This chapter covers the following topics:
A sales opportunity is a pending sale that can be forecasted. When an opportunity is created, it is assigned to one or more sales representatives based on territory definitions. New opportunities can originate from leads, marketing campaigns or can be manually entered. Sales representatives or channel managers can assign opportunities to partners.
An opportunity can be assigned to your direct or indirect sales channel.
Sales representatives from your organization can fulfill direct opportunities.
You can route indirect opportunities to partners for fulfillment.
While routing an opportunity to a partner, you must be able to identify the most appropriate partner based on pre-defined rules or you can manually search for a partner based on their skills and expertise.
When you assign an opportunity to partner, the partner can view details and accept it. At any time, the partner can also abandon the opportunity.
Oracle Partner Management integrates with Oracle sales applications to provide opportunity management functionality. Oracle Partner Management integrates with two different sales applications: Oracle Sales Offline (which is also called Oracle Field Sales) and Oracle Sales. There are some functional differences between the two applications. When using this chapter, make sure to refer to the procedures for your organization's Oracle sales implementation.
The following steps are included in the Lead to Opportunity to Quote to Order flow:
Lead import and processing
Opportunity matching and routing
Offering opportunities
Partner accepts opportunity
Partner creates quote
To create an indirect opportunity enter the required information and select an indirect channel.
Once the opportunity is created, a vendor user can match it to the most appropriate partner. The user can choose to use automated matching to identify the best partner or partners for the opportunity, or he can perform manual matching:
Manual matching: You can match opportunities by selecting a preferred partner or you can perform a search using partner profile attributes to identify the best partner independently of established matching rules. You can select criteria that are used to search for potential partner matches for an opportunity. The criteria can be limited by responsibility.
Automated matching: There are three kinds of automatic matching. The partner matching engine matches partners to opportunities based on rules set up by the channel administrator. With semi-automatic matching, the user is responsible for routing the opportunity to the partners that have been identified as appropriate recipients of the opportunity. With fully automated matching, no user intervention occurs. With automatic background matching, no user intervention occurs. Automatic background matching is used for opportunities that resulted from the lead to opportunity conversion process.
To implement automatic background matching, the channel manager creates matching rules that contain partner routing criteria (routing criteria is optional for other types of matching). Two profile options must be set up. See the Partner Management Implementation Guide for details.
The vendor user can decide whether to route the opportunity to one partner or multiple partners. Routing refers to the process of distributing an opportunity to one or more partners that have been identified as appropriate matches. Oracle Partner Management supports several routing types:
Single: An opportunity is routed to one partner only.
Serial or Single-Serial: The opportunity is offered to one partner at a time from a list.
Multiple-Parallel or First Come First Serve: The opportunity is routed to multiple partners simultaneously. The first partner to accept the opportunity wins it.
Multiple Joint or Joint: The opportunity is offered to multiple partners for fulfillment, and multiple partners can accept and work jointly on it.
While routing an opportunity to a partner, the vendor user may be able to choose whether or not the channel manager must approve the routing assignment. Depending on an organization's business requirements, channel manager approval might always be required, might never be required, or may be optional.
The channel administrator can limit the time period a channel manager can hold a matched opportunity before it is forwarded to the assigned partner. If the channel manager does not process the opportunity, the routing status automatically changes to Offered and the opportunity is offered to the partner.
When you offer the opportunity to a partner, the partner's contact is notified. The partner contact reviews the opportunity and decides to accept or decline it. If the partner accepts it, she can access all the details about the opportunity record.
The channel administrator can set up partner timeouts, which limit the time that the partner can hold on to an offered opportunity. If the partner does not respond within that time frame, the opportunity is routed to another partner. Mail alerts are triggered to inform relevant parties that the offer has timed out.
After a partner contact accepts an opportunity, she can access the additional information about the opportunity and add more users to the team for that opportunity. All designated contacts in the partner organization are given access to details about the opportunity, with the authority to update the details. Additional sales people from the partner organization can be given access by adding them to the sales team. The partner sales team can work on the opportunity, updating the details when required and work the opportunity to its conclusion. At the end of the process the opportunity is closed and e-mail alerts are sent again to inform relevant parties.
