Introduction to Oracle Sales

This chapter covers the following topics:

Oracle Sales Overview

Oracle Sales is an enterprise application for sales professionals that simplifies and optimizes the task of planning and managing the sales process. Oracle Sales simplifies the sales process by providing visibility into the sales cycle, helping companies plan and manage effective selling activities. It is integrated in the E-Business Suite and covers key field sales flows from leads to opportunities to quotes. Oracle Sales is integrated with daily business intelligence, territory management, trading community architecture, quoting, inventory, service contracts, order management, proposals, partners, projects, incentive compensation, and marketing. Oracle Sales has been developed using the standard Oracle Applications (OA) Framework. It is optimized for use with wireless.

Key Oracle Sales Features

Oracle Sales includes the following features:

Interface Access and Navigation

Accessing Oracle Sales

To access Oracle Sales, log in to Oracle Self-Service Applications, using the Sales User or Sales Manager responsibility. The Sales User responsibility takes you directly to the Oracle Sales Dashboard. The Sales Manager responsibility takes you to the Sales Manager Dashboard. This Dashboard displays Daily Business Intelligence information. Managers can access Oracle Sales functionality from the links listed in the Shortcuts.

Note: Users having sales admin role within a group should log in using the Sales Manager responsibility.

Responsibilities can enable you to access more than one operating unit at a time, so you can perform business tasks for entities across all accessible operating units while logged in under a single given responsibility. This enables you to perform tasks for any of the operating units to which you have access, such as adding products to a lead or an opportunity.

Interface Navigation Features

The Oracle Sales interface includes these features:

General Navigation

From the Sales Dashboard, you can navigate to the various types of pages in Oracle Sales. Buttons on the various Sales Dashboard tables include:

Navigation paths to the main pages are:

Sales User Searches

Sales representatives can search for customers, contacts, opportunities, leads, and tasks in Oracle Sales. Customer search enables you to search for customers that are persons or customers that are organizations.

Simple and Advanced Searches

For simple and advanced searches, enter your search criteria and click Go. Simple searches can have these characteristics:

For leads and opportunities, click Save Search to save the search criteria as a view.

Click Views to access the Views page, which enables you to use search criteria to create a view, or to duplicate an existing view, as well as update and delete views. Refer to Views as Saved Searches for further information on views. The behavior of views is determined by the security settings for your implementation. See Information Access for information on security access levels for users. You can use the views provided with Oracle Sales or you can create your own views.

Note: Customer and contact searches use the DQM feature and are not based on saved searches. For other details on customer and contact features in Oracle Sales, see the Customer Management and Contact Management sections.

Click Advanced Search to access the Advanced Search page. Advanced searches are supported for customers, contacts, opportunities, and leads. They have the same characteristics as simple searches, but have additional search criteria to search from.

Advanced Search for Opportunities and Leads

Opportunity and Lead Advanced Search pages enable you to add search criteria. To do so, select the field name you want to add as search criteria and click Add. Additionally, you can search for multiple values for the following:

You can use the same numeric and date fields more than once in an advanced search. For example, you could define an opportunity Close Date field to search for records after May 1, 2004, and a second Close Date field to search for records before June 1, 2004. This search would display records that matched the date range you set up using the two date fields. This logic can also apply to numeric fields.

Simple and advanced searches for leads and opportunities have a mandatory search field labeled Status Category. The Status Category refers to whether a lead or an opportunity is open or closed. If this field has the value of open selected, then all searches return only those leads or opportunities that have a status that is considered to be an open type of status. If you want to search for closed leads or opportunities, you must select the closed value in this field.

Note: In the context of selective search criteria, Status Category is not mandatory if the user enters a value in the Lead Number or Opportunity Number fields.

The search does not return any records if you select values in the Status Category field and Status field that cancel each other. For example, if you have the Status Category set to open, and then in the Status field you select a status that is considered to be a closed status, the search returns no results.

