An opportunity is a potential revenue-producing event related to one or more companies or individuals. An opportunity often has a close date, a win probability, and a sales team. It is typically related to contacts, products, decision issues, activities, and competitors.

In Siebel Finance, opportunities help an organization to nurture and manage the entire life cycle of a revenue-generating opportunity, from creation to closing. Relationship managers and sales representatives, who are responsible for managing and generating revenue, use opportunity information on a regular basis. Top management also uses the opportunity analysis tools in Siebel Finance to analyze pipeline performance and help manage overall business performance through well-planned strategic-selling activities.

In addition, Siebel Finance includes deal management capabilities through extensions to the basic opportunity management functionality. Using deal management, end users can manage and track deal information throughout the deal life cycle. Specifically, users can track the following types of information:

• Deal type
• Industry
• Product line
• Related activities
• Related attachments
• External deal contacts
• Closure information
• Related products
• Status information

Users can control access to deals and deal details by adding and deleting people to the deal team. Users can further narrow deal visibility and any associated activities and attachments by enabling the Secure flag. The combination of these restrictive visibility features provides basic security functionality.

Using the procedures given in this chapter, you will be able to perform the administrator tasks of adding an opportunity from the Opportunities Administration view, managing the sales team assigned to an opportunity, and specifying primary sales team members.

End users use the Opportunities screens to add an opportunity, create an opportunity from an application, and review opportunity details. From a deal management perspective, end users can create new deals, manage deal team members, secure deals, change the primary deal team member, create deal activity plans, create new deal activities and associate team members, and add attachments to deals.

This chapter describes opportunity functionality that is unique to Siebel Finance. For more information on basic opportunity functionality, see Applications Administration Guide.