Understanding Sales Leads and Opportunities

This chapter provides an overview of leads and opportunities, and discusses:

• Differences between leads and opportunities.

• Workflow for leads and opportunities.

• History tracking for leads and opportunities.

Understanding Leads and Opportunities

This section discusses:

• Lead and opportunity management.

• Leads.

• Opportunities.

• Prospects.

Lead and Opportunity Management

The key to a successful sales cycle is efficiently managing leads and opportunities toward the closing of a sale. You start by bringing leads into the system, qualifying them, and then converting them to opportunities. Then, you assign potential revenue figures and expected close dates to the opportunities, and you review the opportunities within pipelines and forecasts to estimate individual and company revenue.

Some companies have fast transaction cycles with no distinction between a lead and an opportunity. Other companies have longer sales cycles, and tracking opportunity information becomes critical. Whether a company uses leads only, opportunities only, or both leads and opportunities, sales representatives typically enter and track all of the information. PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales is a management tool that enables you to do that. It provides a flexible, configurable way for sales users to enter and track lead and opportunity data and for sales managers to view that data to manage sales progress and predict close sales ratios, as shown in this diagram:

Managing leads to opportunities

Sales users can:

• Search for and organize leads and opportunities by virtually any criteria: sales representative, status, lead rating, and so on.

• Look up company and contact information, identify competitors, associate partners, and include notes and attachments for each deal.

• Capture the supporting efforts required for handling any lead or opportunity by adding tasks and assigning them to the appropriate team members.

• View their tasks on the My Tasks page or by using the automated calendar.

  Tasks that are added to a lead or opportunity appear automatically in the task list and calendar of the person to whom the task is assigned.

• View task history for any lead or opportunity to quickly identify which tasks are in process, canceled, or completed.

• View a summary of the marketing campaign that generated the lead or opportunity.

  This information is conveyed in sales and not marketing terminology and includes suggestions for appropriate follow-up actions.

• Generate a call report.

Additionally, managers can identify sales teams and assign sales team members.

Several sales leads and opportunity functions can be initiated from within a BPEL business process.

See Sales Delivered Business Processes and Web Services.

See Also

Understanding the Sales Process

Leads

A lead represents a potential customer for the sale of the company's products and services. In some sales organizations—especially those that sell products and services over the telephone as part of a call center operation—the lead can be used to track all elements of the sales transaction, from qualification to closure. In other sales organizations, a telemarketing organization might use the lead to track and qualify potential customers that are then handed over to an inside sales or field sales organization as opportunities.

PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales enables you to manage leads and track them from beginning through closures. When a lead is qualified, it can be converted into an opportunity for pursuit by selling organizations. A single person can be a lead sales representative for multiple opportunities. An opportunity can also be associated with multiple leads.

The minimum requirements for creating a lead in PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales include:

• A description of the lead

• A lead status

• The business unit

It is recommended that you also include the customer name and at least one contact name and phone number for follow-up. You can enter as much additional information as needed.

You can enter leads into PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales by:

• Creating a new lead and entering the data directly.

• Copying or cloning an existing lead, changing the necessary data, and saving it as a new lead.

• Importing data from an external comma-delimited spreadsheet, such as one that you receive from the telemarketing department or that you create from trade show data.

• Integration with PeopleSoft Marketing and Telemarketing

See PeopleSoft Marketing Applications Preface.

You qualify leads to determine how likely it is that the potential customer will make a purchase. With PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales, you can use a branch script, or survey, to do this. A survey is a set of questions with specified score levels to rate the customer's response. When you finish entering the customer's responses, the system tallies a total of the scores and rates the lead; for example, it might rate a lead as hot, warm, or cold. The marketing or telemarketing department often administers the survey as part of a marketing campaign, or a sales representative might select a survey script to run.

In many organizations, the telemarketing organization is responsible for qualifying leads to a certain point. They can then transfer the lead to the territory management and configurable assignment criteria system to assign it to the sales representative who can accept it, reject it, or turn it back. Sales managers can establish rating rules that automatically assign a rating—for example, hot, warm, or cold—to each lead that is generated from telemarketing.

