Entering Purchase Information for a Sales Opportunity
The Purchase window lets you track information relating to the sales cycle. You can provide an accurate forecast to your management and effectively manage your pipeline by maintaining an up-to-date record of the purchase cycle information for a single opportunity. To help prioritize your workload, view your pipeline ordered by criteria that is most useful to you; for example, by sales stage or by win probability.
To enter purchase information for an opportunity:
1. Select the Purchases sub tab.
2. Categorize the purchases.
If your implementation team has defined a set of standard expected purchases, the system displays them to you as a starting point from which you can build the specific opportunity.
4. Use the Amount field to enter the customer's expected cost for each item.
Your implementation team determines the scaling factor for this field.
5. Enter the revenue value you expect each item to produce for you.
You can enter a revenue percentage or a revenue amount. If you enter a percentage, the quota credit is automatically calculated; conversely, if you enter a quota credit, the quota percentage is calculated.
6. Choose the Credits sub tab to view revenue amounts of other sales representatives.
By the time the opportunity status is forecasted, the sum of all revenue amounts equal the value entered in the Amount field for this line. In other words, if you are sharing this opportunity with another sales representative, the sum of the values you enter for the revenue amount will equal the value in the Amount field.
7. Enter the effect you expect each item to have on your quota.
The available units of measure are defined by your implementation team.
9. Select a sales stage for the opportunity.
Each sales status is linked to an acceptable range of win probabilities. Selecting a sales stage outside the range results in either a warning or an error, depending on the rules set up by the implementation team.
All sales status changes are recorded in the Notes window as a system generated opportunity note.
10. Enter the opportunity's expected close date in the Close Date field.
If you enter a close date value, it defaults as the close date for all expected purchase lines. You can override it for a specific expected purchase.
If you change this value, an alert window opens and prompts you to copy the change to all expected purchases on the opportunity that shared the original close date value. This is a safeguard feature.
11. Choose Save on the toolbar to add the purchase information for an opportunity to the database.
