This chapter covers the following topics:
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.
Oracle Sales includes the following features:
Streamlined creation and management of customers, contacts, leads and opportunities: Oracle Sales supports management of customers of type Organization for B2B and type Person for B2C scenarios. You can create new leads manually, import leads from Oracle Marketing using the sales campaign tool, or use leads entered by TeleSales agents. Oracle Sales assists in tracking these leads and routing them to the appropriate sales representative, enabling the conversion of leads to opportunities. After conversion, you can update opportunity details and track opportunity progress.
Ability to track interactions with customers: Oracle Sales employs notes functionality to track customer interactions. You can enter notes for leads, opportunities, customers, contacts, and forecasts. E-mail interactions are tracked using integration with Oracle Sales for Handhelds.
Competitor tracking: Within each opportunity, at the product level, you can include competitor information such as name, product, and win/loss status. Additionally, Oracle Sales has defaulting capabilities that match products in the opportunity to potential competitor products.
Convenient customer analysis: Important customer information is integrated into the leads and opportunities pages in Oracle Sales. While working on leads or opportunities, you can view information such as a list of all products that a customer has currently purchased that have service contracts, a list of current and past opportunities, a 12 month service summary, and a list of existing service requests. This provides you with background information on the account as you develop leads and opportunities.
360 Degree View in Oracle Sales: The application offers you a view of:
Orders and returns
Opportunities
Leads
Proposals
Quotes
Campaigns
Sales Contracts
Sales Agreements
Service Contracts
Service Requests Backlog
Integrated product information: Oracle Sales enables you to add product information to leads and opportunities to track the goods or services customers might want to purchase. The products that you can add are defined and categorized in Oracle Inventory.
Sales team management: Sales team data is integrated into the leads, opportunities, and customer pages in Oracle Sales. Sales team members can be added to a lead, opportunity, or customer manually, or by using Territory Manager to build the sales team according to predefined business rules.
Customized flexfields: Salespeople can use global and context-sensitive descriptive flexfields to enter additional information for leads, opportunities, customers, and contacts. Flexfields are defined by your organization, and enable unique information to be entered, stored, and managed using the Oracle Sales application.
Forecasting: Oracle Sales provides sales organizations with flexibility in managing their forecasts. Sales organizations can analyze their forecast data at opportunity and product levels, enabling management teams to judge the overall health of their organization.
Attachments: Sales representatives and managers can add external documents, web addresses, and text to opportunities, leads, customers, contacts, and forecasts.
History Tracking: Oracle Sales enables history tracking for leads and opportunities (including product and non-revenue opportunities).
Account Plans: Complete plans to enable you to manage your customer relationships to produce sales.
Reporting: Oracle Sales provides opportunity reports.
Business hierarchy: A display of the structure and relationships of a business give you a view into your customer.
Advanced search tools: You can search leads, opportunities, customers, and contacts using powerful search tools. For leads and opportunities, you can save the search results for future use.
Sales Offline: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Sales Offline, to enable sales representatives to manage sales efforts remotely.
Proposals: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Proposals to provide sales representatives with the ability to create proposals and send collateral.
Quoting: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Quoting to provide sales representatives with the ability to create a quote from an opportunity.
Partners: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Partners to provide sales representatives with the ability to determine the sales channel for a lead or opportunity.
Projects: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Projects to capture project costs related to the pursuit of opportunities.
Incentive Compensation: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Incentive Compensation to enable you to view sales commissions, earnings statements, attainment summaries, and year to date summaries.
Preference settings: Preferences for defaults for key values for leads, opportunities, forecasting, sales coach and account planning.
Multi-operating unit access: Access to business objects across operating units based on your access rights. These include selected business activities, products added to leads or opportunities, quotes, and products under service contract.
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:
Shortcuts on the Sales Dashboard: Displays links to the view pages for business objects and tools. You can access search pages for customers and contacts; access applications such as Leads, Opportunities, Quotes, Proposals, Incentive Compensation, Reports, and so on, from the shortcuts.
Link trail: As you navigate through Oracle Sales, the links to the pages you have visited are shown at the top of your current page. For example:
Sales Dashboard > Customers > Customer:BrandNew Industries > Contact: Leslie Moore (BrandNew Industries)
Use these links to navigate back through the product.
Partial page refresh: This feature enables you to see the changed portion of a page without waiting for the entire page to refresh. For example, if you are viewing a table of leads, you can select a radio button next to a lead and details about that lead are displayed below the table. When you select a different lead, the information shown below the table is refreshed with details on the newly-selected lead.
Sortable table columns: Many table columns are sortable in Oracle Sales. Clicking the column heading sorts the data in ascending or descending order.
< Previous and Next >: Links that enable you to view the next available group of items in a table, or to navigate back to the previously listed group of items.