If the partner declines the opportunity, they cannot access the record and the channel manager is notified.
Once a partner contact accepts the opportunity, she can create a quote or a proposal for the customer and publish it to the customer. The partner contact can add products to the quote and select the price list for the quote, and then submit it for approval to the vendor.
Once the partner, the customer, and the vendor agree on the quote, the partner can place an order and monitor the order status.
Opportunity matching refers to the process of identifying a partner to which an opportunity should be offered. Opportunity Management allows the vendor to create rules that identify the best partner for an opportunity based on opportunity criteria, partner criteria, and geographical criteria. An opportunity matching rule can also specify tiebreak criteria.
Opportunity routing refers to the process of offering an opportunity to one or more partners. Routing can be done manually by a vendor user, or automatically. Automatic routing can be set up as part of a matching rule. Matching rules are set up and administered by the channel administrator.
Opportunity matching and routing can be partially or completely automated. There are three levels of automated matching and routing:
Semi-automatic
Fully-automatic
Automatic Background
With semi-automatic matching, a user selects which matching rule will be used to generate a list of partners. The user is responsible for completing the routing manually. Semi-automatic matching requires that the channel administrator set up at least one matching rule.
With fully-automated matching, a user initiates the matching process but the Rules Engine selects the best matching rule based on the opportunity's attributes, and then generates a list of partners. The user is then responsible for completing the routing manually. Fully-automatic matching requires that the channel administrator set up at least on matching rule.
With automatic background matching, no user intervention occurs. Automatic background matching is used for opportunities that resulted from the lead to opportunity conversion process.
In automatic background matching, a workflow background process, either initiated by a user or scheduled to run at regular intervals, queries all opportunities in the indirect channel, determines the best partner(s) for each opportunity, and routes the opportunities based on the routing rules.
To implement automatic background matching, the channel manager creates matching rules that contain partner routing criteria (routing criteria is optional for other types of matching).
The matching engine determines which rule to use for a particular opportunity based on whether the opportunity's information matches the opportunity matching criteria contained in the rule. Depending on how the channel administrator has set up matching, the engine will do one of the following:
Evaluate the opportunity matching criteria for each rule before selecting the rule to use.
Stop at the first rule that contains opportunity matching criteria that matches that of the opportunity.
Routing refers to the process of distributing an opportunity to one or more partners that have been identified as appropriate matches. Oracle Partner Management supports several routing types:
Single: An opportunity is routed to one partner only. If multiple partners have been identified as a potential matches, the “winner” is selected randomly.
Serial or Single-Serial: When the matching rules identified more than one partner for an opportunity, the opportunity is offered to one partner at a time from the list. If the highest ranking partner declines it, the opportunity is offered to the second ranking partner and so on until a partner accepts it. Once a partner accepts the opportunity, partners further down in ranking do not see the opportunity.
Multiple-Parallel or First Come First Serve: You can also route the opportunity to multiple partners simultaneously. The first partner to accept the opportunity wins it, and the other partners are removed from the opportunity. If you want to do multiple matching, you need to select at least two partners from the partner list.
Multiple Joint or Joint:This option supports collaborative selling. The opportunity is offered to multiple partners for fulfillment, and multiple partners can accept and work jointly to win and fulfill the opportunity.
Manual matching allows a vendor user to identify a partner match for an opportunity independently of established matching rules. To perform a manual match, the user selects criteria that will be used to search for potential partner matches for an opportunity. The partner criteria available are partner profile attributes that have been enabled for opportunities and matching services.
The criteria available for manual partner matching can be limited by responsibility. For example, an organization might want channel managers to be able to identify partner matches using all available partner criteria, but might want only a subset of the criteria to be available to channel representatives for matching. Manual matching options are set up and administered by the channel administrator.
You can perform advanced searches based on opportunity attributes. You can customize the search criteria by adding or removing search attributes. You can choose attributes on which you want to base your search. You can save your search criteria and use it as the default view of opportunities.
While searching for an opportunity, you can select the organization, address, partner, sales team and relationship parameters and optionally set the display and sort options.
This section describes how to use opportunity management to accomplish some basic tasks. Use the procedures in this section if your organization is using Oracle Sales Offline to manage its direct sales channel.
