Lead and Opportunity Management
This is the highest-density area on the exam. Leads capture unqualified interest from web forms (Web-to-Lead, subject to a daily submission cap), inbound email (Email-to-Lead), list imports and manual entry. Standard fields - Status, Rating, Source, Industry - plus custom qualification fields feed lead scoring, assignment rules (route to users or queues by criteria), escalation rules (time-based re-routing) and auto-response rules (instant acknowledgment). Assignment rules run in order; only the first matching rule applies unless you configure subsequent entries in Lightning.
Lead conversion maps lead fields to account, contact and opportunity, honoring existing-account matching, converted-status settings and permission to convert. Converted leads become read-only; the record is retained for reporting rather than reopened.
Opportunities carry the pipeline: stage, amount, close date, probability, forecast category, products and schedules, price books, quotes, and eventually orders and contracts. Teams and splits share credit; Big Deal Alerts flag stagnant high-value deals; field history tracking supports trend analysis; related lists surface contact roles and competitors.
Traps: expecting deleted or converted leads to behave normally in reports; assuming assignment rules fire on API/imported leads unless the option is checked; confusing lead Status with opportunity Stage; forgetting that adding products requires a price book and that quotes need an opportunity; assuming lead conversion always creates a new account (it can attach to an existing match).
Worked example: web form → Web-to-Lead creates a lead with Source captured → assignment rule routes high-rating leads to the inside-sales queue and the rest to a named owner → auto-response emails the prospect → qualification fields required by validation before Status can reach "Qualified" → conversion produces Account, Contact and Opportunity in the correct record type.
Rule of thumb: automate routing and acknowledgment at capture, and enforce qualification with fields before conversion - not after.