A free consultation should give a prospective customer a clear next step and give your team enough context to prepare. In Odoo 19, you can connect a consultation booking to CRM so the meeting, contact details and answers stay together.
This guide is for consulting firms, ERP implementation teams and other service businesses using consultations to assess a possible project. It focuses on qualification and follow-up. For calendar configuration, resource capacity and publishing controls, use the separate Odoo 19 Appointments setup guide.
The problem: the meeting is booked, but the enquiry has no owner
Imagine an IT services firm offering an introductory call. A visitor books a slot, but the salesperson has only a name and an email address. Nobody knows which system the visitor uses, what is going wrong or whether the company needs a short answer or an implementation project.
The call then starts with information gathering. Afterward, the next action may remain in a personal calendar or inbox instead of the sales pipeline. This is an illustrative situation, not a reported ERPixel client case.
A useful consultation flow connects three things: what the visitor expects, what the consultant needs to know and who takes responsibility after the meeting. A confirmed meeting alone does not establish that an enquiry is commercially qualified.
1. Give the consultation a clear purpose
Before editing the booking page, decide who the call is for and what it should achieve. For example: “Discuss your current Odoo workflow, the main difficulty and the next step.” State the duration and explain what the visitor should prepare.
Avoid promising an implementation estimate or a complete technical diagnosis from a brief introductory meeting. The page should describe what your team can reasonably cover and what may need further investigation.
Use a dedicated consultation appointment type so its questions and customer-facing messages can be maintained separately from product demos or support sessions. Keep it free of a payment requirement if the offer is a free consultation.
2. Ask questions that help the consultant prepare
In the appointment type’s Questions tab, add a short set of questions. An illustrative Odoo consultation form might ask:
- Which Odoo version and edition are you using, if known?
- Which business process or application needs attention?
- What is the main problem you want to discuss?
- What would a useful outcome look like?
- Is there a deadline we should know about?
Make essential questions mandatory and leave the rest optional. Someone exploring Odoo for the first time may not know the version or module names. Avoid requiring a technical answer just to start a conversation.
These answers support qualification. A lead is an initial enquiry; an opportunity represents a potential sale your team is pursuing. Define your own qualification criteria rather than treating every booking as a sales-ready project.
Use our Lead qualification checklist to establish the customer’s role, budget, required service, enquiry source and decision timing before involving more colleagues.
3. Connect the appointment to Odoo CRM
With the CRM app installed, open the consultation appointment type, select Options and enable Create Opportunities. This is standard Odoo functionality, described in the official guide to creating opportunities from appointments.
When a customer books, Odoo creates an opportunity with their contact information. Answers to the booking questions appear in Internal Notes, and the appointment is listed in the record’s chatter.
For a user-based appointment, the person hosting the meeting becomes the opportunity’s salesperson. For a resource-based appointment, the appointment type’s creator becomes the salesperson. For a consultation with a named advisor, check that the user-based booking produces the owner you expect.
This creates the CRM record; it does not prove qualification or complete your follow-up process. For the wider distinction between contacts, opportunities, stages and activities, see our Odoo CRM guide and the CRM definition.
4. Put the booking link at the right point on your website
Place a clear invitation beside the service the visitor is considering, with a link to the published consultation page. Keep the offer consistent: the service page, booking title and confirmation message should describe the same conversation.
If you use Odoo Website, the booking page is published through Appointments. If your website runs on another platform, linking to the published booking page is one option; a custom booking interface requires separate integration work. Do not describe an external site as an Odoo Website page.
In the appointment’s customer-facing messages, explain what happens after booking and where to find the joining details. Configure reminders in the appointment settings, then test their delivery. Calendar mechanics belong in the setup guide, rather than being repeated here.
5. Test the handoff and agree on the next action
Make a test booking as an external visitor. Then open CRM and check the new opportunity:
- Are the contact information and question answers available?
- Is the correct salesperson assigned?
- Can that person find the scheduled appointment?
- Does the confirmation explain how to join?
- After the call, can the owner record the outcome and schedule the next activity?
Agree how your team will handle a suitable project, an enquiry that needs more information and a request outside your scope. Automatic stage changes, tailored routing or additional integrations should be specified separately; they are not implied by enabling Create Opportunities.
Measure consultation quality as well as booking volume
Track completed bookings, attended consultations, enquiries that meet your qualification criteria and follow-up activities completed on time. Review the reasons for unsuitable bookings before adding more mandatory questions.
If the booking flow needs to fit a wider sales process, see Odoo implementation. To discuss your consultation flow and the handoff to CRM, book a meeting with Alexander Koltsov.