Also, you can run a query using both the sales person and sales group search fields in addition to other possible search fields. The results for this query returns records where the sales person you entered is on the sales team and has the sales group you entered as their designated sales group for the lead or opportunity. In this case the two search fields are implicitly linked in the search query.

If Selective Search Criteria is enabled, you must enter values in at least one of the following fields to search:

Leads

Note: This is an exception: If you enter a value for Lead Number, then values need not be entered in any other field for the search to run.

Opportunities

Note: This is an exception: If you enter a value for Opportunity Number, then values need not be entered in any other field for the search to run.

Exporting Search Results

Save the results of simple or advanced searches by clicking Export. This saves the table of search results to a file with a .csv extension which can be downloaded and opened in a spreadsheet application.

Sales Manager Searches

Users who log in as sales managers can conduct searches that return objects (for example, leads or opportunities) to which they have access as well as objects that their subordinates can access. This includes access to sales groups and their hierarchies as well. This hierarchical search logic can affect system performance, so sales managers have different search pages than those used by sales representatives.

Sales managers access search pages for leads and opportunities from the Sales Manager Dashboard. Sales managers can also access customer and contact search pages from the dashboard.

The basic search functionality is similar to that discussed for sales representatives in Sales User Searches with the exceptions discussed in the following subsections.

Sales Manager Searches for Leads

For the Simple Search and Advanced search pages, the sales manager must enter data in both of these mandatory search fields in addition to any other search fields entered:

Sales managers can also search by multiple statuses, sales channels, and owners, through the Advanced Search and Saved Search features.

Note that these mandatory fields have default values. Be sure to select the value you want to search for before clicking Go.

Also note that the search parameter Status menu list displays only statuses that represent open leads or those that have been converted to opportunities. Thus, as a sales manager, you cannot search for closed leads. This limitation is due to performance issues that can arise when sales managers conduct a search through their hierarchy when there are large numbers of closed leads in the system.

Sales Manager Searches for Opportunities

For the Simple Search and Advanced Search pages, the sales manager must enter data in both of these mandatory search fields in addition to any other search fields already entered:

Sales managers can also search additionally by multiple statuses and sales channels through the Advanced Search and Saved Search feature.

For example, if you want to check one of your subordinate’s inactive and lost opportunities in the last quarter, then use the additional search feature, for Opportunities. Select 'Inactive' in the Status field. Add another Status field as a search criterion, and select 'Lost'. Enter your subordinate's name in Owner field, last quarter date in Close Date Quarter field, and click Go to view the result. The application now displays your subordinate's active and lost opportunities, in the last quarter.

The search field Close Date Quarter is available only to sales managers and is not part of the standard sales representative search. Select values in this field to see which opportunities have a close date in the specified quarter. For example, if you select Q2-05, the search would return opportunities that have a close date in the second quarter of 2005.

Note that these mandatory fields have default values. Be sure to select the value you want to search for before clicking Go.

Views, which are saved searches, are available for leads and opportunities, but not for customers and contacts. Customer and contact searches use the Data Quality Management feature and are not based on saved searches. For details on customer and contact search, see Customer Management. The view functionality described in Views as Saved Searches applies to sales managers' views with the exception that the sales manager cannot create views on the Sales Dashboard. The behavior of views is determined by the security settings for your implementation. See Information Access for information on security access levels for managers.

In some cases, users can have roles of both sales representative and sales manager in the system. Users who log in as a sales manager have access only to views they created as a sales manager in the system. They do not have access to views they created when they logged in as a sales user. Also, if they log in as a sales user, they do not have access to views they created as a sales manager.

Views as Saved Searches

Oracle Sales enables you to save searches for future use. These saved searches, called views, control the display of data in the Leads and Opportunities tables on the Sales Dashboard, and on the Lead and Opportunity Views pages. There are seeded views provided for leads and opportunities. These are accessible only by users with the sales representative responsibility. Users with the sales representative or the sales manager responsibility can create views.

