1. Customer Relationship Management for Sales Implementation Guide
  2. Understanding Opportunity Entry

Understanding Opportunity Entry

When you enter an opportunity, you enter basic information about the contact, the company, and the industry associated with the opportunity. If the system created the opportunity during lead conversion, much of this information is automatically entered in the opportunity record. However, you should review the record and enter any additional information as necessary.

The information that you enter for the opportunity is used to provide the sales team with all of the information that they need to successfully convert the opportunity to a sale. You can also use this information to track successes, failures, and trends in sales and marketing strategies and processes. For example, you can enter the source of each opportunity. You can then use this information to determine which marketing or advertising campaigns and events have led to the most opportunities.

You can also enter a monetary amount in the Budget field. This field can be used to store:

  • The amount of money available to the sales team when working on this opportunity.

  • The amount of money that the customer has budgeted for this sale.

You decide how to use this field, depending upon the needs of the organization.

As the sales team works with the opportunity, they enter the costs that they incur. You can produce these reports to determine whether a sales team is within its budget for a specified opportunity:

  • Opportunities by Channels for a Sales Rep Report (R90CB020E).

  • Opportunity Summary Report (R90CB020I).

Additionally, you can enter information about the sales methodology that the sales team should use when working on the specified opportunity. Sales methodologies are used to assist sales representatives in carrying out all of the necessary steps to successfully sell certain types of goods or services. After you enter a sales methodology on an opportunity, you then specify the current sales cycle step on which the sales team is working. The system uses the probability associated with the sales cycle step, along with any monetary value associated with the opportunity to determine the amount of potential revenue to enter into the sales pipeline. This information is used for revenue projections.

Before you can enter opportunities or create opportunities during lead conversion you must set the processing options for the Manage Opportunities program (P90CB020).