Activities and Action Plans
Typically, an organization researches the sales cycle for their products and services and develops sales strategies that representatives can use to help them close sales. Many times, sales strategies include predefined activities that sales representatives can carry out to assist with a sale.
You can create new activities, search on existing activities associated with the opportunity, or delete activities associated with the opportunity. You can also link action plans to the activity. An action plan is a list of activity templates. When you link an action plan to an opportunity, the system creates new activities for the opportunity based on the activity templates associated with the action plan. If you have attached an action plan to the sales cycle that is associated with the opportunity, the activities associated with that action plan are automatically added to the opportunity record. For example, you might have sales representatives attach an action plan that includes these activities to all opportunities associated with widget sales:
Activity 1 - Qualify opportunity.
Activity 2 - Send marketing material to customer.
Activity 3 - Follow up call to customer to schedule demonstration.
Activity 4 - Generate proposal documents.
After you have attached activities to an opportunity, sales representatives can view the activities in their calendars. Each activity appears on the calendar. You can use this calendar to verify that activities are scheduled properly.