Use this procedure to create an opportunity.
Navigation
Log in as a channel manager and click the Opportunities Quick Link to display the Opportunity Summary page. Then, click Create to view the Create Opportunity page.
Prerequisites
None.
Notes
Budget: Enter the budget amount for this opportunity, if known.
Sales Methodology: Select the Sales Methodology to be used with this opportunity, if appropriate. Click the eyeglass icon to view additional information about the selected sales methodology.
Select a project: Allows you to link the opportunity to an existing project.
Key Competitor: If the opportunity involves a competitive situation, the name of the key competitor can be recorded.
Use this procedure to route an opportunity to one or more partners.
Navigation
Log in as a channel manager and navigate to Opportunities Quick Link > Opportunity Summary page.
Prerequisites
An indirect opportunity must exist.
Steps:
Click an Opportunity link with the Unassigned status.
In the Opportunity Details page, click the Partner side navigation link.
In the Partner Selection region, click Go to see a list of possible partners for the opportunity. Select a partner from the resulting list. and click Select.
You can add more partners to the list by selecting one of the following methods from the Add more partners to the list drop-down list:
Automatic Partner Matching: In this method, the partner matching engine selects the appropriate rule based on opportunity attributes (if multiple matches are found, the rule with the higher precedence wins).
Manual Search: In this method, you can search for partners based on profile attributes. After the list of partners is returned, you can select one or more partners.
If you added a preferred partner, this partner is displayed at the top of the list when you use Automatic Partner Matching or Manual Search.
Select a routing type using the Routing Type drop-down list.
Select the By-pass CM Approval check box to bypass the channel manager's approval.
If you do not select the By-pass CM Approval, the channel manager must approve or reject the assignment.
If you are a sales representative and you do not by-pass the channel manager, the channel manager is notified. The channel manager must sign on and approve the selected list of partners.
If you are the channel manager, you can submit and approve the routing without the need to sign on again.
Click Submit Routing.
The status of the opportunity changes to Matched.
You can add a partner to the external sales team without assigning the opportunity to the partner. Unless the opportunity is assigned to a partner, the partner's users will not be able to view the opportunity.
Use this procedure to add a partner as an external sales team member.
Navigation
Log in as a channel manager and navigate to Opportunities Quick Link > Opportunities page.
Prerequisites
None.
Steps:
Click the link for an opportunity with an Unassigned status.
The Opportunity Details page appears.
Click the Sales Team > External side navigation link.
The Opportunity: abc page appears.
Add a partner as an external sales team member by clicking Go and selecting the partner.
Add a contact as an external sales team member by clicking Go and selecting the contact.
Click Update to save your changes.
If you are a channel manager and an opportunity is routed to a partner that you are managing, you can approve or reject the opportunity assignment.
Navigation
Log in as a channel manager and click Opportunities Quick Link >Opportunity Summary page.
Use this procedure to approve an opportunity assignment.
Prerequisites
An indirect opportunity in the routing status Matched must exist.
Steps:
Look for the opportunity routed to a partner that you are managing and click the Opportunity link.
The Opportunity: abc page appears.
Review the opportunity and click the Partner side navigation link.
View the partner selected for the opportunity; the response status should be Matched.
Change the response status from Matched to Approve.
If you think, this partner should not be working on this opportunity, select Reject.
Click Update. The response status of the opportunity should be Matched Approved'.
Click the Opportunities subtab and look for the opportunity. The routing status of the opportunity should be Offered.
If you decide that the routing is inaccurate, you can withdraw the routing. All partners are withdrawn from the routing.
Use this procedure to withdraw an opportunity.
Navigation
Log in as a channel manager and click the Opportunities Quick Link.
Prerequisites
An indirect opportunity in the routing status Offered must exist.
Steps:
Look for an opportunity you routed to a partner and click the Opportunity link. The Routing status is Offered.
The Opportunity: abc page appears.
Review the opportunity and click the Partner side navigation link.
Click Withdraw Routing to withdraw the routing.
This section describes how to use opportunity management to accomplish some basic tasks. Use the procedures in this section if your organization is using Oracle Sales to manage its direct sales channel.
