that a deal needs attention.

Also, if you’re managing a team, the assigned sales rep field makes it easy to filter the pipeline by person, so you can review what each rep is working on in a single view.

The Opportunities and Leads module is really the heartbeat of sales activity at NZRT. It gives you visibility, accountability, and a direct line into proposals and orders when the time comes. Whether you’re a rep managing your own deals or a manager reviewing the whole pipeline, this is the place to start.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.