Overview of Guided Sales Processes

You can guide salespeople through a structured sales process as they pursue an opportunity from the initial qualifying stage to closing the deal. In CX Sales, you build the guided sales process exclusively as a sales method. In Digital Sales, sales methods provide the scaffolding for a much more full-featured process provided by orchestrations. Using sales methods in CX Sales, you can provide only a single set of linear recommendations. Orchestrations in Digital Sales, by contrast, can have multiple branches to suggest different actions when a particular step in the sales process does or doesn't succeed.

Each opportunity must be associated to a sales method that takes the salesperson through a series of sales stages. For each sales stage, you can specify any of the following:

• Prepopulate the win probability for opportunities at that stage.

  If you're including opportunities in forecasts using win probability, then prepopulating a default win probability ensures that opportunities don't get left out by mistake.

• Specify which field entries are required

  For example, you may require salespeople to enter the close date or budget for opportunities that are about to close.

For Digital Sales, you suggest appropriate tasks, documents, and actions for each sales stage by creating orchestrations. At each sales stage, you specify what information the salesperson needs to provide and what actions they need to take to move the opportunity to the next sales stage. You can also provide automated steps that take actions behind the scenes to follow up when things don't go as planned. For example, you can automatically send a follow-up email if a customer doesn't respond when a salesperson contacts them. See the topic Guide Salespeople Through Best Practices Using Orchestration for more information.

CX Sales doesn't include orchestrations, but, for each sales stage, you can specify any of the following:

• The tasks you want assigned

• Documents you want to provide as part of Sales Coach

  See the topic Overview of Sales Methods, Sales Stages, and Sales Coach in the Implementation Reference guide.

• Assessments

  See the topic Overview of Assessments in the Implementation Reference guide.

Oracle provides several predefined sales methods, which you can modify to your needs. These include:

• Accelerated Sales Process

  A sales process for deals that involve a single decision maker and short time frame.

• Standard Sales Process

  A sales process designed for longer sales cycles, where decisions are made by committee.

You can create multiple sales methods for different sales situations and products. By default, all opportunities use the sales method you specified as the default in the Configure Opportunities quick setup page. In Digital Sales, salespeople get to choose one of the available sales methods when they create an opportunity. If you want to give salespeople the same option of choosing a sales method in CX Sales opportunity pages, then you must use Application Composer to display the Sales Method field in the UI.