Because most of the information that is included in opportunity management is created and stored in the Oracle Sales application, some of the procedures in this section refer to Oracle Sales instead of Oracle Partner Management. Refer to the Oracle Sales User Guide for additional information.
This section both describes the information that can be associated with an opportunity record and provides information to help you create a new or update an existing opportunity.
The Opportunity Views page displays views that you can select to display your data. This page enables you to review and update a specific group of opportunities. To see a summary of a particular opportunity, click the radio button in the Select column. This refreshes the page with the selected opportunity's summary details. You can update the details that appear on the summary page. If you need to update additional opportunity information, click the opportunity name to access the Update Opportunity page.
Click Simple Search to access the simple search page. To see a different view, select the view name from the View menu and click Go.
Click Export to download the list of opportunities to a file with a .csv extension that you can use in a spreadsheet application.
The information described in this section applies to the Create Opportunity and Update Opportunity pages. To save changes made to these pages, click Apply.
Notes
Methodology: Captures your sales group's best practices. These steps assist you in making sales. For more information, refer to Sales Methodologies in the Oracle Sales User Guide.
Stage: The stage in the sales methodology for the opportunity. Stages are related to the win probability values.
Win Probability: The chance of winning the opportunity, expressed as a percentage. Win probabilities are used to calculate weighted pipeline amounts (opportunity amount multiplied by win probability). Lower numbers imply opportunities with a lesser chance of closing; higher numbers imply a greater chance of closing the opportunity with a win.
Sales Channel: The sales channel assigned to the opportunity. For opportunities that will be routed to partners, an indirect channel should be selected.
Response Channel: The source for the opportunity, such as Fax or Email.
Referral: Links to the Referral Details page. Appears if the opportunity has a related referral. The field is enabled through Personalization.
Customer: Click Select to select or change the customer for the opportunity.
Address: Customer address for the opportunity. After you create an opportunity, the address defaults to the primary address for the customer. However, you can select another address for the opportunity besides the primary address.
Status: The status of the opportunity, for example, Preliminary, On-Hold, or Won. The status interacts with the Close Reason field.
Close Reason: The reason an opportunity was closed, such as Won Opportunity. You can not specify a close reason without first specifying a close status.
Amount: The total opportunity amount.
Forecast Amount: The forecast amount, which is distributed to the individual product forecast based on proportion. For example:Existing Opportunity Forecast: 100Existing Product Forecast Line 1: 20Existing Product Forecast Line 2: 80If you change the opportunity forecast amount to 200, the result would be:New Opportunity Forecast: 200New Product Forecast Line 1: 40New Product Forecast Line 2: 160
Customer Analysis Tab
The Customer Analysis tab contains the following:
Products Under Contract: Displays the product category of products for which your customers have service contracts. The product category name can be expanded to list the nested levels of product categories and items. The amount shown is the value of the service for products in that category that are under the service contract. The amounts roll up to the first level of the product hierarchy.
Recent Opportunities: Displays the previous opportunities for the customer.
Service Summary: Displays the total number of open service requests, the number of escalations, and the average days to close service requests that have the severity levels of High, Medium, or Low.
Service Request Backlog: Displays a brief description of the customer's problem, its severity level, whether the problem was escalated, and the number of days the issue has been open.
Notes and Tasks Tab
From this tab you can read and create notes about the opportunity. You can also create tasks that are associated with the opportunity and add attachments to the opportunity.
Contacts Tab
The Contacts tab contains the following:
Suggested Contacts: Displays contacts that are suggested as likely contacts for this opportunity, based on previous opportunities with the same product category and customers. Click the Add to Selected Contacts icon to add a suggested contact to the Selected Contacts for the opportunity.
Selected Contacts: Displays the contacts for this opportunity. Select the Primary checkbox if this contact is the primary contact for the opportunity. Click the Remove icon to delete the contact from the Selected Contacts list.
To view additional details about a contact, select View Details and click Go.
You can create a task for yourself related to a contact by selecting a contact name, selecting Create Task, and then clicking Go.
Products Tab
The Products Tab displays the products associated with the opportunity. Select a product to view details about it.