Asterisks (*): Fields with asterisks denote required information.
Personalization of tabs: Some tabs on the update pages can be combined, through personalization, into one Details tab.
Additional Information: Flexfields are available on the Additional Information tab.
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:
Create: Enables you to create a new task, lead, opportunity, or customer.
Full List: Enables you to access the View page for lists of leads, opportunities, customers, proposals and quotes.
Personalize: Enables you to create or duplicate views, or set a view as a default.
Navigation paths to the main pages are:
Create a business object
Sales Dashboard > Business object table > Click Create (Business object)
Sales Dashboard > Shortcuts > Click Business object > Click Create (business object)
View business object
Sales Dashboard > Business object table > Click Full List
Sales Dashboard > Shortcuts > Click (Business object)
Update a business object
Sales Dashboard > Business object table > Click Full List > Select a business object from the list or search
Sales Dashboard > Shortcuts > Click (Business object) > Select a business object from the list or search
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:
Search on any combination of available fields
Not case sensitive
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:
statuses and sales channels for opportunities.
statuses, sales channels, and owners for leads.
For example, if you want to check all New and In-Progress leads that are 60 days old, then advanced search feature for Leads. Select 'New' in the Status field. Add another Status field as a search criterion, and select 'In-Progress'. Enter 60 in the Age (days) field, and click Go to view the result. The application now displays all New and In-Progress leads that are 60 days old.
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
Status
Age (Days)
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
Status
Close Date Quarter
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.
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:
Status
Age (Days)
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:
Status
Close Date Quarter
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.
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.
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.
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:
Create leads in Oracle Sales, or work with leads from Marketing sales campaigns tools, or from TeleSales agents
Assign leads to sales representatives manually, or assign automatically using the Territory Assignment Program (TAP)
Rank leads using business-specific logic appropriate to different campaign strategies, regions, or products
Update leads
View customer information
Track contacts related to the lead
Search on key lead criteria to find the right lead
Convert qualified leads to opportunities
Create proposals
Enter notes for a lead and share them with sales team members
Track tasks for the lead
Add file, URL or text attachments with additional information
Display marketing activities for the lead, including campaigns and events
See Leads for more information.
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:
Convert opportunities from a lead or manually create them in Oracle Sales
Assign opportunities to a sales representative or a sales team dedicated to the opportunity. Assignment can be done manually or automatically using Territory Manager rules.
Update the opportunities
Track contacts
Enter forecast information
View customer data
Create proposals or quotes
Search on key opportunity criteria to find the right opportunity
Enter notes for an opportunity and share them with sales team members
Track tasks for the opportunity
Add file, URL or text attachments with additional information
Display marketing activities for the opportunity, including campaigns and events
View opportunity reports
Close opportunity
See Opportunities for more information.
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:
Integrated view of customer information, including marketing campaigns, open leads or opportunities, products under service contract, proposals and quotes received, recent orders, sales contracts, sales agreements, and service requests backlog
Company data such as addresses, contact points, company facts, and revenue information
Basic information such as first name, last name, title, and contact information
Notes from the sales representatives working on a customer account
Tasks that need to be completed for the customer
Add file, URL or text attachments with additional information
Contact repository containing a full list of contacts and their primary address
Business relationships with other organizations such as channel partners or subsidiaries
Customer classifications
Account plans to help you manage customer relationships
Sales team members associated with each customer
E-mail interactions (with integration with Oracle Sales for Handhelds) for customers that are organizations
Business hierarchies to show the structure of a organization's business
Ability to search for customers using Simple and Advanced Search features
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.
Oracle Sales provides a contact management system that enables you to enter and track a wide range of data regarding contacts, including:
Contact information such as primary e-mail, telephone number, address, job title, and department, as well as secondary addresses and phone numbers
Contact points such as phone and email address with restrictions, if any
Business activities that are associated with a particular contact. These activities include open leads and opportunities, proposals and quotes received by the contact, recent orders, sales contracts, sales agreements, service contracts, and service requests backlog
Suggested contacts for a lead or opportunity based on product interest
Notes for the contact to track interactions and monitor progress towards goals
Tasks can be created for a contact and monitored for completion
Add file, URL or text attachments with additional information
View E-mail interactions (with integration with Oracle Sales for Handhelds)
Search for contacts using Simple and Advanced Searches
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 integrates with these applications:
Oracle Marketing: Oracle Marketing automates the entire marketing process from campaign planning, budget management, and list creation to execution and analysis.
Oracle Quoting: Oracle Quoting is integrated into the opportunity management functionality in Oracle Sales. If a quote is created from an opportunity, key information concerning the customer, sales team, and products is integrated into the new quote.
