Understanding Sales Leads and Opportunities

This chapter discusses:

• Leads and opportunities.

• Differences between leads and opportunities.

• Workflow for leads and opportunities.

• History tracking for leads and opportunities.

Leads and Opportunities

This section discusses:

• Lead and opportunity management.

• Leads.

• Opportunities.

• Prospects.

• Profile enablement.

• Higher Education for Sales.

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 Sales is a flexible, configurable management tool that enables you to enter and track lead and opportunity data and enables sales managers to view that data to manage sales progress and predict close sales ratios. This diagram illustrates the business flow for managing leads, starting from their creation to their conversion to opportunities:

Processing of leads from their creation to their conversion 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.

Delivered Lead and Referral Business Process

PeopleSoft CRM delivers a business process that takes in lead and referral (leads that come from internal employees) information for lead generation and processing. Eligible leads are then converted to opportunities, which go through the usual opportunity management process until closure. This business process is invoked when customers import leads from external sources into the CRM system, and is only available with the integration between the CRM system and Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

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 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 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 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 TeleSales.

See Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM Marketing Applications Preface.

You qualify leads to determine how likely it is that the potential customer will make a purchase. With PeopleSoft 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 the TeleSales application.

Opportunities

You can add an opportunity directly to PeopleSoft 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 PeopleSoft TeleSales 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. You can edit prospect information directly on these pages:

• Lead import results.

• Online entry of leads and opportunities.

• Search list for leads and opportunities.

Prospects are not stored in the Customer Data Model (CDM); rather, they are stored along with their leads and opportunities. Customers and contacts from the CDM, however, appear as links 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 CDM, converting the prospect to a contact or customer. A prospect is also pushed to the CDM when you use quick create to manually convert prospects from leads and opportunities to customers or contacts.

If Customer Data Hub (CDH) integration is activated in the CRM system, prospect information that exists in leads is subject to duplication check during the lead to opportunity conversion process.

See CDH Impact on Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion.

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.

Profile Enablement

The Lead and Opportunity components support the display of profile fields on the More Info page. You can set up separate sets of profile fields to show in leads and opportunities based on the business object that is referenced (person or company).

To add profile fields to the More Info page:

1. Define profile fields on the Profiles page.

   The CRM system delivers profile fields, some are for general use and some are geared towards specific industries. For profile fields that you want to use, make sure that they are activated.

2. Add profile fields to profile groups on the Define Profile Group page.

3. Assign the profile groups to the Sales Person component (for leads and opportunities referencing consumers) or the Sales Company component (for leads and opportunities referencing companies) on Assign Profile Group Display page.

   Here, you can configure if a profile field appears as read-only or can be updated at runtime.

Refer to the see reference for more information on how to set up profiles to display in profile-enabled components.

See Understanding Profiles.

At runtime, the profile fields appear on the More Info page of the component that is set up to display them. You can update the values of these profile fields if they are not set as read-only, which are stored in the corresponding lead or opportunity. However, the current status of the lead or opportunity also plays a role in determining the availability of profile fields for edits. In other words, if a lead or opportunity is in a status (for example, Converted to Opportunity for leads) that does not allow any update to be made, profile fields are not available for edit even if they are not set to be read-only on the Assign Profile Group Display page.

See Also

Maintaining Profile Data for a Lead or Opportunity

Higher Education for Sales

In the higher education world, when prospects are qualified from the marketing application, telemarketers can create leads for these prospects and leads are then assigned to recruiters either manually or automatically. Recruiters work the leads and convert the qualified ones to opportunities. PeopleSoft Sales helps to build an effective recruiting system in CRM by providing enhancements in these areas:

• Leads and opportunities.

• Assignment group for Higher Education.

• Publishing academic information changes between leads or opportunities and constituents.

Leads and Opportunities

Enhancements for the Lead and Opportunity components include:

• Adding new section for selecting and storing academic information for constituents.

• Using a new display template to render leads and opportunities for Higher Education usage.

Academic Information Support

A new section is added to the Discover page of leads and opportunities to support the selection and storing of education information for constituents, which include institution, career, programs and plans.

When you convert a lead to an opportunity, you can select to include the academic information in the conversion process. The system displays a warning message if it detects a mismatch of institution and career in the conversion process (especially when converting a lead to an existing opportunity).

Unlike lead conversion, academic information cannot be copied to the new object or objects in the case of cloning.

Refer to the see reference for more information on the Academic Information section.

See Creating a Sales Lead.

Changes in Pages, Sections and Fields

The CRM system delivers the Higher Education Sales Display Template Family (HE_SALES) for displaying Higher Education leads and opportunities. The system renders leads and opportunities using the HE_SALES display template if the Higher Education option is selected in the Installation Options page.

The HE_SALES display template makes these visual changes to the Lead and Opportunity components:

• The Summary page of the Lead and Opportunity components.

  This page is not visible in either component.

• The Discover page of the Lead and Opportunity components.