Notes
Revenue: Depending on your organization's business requirements, the revenue table may be available in the Products tab. The table displays the Forecast Owner for the product and the Sales Group in which the products are forecasted. Viewing revenue information enables forecasting for individual products within a single opportunity, even if the products are the responsibility of several sales representatives.
Non-Revenue: Depending on your organization's business requirements, the non-revenue table may be available in the Products tab. The non-revenue table displays the sales representatives who perform non-revenue forecasts. Click Add Person to add non-revenue forecast owners and their sales groups.
Competitors: Displays the name of competitors, competitor products, and the win/loss status (None, Won, Lost). Click the Remove icon to delete a competitor from the list.
Sales Cycle Tab
The Sales Cycle tab is available if there is a sales methodology associated with the opportunity. The Sales Cycle tab displays the sales stages of the sales cycle as defined for your organization's Sales Methodologies.
Click View Worksheet to display the Sales Coach worksheet for the selected stage or step in a text editor.
Sales Team Tab
The Sales Team tab displays the sales team members for the opportunity.
Notes
Full Access checkbox: Determines whether the team member can update or only view the opportunity. The default value is selected.
Contributor checkbox: Enables you to specify if a sales team member has contributed effort (not revenue) to this opportunity. This is an optional field, and can be enabled by the channel administrator using the Personalization feature.
Owner checkbox: Determines which sales team member owns the opportunity. Only one owner can be specified for an opportunity.
Do Not Reassign checkbox: Determines if the sales team member can be reassigned automatically when changes are made to the Partner Management territory hierarchy. If the checkbox is selected, the team member will remain on the sales team even if changes are made to the Partner Management territory. By default, the checkbox is unselected, unless the team member is the opportunity owner.
Proposals and Quotes Tab
The Proposals and Quotes tab contains the following:
Proposal: Displays proposals that have been created for the opportunity.
Click Create Proposal to create a new proposal for the opportunity. Oracle Partner Management integrates with Oracle Proposals to create and manage proposals. Refer to the Oracle Proposals User Guide for more information.
Quotes: Displays quotes that have been created for the opportunity.
Click Create Quote to create a new quote for the opportunity. Oracle Partner Management integrates with Oracle Quoting to create and manage quotes. Refer to the Oracle Quoting User Guide for more information.
Projects: Depending on your organization's business requirements, the Projects table may be available. The Projects table displays projects associated with the opportunity. Oracle Projects enables project managers to manage the schedule, resources, finances, issues, and other aspects of their projects. Oracle Partner Sales integrates with Oracle Projects to enable projects to be created and to capture the costs related to the pursuit of opportunities. See the Oracle Projects User Guide for more information.
Partner Tab
The Partner tab displays information about an opportunity's routing status and partners who are working on the opportunity. The page contains two regions:
Assignment Details: Provides information about an opportunity's assignment status. Click the assignment status to view details about the opportunity's assignment history. If an opportunity has been routed, the Assignment Type field reflects the routing type used for the opportunity.
Partners: Displays information about the partners to whom the opportunity has been routed or who are currently working on the opportunity.
Before the opportunity is routed to or accepted by a partner or partners (that is, the assignment status is Unassigned), the Add Partner, Add Preferred Partner, Generate Partner List, and Go buttons are available. The channel manager can create a list of partners who are eligible to receive the opportunity by clicking Generate Partner List, Add Partner, or Add Preferred partner (refer to Assigning an Opportunity to a Partner for more information).
While an opportunity's status is Unassigned, the channel manager can adjust the default partner rankings, if appropriate.
The Withdraw Assignment button becomes available when an opportunity's assignment status is Pending Approval, Offered, or Active.
The Approve Assignment drop-down list appears when an opportunity's status is Pending Approval. It allows the channel manager to approve or reject the partner matching choice(s).
After the opportunity has been routed, the buttons are no longer visible, and partner rankings become static. Once the opportunity has been accepted, the list displays only those partners that are actively working on the opportunity.
Use this procedure to route an opportunity to one or more partners.
Navigation
Log in as a channel manager and navigate to Opportunities Quick Link > View Opportunities page, and select an opportunity that has not been routed to a partner. From the Update Opportunity page, click the Partner tab.
Prerequisites
An indirect opportunity must exist.