The behavior of views is determined by the security settings for your implementation. See Information Access for information on security access levels for users.

Displaying the Search Results of a View

You can display the results of searching with a view by selecting a view name from the view menu and clicking Go.

Views are displayed on both the Sales Dashboard and the Leads and Opportunity Views pages. Views displayed on the Sales Dashboard page are not the same set of views displayed on the Leads or Opportunity Views pages. For example, the user-created views displayed in the Leads table on the Sales Dashboard page are separate from those views that are displayed on the Leads Views page.

Creating Views

Views can be created for the Leads and Opportunities bins on the Sales Dashboard, as well as the Leads Views page and Opportunity Views page. To create a view for the Dashboard page, click Personalize to access the Personalize Views page. On this page you can create, edit, or duplicate views by selecting the appropriate button. If you are on the Leads or Opportunities Views pages, you can create a view for the page by clicking Personalize, which displays the Personalize Views page where you have the choice of creating, editing, or duplicating a view. If you are on the lead or opportunity simple or advanced search pages, you can create a view by clicking Save Search. To create a new view, click Create View. Click the Update icon to modify a view; click the Delete icon to delete a view.

Both the Sales Dashboard and the Leads and Opportunity Views pages have views displayed on the page. You can create views that apply to either the Sales Dashboard or the Views pages, but not to both. For example, if you are on the Dashboard page, and click the Personalize button in either the Lead or Opportunity table to access the Personalize Views page, all views that you create, edit, or duplicate from here are available only on the Sales Dashboard table.

Creating or modifying existing views is accomplished on the Create View, Update View, or Duplicate View pages, as required. The view name you enter on these pages must be unique. Select the Set as default check box to designate a view as the default view.

When creating or modifying a view, you can personalize the results table. You can designate which columns are displayed in the table by moving the values between Available Columns and Columns Displayed. You can rearrange the order of displayed columns for a table by moving the values up and down in Columns Displayed. Totaling enables you to access a page where you can type in the new column name as well as designate any columns that should be totaled. You can set upto three sorting orders for the data in the table.

You can add or modify the search parameters used in the view as needed. This is accomplished in the Search Query to Filter Data in your Table section of the page. You can add a new search parameter by selecting the parameter from the Add Another menu and clicking Add. You can also use the multiple values search criteria, as described in Advanced Search for Opportunities and Leads.

Other than the numeric and date parameters, do not add the same search parameter more than once to a view. Views that have the same search parameter entered more than once will provide a warning message and do not return any results. This is the same restriction that applies to advanced searches, as described in Sales User Searches.

Managing Views

Views are managed on the Personalize Views page. If you have accessed this page from the Sales Dashboard, it displays a list of the possible views for the Sales Dashboard. If you have accessed the Personalize Views page from the Lead or Opportunity Views page, a list of possible views that can be applied to one of those pages is displayed. The views you have created as well as the views provided with Oracle Sales are displayed on this page.

To update a view, click the Update icon in the table. To duplicate a view, click the radio button in the Select column next to the view name, and click Duplicate. You cannot edit or delete a provided view, but can duplicate it and then edit the duplicated version.

You can set one of the views that you have created to be the default by clicking on the Update icon and selecting the Set as Default check box on the Update View page. If you do not want to see one of the views you have created displayed in the view menu, select No in the Display View column and click Apply.

Sales Dashboard

The Sales Dashboard provides you with a summary display of your leads, opportunities, proposals, quotes, top customers and customer data, as well as your latest submitted forecast. Your implementation might be personalized to contain fewer areas. See Sales Dashboard for more information.

Leads Management

Oracle Sales assists in tracking leads, routing them to the appropriate sales representatives, and converting the leads to opportunities. Lead management features include the ability to:

See Leads for more information.

Opportunities Management

Sales teams can use Oracle Sales as a central location to update opportunity details, track the progress of sales efforts, and manage ongoing interactions with the customer. Opportunity management features include the ability to:

See Opportunities for more information.

