How You Work with Opportunities

Opportunities are the building blocks of your sales operation for collecting general sales information.

When staff members in your marketing, service, or sales department discover a potential buyer for your organization’s products or services, they can generate a lead (a prequalified opportunity) and assign it to you. Most of the time, you work with these existing opportunities that have been created by someone else. For this reason, we have identified procedures for working with existing opportunities rather than adding new opportunities.

At other times, however, you can add opportunities to the knowledge base. For instance, when an existing customer contacts you by phone, fax, or email, you may want to add an opportunity to create a record of the customer’s inquiry. See Add an Opportunity.

Regardless of how opportunities are assigned to you or where they originate, there are benefits from understanding what certain field properties mean and how they can impact opportunities during the sales cycle. This knowledge can help you effectively move your opportunities toward a sale.