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.
User Access to Oracle Sales
To access Oracle Sales, log in to Oracle Self-Service Applications, using the Sales User or the 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. The Sales Manager dashboard displays Daily Business Intelligence information. Managers can access Oracle Sales functionality from the links listed in the Shortcuts.
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.
Navigation for Sales Representatives, Sales Admins, and Sales Managers
Sales Representative users access the application through the Sales Dashboard page. This page provides a summary of the sales representative's business activities as well as links to other portions of Oracle Sales. For example, if the user wants to see leads data, the user can access the Sales Dashboard and then click the Leads link in the Shortcuts.
Sales Admin and Sales Manager users access the application through the Sales Manager Dashboard. The Sales Manager Dashboard includes information on pipeline, weighted pipeline, sales forecasts, and won and lost opportunities. Also included are booked orders and recognized revenue information.