Notes:
Generate Partner List: Click to generate a list of partners that are eligible to receive the opportunity. Depending upon how your organization has set up matching, you might be required to select the matching rule that you will use to identify partners for the opportunity. If you do not have the ability to select a matching rule, the application uses a specified rule. Matching rules evaluate criteria on the opportunity against partner profile information. The name of the rule used is displayed on the page that displays the list of eligible partners.
Depending on the type of routing that you will use, select one or more partners from the resulting list.
Add Partner: Click to perform an ad hoc search to identify a partner or partners for the opportunity. The search criteria that is available for you for partner matching is determined by your responsibility, and can be changed, if needed, by the channel administrator.
Add Preferred Partner: Click to add a list of preferred partners.
Submit Assignment: Select the routing type that will be used to distribute the opportunity to partners.
Requires Channel Manager Approval: Depending on your organization's business requirements, you may be able to choose to require channel manager approval of the opportunity routing, or to bypass approval.
Go: Click to initiate the routing of the opportunity to partners. The Assignment field changes to reflect the current status of the opportunity routing process. The Assignment Type field reflects the routing type that you selected in the Submit Assignment field.
Assignment Status: Click the current status to access the Opportunity Assignment History page, which provides information about the events associated with the opportunity's assignment history.
If you are a channel manager and an opportunity is routed to a partner that you manage, you may be required to approve or reject the opportunity assignment.
When an opportunity assignment approval has been routed to you, you receive a notification, from which you can navigate to the Update Opportunity page and approve or reject the assignment.
You can create a quote for an opportunity. Oracle Partner Management uses the functionality of Oracle Quoting to create and manage quotes associated with opportunities. For complete information about creating quotes, refer to the Oracle Quoting User Guide.
To create a quote for an opportunity, navigate to the opportunity's Update Opportunity page, and select the Proposals and Quotes tab. Click Create Quote to display the Create Quote from Opportunity page. Some of the fields are populated automatically with information from the opportunity, including:
Opportunity name (becomes the quote name)
Customer Name
Customer Address
Currency
Sales Channel
Source Name
Select a close status in the Status field, and select a Close Reason. Click Save.
To access history, click View History on the Update Opportunity page.
View Information on the Opportunity History Page
You can view the history of an opportunity as it flows through the sales cycle. This history helps you make decisions about further action with the opportunity. The history includes opportunity header, product, and non-revenue product information. Opportunity history is available through personalization performed by your system administrator.
Notes
Updated Date From/To: Enables you to search for and view opportunity history that occurs between specific dates.
Updated By: Source for the update. Records displayed can be filtered by this source name.
Field: The name of the field that has changed. You can filter the records displayed by selecting the field name of the changed field you want to display.
Old Value: Value for the changed field before it was changed.
New Value: Current value for the changed field.
If you decide that an opportunity's routing is inaccurate, you can withdraw the opportunity from the partner(s). When you withdraw an opportunity, all partners are removed from the routing.
To withdraw an opportunity, navigate to the opportunity's Update Opportunity page, and then display the Partner tab. Click Withdraw Routing; the opportunity's assignment status changes to Withdrawn.
The following table indicates the different routing statuses of an opportunity.
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Unassigned | The opportunity has not been routed. |
| Matched | The channel manager needs to approve the match before the opportunity can be offered to the partner. |
| Offered | The partner has been offered the opportunity and notified. |
| Active | The partner has accepted opportunity. |
| Recycled | Matched partners were rejected or offered opportunity was rejected by all partners. |
| Withdrawn | The channel manager or sales representative canceled opportunity assignment. |
| Abandoned | The partner decided to return opportunity to vendor after initially accepting it. |
Access to opportunities is restricted by user types and permissions.
Vendor Users - Employees in the vendor organization who can view opportunities they have created and opportunities they have access to, because they are on the partner's channel team. An example of a vendor user is a Channel Manager who is responsible for managing a set of partners. A sales representative managing an opportunity generated from a referral is another example of a vendor user.
Channel Managers - Employees it the vendor organization who can view, update and approve an opportunity assignment.
Partner Users - Partner Users can view and accept opportunities if they have the PV_OPPTY_CONTACT permission.