Oracle Proposals: Oracle Sales integrates proposals into leads and opportunities to enable you to create proposals and send collateral throughout the sales cycle. If a proposal is created for leads or opportunities that are linked to a sales campaign, the proposal incorporates content and formatting developed specifically for that campaign.
Oracle TeleSales: Oracle TeleSales is designed for inbound telesales agents or outbound telemarketing agents. A sales opportunity can begin in TeleSales and then transfer to Oracle Sales. TeleSales agents record lead information from phone calls into the enterprise database, and these are accessible in Oracle Sales for further processing by field sales representatives.
Sales Offline: Oracle Sales Offline provides you with the capability to manage sales efforts remotely.
Oracle Sales for Handhelds: Provides e-mail interactions for customers that are organizations and also for contacts.
Oracle Projects: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Projects to enable the display of projects related to an opportunity.
Oracle Partners: Oracle Sales integrates with Oracle Partners to provide sales representatives with the capability to determine the sales channel for a lead or opportunity.
Oracle Incentive Compensation: Oracle Incentive Compensation provides information on sales commissions, earnings statements, attainment summaries, and year to date summaries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
Oracle Sales security has three components for sales representatives:
Customer access security
Lead access security
Opportunity access security
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.
Full Access: With full access, sales representatives can update all data, irrespective of which sales team they belong to.
Sales Team with Full Access: Sales representatives can update all customers, leads, and opportunities from their respective sales teams.
Sales Team with Read Only Access: Sales representatives have read-only access to all customers, leads, and opportunities from their respective sales teams.
Sales Manager Access
If you are a sales manager, there are three additional levels of access for customers, leads, and opportunities:
Update data: Update access to all customers, leads, and opportunities where your subordinates are on the Customer, Lead, or Opportunity sales team(s).
Inherit data: Update access to all customers, leads, and opportunities where your subordinates are on the Customer, Lead, or Opportunity sales team(s) with full access granted and read-only access to all customers, leads, or opportunities where your subordinates are on the respective sales team(s) with full access not granted.
View data: Read-only access to all customers, leads, and opportunities where your subordinates are on the Customer, Lead, or Opportunity sales team(s).
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:
Update data: Update access to all customers, leads, and opportunities where the manager's subordinates are on the Customer, Lead, or Opportunity sales team(s).
Inherit data: Update access to all customers, leads, and opportunities where the manager's subordinates are on the Customer, Lead, or Opportunity sales team(s) with full access granted and read-only access to all customers, leads, or opportunities where the manager's subordinates are on the respective sales team(s) with full access not granted.
View data: Read-only access to all customers, leads, and opportunities where the manager's subordinates are on the Customer, Lead, or Opportunity sales team(s).
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:
Customers or contacts within the organization, those closely match the new entry.
Active and inactive customers or contacts, across all organizations, those closely match the new entry.
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.
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:
add products to a lead or an opportunity
View complete lists of these business activities, belonging to all operating units
Quotes
Orders
Sales Agreements
Sales Contracts
Service Contracts
Further access to Quotes, Sales Agreements, and Sales Contracts is controlled by operating unit access.
Search for and add products across accessible operating units for lead and opportunity searches
Access quotes across your accessible operating units. All quotes are listed, but you can only update/modify the quotes that belong to your accessible operating units.
Oracle Sales is dependent on these applications for:
Daily Business Intelligence (DBI): Top customers, products under contract, revenue amounts for account plan revenue objectives, and service summary information
Calendars and Tasks: Calendar and task sections of the Sales Dashboard and embedded task functionality across the sales application suite
Oracle Marketing: Marketing campaign data that might be the source of leads and opportunities, and sales campaign data
Oracle Trade Management: Competitor information to track competitors for products within opportunities
Oracle Service Contracts: Contract details for service items from Oracle Service Contracts
Oracle Sales Contracts: Terms and conditions for the sales contract from Oracle Sales Contracts
Oracle Inventory: Product information selected on leads and opportunities
Oracle Quoting: Quotes functionality, and also the sales supplements for sales coaches
Oracle Proposals: Proposal functionality, including proposal creation and generation
Oracle Partners: Sales channel (external sales team) for a lead, opportunity or customer
Oracle Projects: Visibility of projects related to specific opportunities
Oracle Incentive Compensation: Data for sales commission statements, year to date summaries, earnings statements, and attainment summaries
Oracle Applications Framework: Provides the framework and user interface for Oracle Sales; enables personalization of the Oracle Sales user interface, and Views functionality
Oracle Territory Manager: Sales representative assignment rules for sales territories
Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA): Customer and contact information, including searches
Oracle XML Publisher: Used for the printing of account plan output
Oracle Common Application Calendar: Provides calendar, notes, and tasks information
Oracle Sales for Handhelds: Provides e-mail interactions for customers that are organizations and contacts