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in this video I'm gonna walk through the differences between leads accounts contacts and opportunities so this is actually a really common question I get from people who are new to Salesforce but also people who've been using Salesforce for a long time it's not always clear how contacts and leads are different or how leads and opportunities or are different and so these are some of the core objects within Salesforce so it's important to understand the differences between them and how they relate to each other so let's start with accounts and contacts here so accounts and contacts makes up your core database so this is data that you want to make sure is as good as it possibly can be he wanted to be as clean as possible you want the highest quality data for the long term this is where your customers are going to reside now an account is a company it's an organization so you might have your customers under accounts but you also might have accounts for partners that you work with or maybe vendors and then within accounts you have contacts and so contacts are those individual people that work or are part of the different organizations so you'll have individual customers at a customer company underneath in an account same thing with with a partner or say you're working with a PR firm the firm itself will be the account and then contacts within that account will be those individual people at the PR firm that you work with so it's just good to remember that with accounts and contacts this is your core database you want this data to be as good as it possibly can be so that leaves the question of okay what are leads so leads is a preliminary record so a lead is something that has information about a person or a little bit of information about a company but you don't know yet if it's high quality and so with a lead record you can process that lead and then ultimately you're gonna do one of two things with it you'll either convert it into an account and a contact or you're going to disqualify it you'll close it here or unqualified it's maybe it's not a good fit for your business or perhaps it's just bad data so the reason why we have a lead a form to lead or web to form excuse me a web to lead form from Salesforce is because you typically don't want to take some random data that's been entered onto your website and create a contact out of it if somebody fills out a form on your website you don't know if it's quality data yet it could just be a bot or it could be somebody who's confused and actually isn't a good prospect for your business at all so that's why the lead object exists you have this preliminary step where you can validate the data and hopefully get this person on the phone and then eventually it'll convert them to an account in a contact so when you convert them you also have the option of creating an opportunity at that point in time an opportunity is a way of tracking potential revenue for your business so an opportunity is always going to be related to an account and you can also relate it to contacts if you choose and so an opportunity is a potential deal and that's why you can have multiple opportunities related to just a single account because it's possible that you sell them something initially but then there's an upsell opportunity down the road there's there's a chance of future deals so opportunities is where you're gonna track your deals and all the data related to that usually it's time specific accounts in contacts or your core database where you want to have high-quality information about partners or customers or vendors and leads is a transitional record that will either convert into an accountant contact or become disqualified and the lead exists to help you qualify and also to help you preserve the quality of the data in your accounting contacts I hope that helps