Opportunities

You can add an opportunity directly to PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales, or you can convert an existing lead to an opportunity.

If the organization does not use leads, you can add opportunities and manage and track them as you do leads, including qualifying and assigning them and developing the sales proposals. You cannot, however, accept, reject, or turn back an opportunity; these actions are relevant to assignment of leads by telemarketing to sales.

If you use leads and a lead meets the organization's requirements, you can convert the lead to an opportunity.

Note. Opportunities are included in pipelines and forecasts, but leads are not.

As with leads, the minimum requirements for creating an opportunity include:

• A description of the opportunity

• An opportunity status

• The business unit

Prospects

Sometimes you might want to enter a potential customer or contact into the system so that you can capture their information, but because adding unnecessary information to the database can affect performance, you do not want to commit their information to your database until they become actual customers or contacts. These potential customers or contacts are called prospects, and only the minimal information necessary to identify them is included. Prospects are associated with leads and opportunities (and referrals, in Client Management), but cannot be assigned to partner representatives.

These sales pages display prospect information for leads and opportunities:

• Lead import results.

• Online entry of leads and opportunities.

• Search list for leads and opportunities.

You can edit prospect information directly on these pages. Customers and contacts from CDM, however, appear as hyperlinks that enable you to access the CDM component for editing.

When a lead is converted to an opportunity or an opportunity is set to Closed/Won, the prospect information is transferred (pushed) to the Customer Data Model (CDM), converting the prospect to a contact or customer. A prospect is also pushed to CDM when you use quick create to manually convert prospects from leads and opportunities to customers or contacts.

Prospect information appears on Sales components only (Lead, Opportunity, Referral) and does not appear on these elements:

• My Contacts.

• Tasks.

• Strategic Account Planning/SmartViews.

• Call Reports.

• Audiences.

• Segments.

• 360–Degree View.

• Partner Relationship Management.

Differences Between Leads and Opportunities

A significant difference between leads and opportunities is their relation to pipelines and forecasts. Opportunities but not leads are rolled up into pipelines and forecasts. If you integrate PeopleSoft Enterprise Incentive Management with the system, you can include opportunities (but not leads) in the compensation calculations of Enterprise Incentive Management.

For the most part, the Lead component has the same pages (Summary, Discover, Assign, Qualify, Propose, Tasks, Notes, History, and Call Reports) and the same sections as the Opportunity component. The following exceptions relate specifically to forecasting, which uses products, prices, and revenue allocations:

• On the Opportunity - Propose page, sales users can click the Create Forecast button to copy products to the Forecast section and make them available for inclusion in forecasts.

• On the Revenue Percentage tab on the Opportunity - Assign page, sales users with the appropriate sales access profile can specify revenue allocations and shadow allocations to identify the amounts of revenue that are assigned to individuals.

• Because the system does not roll up leads into forecasts, no Revenue Percentage tab appears on the Lead - Assign page, and no Forecast section exists on the Lead - Propose page.

Here are some additional differences between leads and opportunities:

• You can create opportunities only in PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales.

  However, you can create leads in other PeopleSoft products (for example, Telemarketing, Marketing, and Support).

• You can accept, reject, or turn back a lead but not an opportunity.

• You can track the stage of the sales process on the Opportunity - Discover page but not on the Lead - Discover page.

Workflow for Leads and Opportunities

You can set up workflow to send notifications when certain events occur in the Lead and Opportunity components. For example, the system can send a workflow notification to a sales manager if a sales representative rejects a lead. PeopleSoft delivers several policies that specify the details for workflow:

Like other PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management applications, PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales uses the Active Analytics Framework to configure workflow.

See Setting Up PeopleSoft CRM Workflow.

History Tracking for Leads and Opportunities

You can set up history tracking to maintain records of events that occur in the Lead and Opportunity components. For example, the system can log a record if a sales manager changes the sales representative assignment for a lead. PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales delivers several policies that specify the details for history tracking:

The configuration process for history tracking is similar to that for workflow.

See Also

Setting Up PeopleSoft CRM Workflow