  • The Academic Information section is added to both components.

  • Both the Partner and Contacts sections are not visible in either component.

  • Sales Rep is renamed Recruiter.

• The Assign page of the Lead and Opportunity components.

  • Sales Rep is renamed Recruiter.

  • Sales Team Members is renamed Recruiting Team Members.

  • Sales Team is renamed Recruiting Team.

See Creating a Sales Lead, Creating a Sales Opportunity, Assigning Sales Representatives to a Lead or Opportunity, Managing a Lead or Opportunity on the Summary Page.

Assignment Group for Higher Education

PeopleSoft Sales uses the application engine to assign sales representatives to leads and opportunities automatically. The engine refers to assignment groups for assignment configurations and criteria, together with territory definitions, to determine the appropriate sales representatives or sales teams for leads and opportunities. The system delivers a new assignment group to support the automatic assignment of recruiters and recruiting teams for Higher Education leads and opportunities. The assignment configuration and criteria of the new HE_SALES assignment group are similar to the setup of the existing Sales assignment group, with these differences:

• The HE_SALES assignment group does not have Company Revenue as an assignment criterion.

• The HE_SALES assignment group includes Institution, Career, Program, Plan and Last School Postal Code as assignment criteria.

  Note that the Last School Postal Code value is stored in CLM in a one-to-one relationship with institution and career. Each lead can store one Last School Postal Code value for the current selected institution and career combination. The recruiter or recruiting team assignment can be based on the last school postal code only if a career (not a required value) is currently selected in the lead. A change of the Last School Postal Code value in CLM does not trigger the same update in the corresponding lead. In this case, if you want the assignment engine to perform automatic assignment based on the updated last school postal code, you need to create a new lead for the constituent.

  The same is true for opportunities.

• All of the criteria mentioned above, and Postal Code, have a non-zero weight value.

See Also

Creating or Editing Territories

Configuring Assignment Criteria

Publishing Academic Information Changes

The CRM system stores the academic information (which includes institution, career, programs and plans) of a constituent in both its consumer and its lead and opportunity records. To keep the information synchronized between these records, the system publishes academic information to Constituent Lifecycle Management (CLM), which is a one-way operation, when a change occurs in a lead or opportunity so that the update is reflected in the consumer record as well.

The system publishes academic information to CLM when a change occurs in one of these items in a lead or opportunity at save time:

• Institution, career, and program and plan set.

• Status is changed to Close - Lost for the lead or opportunity.

• Consumer (the BO ID).

The published update includes this list of information, which is passed to CLM:

• Institution, career, and program and plan set.

  Because institution and career are read-only after it is saved for the first time, no publishing occurs for the deletion on institution and career. Programs and plans, however, can be added, changed and deleted in leads and opportunities; the update includes any program and plan changes along with the Delete Action flag to indicate addition, update or deletion of the information.

• BO ID of the consumer.

  In the case where academic information is published because of a change in consumer selection, the update of the newly saved Consumer object is published to CLM .

  This published update does not apply to the business carding scenario where there is no association with an actual BO ID.

• Transaction type (LEAD or OPPY).

• Lifecycle status (Suspect, Prospect, Inactive, Applicant, and so on).

  The lifecycle status is set to Inactive in the published update if the status of the lead or opportunity, the event that causes the published update to occur, is changed to Close - Lost.

• The Delete Action flag (True or False).

  The system sets the value of this flag to False if a program and plan set is added to the Academic Information section of lead or opportunity. The value is set to True if a program and plan set is deleted from the section. A change of program and plan set triggers two calls (one for deleting the old program and plan and the other one for adding the new program and plan).

Note. This publication pertains only to changes that occur between lead or opportunity and consumer (individual) records and it does not apply to leads and opportunities that are created for companies (organization).

This graphic illustrates the logic flow for publishing academic-related information changes taking place leads and opportunities:

Logic flow for sending one-way publish to update consumer records with changes in academic-related information that occurred in leads or opportunities

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 Incentive Management with the system, you can include opportunities (but not leads) in the compensation calculations of Incentive Management.

For the most part, the Lead component has the same pages (Summary, Discover, Assign, Qualify, Propose, Tasks, Notes, History, Call Reports, and More Info) 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 Sales.

  However, you can create leads in other PeopleSoft products (for example, TeleSales, 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 Sales uses the Active Analytics Framework (AAF) to configure workflow.

See Setting Up PeopleSoft CRM Workflow.

History Tracking for Leads and Opportunities

The CRM system supports history tracking to maintain records of events that occur in the Lead and Opportunity components through the AAF. For example, the system can log a record if a sales manager changes the sales representative assignment for a lead. PeopleSoft Sales delivers these AAF policies that specify the details for history tracking:

When enabled, these policies are triggered when a lead or opportunity of the specified setID is saved. The framework evaluates the conditions of the policies and carries out actions for the policies that have a positive evaluation result.

See Also

Understanding CRM Action Types

Configuring Sales History Actions