Customer Management

Oracle Sales provides you with a detailed view of customer information by integrating information from E-Business Suite modules such as marketing, service contracts, sales, and order management. Oracle Sales enables you to manage information for both organization customers and person customers (consumers). Customer information that is displayed includes:

See Customers for more information.

The customer management functionality of Oracle Sales also has a built-in Data Quality Management (DQM) feature that helps you avoid the creation of duplicate customers. See Ensuring Data Quality for more information.

Contact Management

Oracle Sales provides a contact management system that enables you to enter and track a wide range of data regarding contacts, including:

Note: You can enter contact’s personal information and contact other details during creation of the contact, if Contact DFF is enabled.

See Contacts for more information.

Contacts uses the same Data Quality Management (DQM) feature that is used for Customers. See Ensuring Data Quality for more information.

Calendar and Task Management

Oracle Sales enables you to see scheduled appointments in your work day, and to view other dates to see scheduled meetings. You can access your appointments by using an integrated calendar tool provided by Oracle. This tool enables you to create new appointments, invite other attendees, and synchronize with external calendar applications such as Outlook.

Task management is a feature of leads, opportunities, contacts, and customers. See the Oracle Common Application Calendar User's Guide for more information.

See Tasks and Calendar for more information.

Notes Management

You can add notes for leads, opportunities, customers, contacts, and forecasts. The name of the note's author and the date that the note was created are also provided, as well as note status. This note history provides the sales team with information on the progress of an effort. Notes have the security levels of publish, private, and public. See the Oracle Common Application Calendar User's Guide for more information on the note functionality.

Forecasting in Oracle Sales

Oracle Sales provides sales organizations with flexibility in managing their forecasts. Sales organizations can analyze their forecast data at opportunity and product levels, thereby enabling management teams to judge the overall health of their organization. Opportunity forecasts can be maintained within the opportunity itself. This provides instant visibility to management without the need for users to separately submit forecasts, thereby reducing the time spent by users preparing their forecast. Product family forecasts might be provided to management dependent on, or independent of, the opportunity pipeline. You can add attachments to forecasts as well.

See Forecasting for more information.

Sales Campaigns in Oracle Sales

Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Marketing to provide Sales Campaign functionality to sales managers. This functionality enables sales managers to explore their installed base and historical customer data, and mine the data for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

The Oracle Marketing application enables sales as well as marketing users to create activities that cross-sell and up-sell products to customers in particular sales territories. When a sales campaign is launched, leads are generated for sales follow-up. Territory Management assigns the appropriate sales representatives to the leads based on predefined rules. If these leads are converted to opportunities, the same sales representatives are carried over to the new opportunities. Each new opportunity is also linked to the original sales campaign. This enables the marketing and sales organizations to track the progress and success of sales campaign initiatives.

See Sales Campaigns for more information.

Sales Methodologies in Oracle Sales

Oracle Sales supports custom sales methodologies. Organizations can create sales methodologies that match their requirements for different product lines, sales channels, organization units, or marketing campaigns.

You can access these sales methodologies when you create and manage leads and opportunities. Each stage of the methodology has a sales coach that can consist of a series of questions regarding that sales stage, or provide you with sales stage information. The sales coach assists you by reminding you of points and issues to consider and procedures to follow during the sales effort. Additionally, you can export summaries of the sales coach data into printable worksheets that can be used during review meetings and training sessions.

See Sales Methodologies for more information.

Oracle Sales Integrations

Oracle Sales integrates with these applications:

Competitor Tracking in Oracle Sales

Oracle Sales enables you to track competitors for products within opportunities, using information from Oracle Trade Management. Oracle Sales also provides defaulting capabilities that match products in the opportunity with potential competitors. For example, if an opportunity has two products and you link one product to a particular competitor, Oracle Sales checks to see if the second product is also associated with the same competitor. If true, the second product is linked to the competitor. If required, you can manually overwrite the link. This enables you to track how sales efforts compare to an organization's competitors, and assists in understanding win/loss trends and uncovering competitive threats. Note that competitor information is not available in Oracle Sales unless it is loaded into Oracle Trade Management first.

Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) for Sales

Oracle Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) for Sales is a management reporting tool that enables sales executives and managers to gain a comprehensive forecast analysis, revenue backlog summary, opportunity activity review, and sales force comparisons for their organizations. Oracle Sales uses DBI information to display top customers, products under contract, and service summary information.

Personalization in Oracle Sales

Your system administrator can personalize areas in the Oracle Sales user interface. For example, personalization can determine the number of rows displayed in a table (for example, 10 rows or 20 rows), specify product branding or whether to hide or show parts of the Sales Dashboard or other pages in Oracle Sales. Some of the functionality described in this guide is not available until your system administrator provides it though personalization.

You can add personalized views of your data. View are saved sets of search criteria. These views control the display of records in the Leads and Opportunities tables on the Sales Dashboard, and on the Lead and Opportunity view pages. You can create personalized views or use the views provided with Oracle Sales. The Sales Dashboard is also configurable.

See Views as Saved Searches for more information.

Setting User Preferences for Specific Fields

Oracle Sales enables you to set preferences for the defaults of key fields for leads, opportunities, forecasts, sales coach and account plans. To do so, click Preferences and then, Sales Default Preferences, and then click Apply. You can personalize the defaults in the areas listed in the following table.

Oracle Sales User Preferences
Area Fields
Leads Lead Status
Opportunities Sales Channel
Status
Win Probability
Days Until Close Date
Forecasts Forecast Category
Forecast Period Type
Non-Revenue Type (available through personalization by your system administrator)
Display Decimal
Sales Coach and Account Plans Sales Document Type
Account Plan Document Template

Information Access

Oracle Sales security has three components for sales representatives:

Sales Representative Access

Sales representatives can either have full access or sales team access to customers, leads, and opportunities. Sales Team access can be of two types - full access or read only.

Sales Manager Access

If you are a sales manager, there are three additional levels of access for customers, leads, and opportunities:

Sales Admin Access

An additional access level (role), Sales Admin, enables a sales group member (such as an administrative assistant, or other support team member) to have access to all leads, opportunities, customers, and contacts to which the manager of the sales group has access. This person can act for the sales manager when necessary. The Sales Admin should have an access level lower than the sales manager.

The Sales Admin has view only access to a manager's forecast details unless create, update, and submit forecast capabilities are enabled by the system administrator. Note that even with the forecast capabilities enabled, the Sales Admin might not be able to edit the sales manager's owned opportunities on the Forecast page depending on system settings.

If you are a Sales Admin, there are three additional levels of access for customers, leads, and opportunities:

Ensuring Data Quality

When you create a new customer or contact, Oracle Sales uses Data Quality Management to check if there is an existing customer or contact with similar attributes (such as name, city, state, country) to the new customer or contact. If the validation indicates that the new item might be a duplicate, the application displays a duplicated prevention warning page. Depending on the value you have set for the profile option, ASN: Show out of context contacts in duplicate prevention flow, the application displays either of the following:

You can choose to use the items in the list, or continue with the creation of a new customer or contact. For more information on Duplicate Prevention profile options, see Oracle Sales Duplicate Prevention Profile Options, Oracle Sales Implementation Guide.

When a duplicate prevention match rule is configured with an override threshold, you will not be able to create new organization, person or contact in a deduplication flow when the number of matching records exceeds the override threshold.

Working with Multi-Organization Access

If your business has more than one operating unit or organization, the Multiple Organization Access Control (MOAC) feature enables you to access more than one operating unit at a time. This means that you can access multiple operating units while logged in under a single responsibility. You can perform business tasks across any of the operating units to which you have access without having to switch responsibilities.

In Oracle Sales, multi-organization access enables you to perform the following:

Product Dependencies

Oracle Sales is dependent on these applications for: