What are opportunities?

Opportunities allow organizations to support the full sales process, from leads, to opportunities, to sales. Within opportunities, you can capture information related to an opportunity, such as customer (account) and the products to be sold.

Guided by the sales method tailored to each sales situation, the opportunity sales team works to close the deal. Your sales organization can create different sales methods for different sales situations. Each sales method can take salespeople through different sales stages and steps. See the related topic for more information about sales methods and stages.

In addition, administrators can specify a different default win probability percentage for each sales stage. The sales team closes the opportunity when the deal is won or lost. If you lose the deal, the sales organization may require you to enter competitors and the reasons why the deal was lost.

Here are just some of the data that sales teams can capture for an opportunity:

• Accounts: You can associate an account (for example, a customer or prospect) with an opportunity.

• Opportunity owner: The person who creates an opportunity is automatically assigned ownership. You can change owner if needed.

• Contacts: You can associate contacts with an opportunity. In addition, you can specify a contact's role, affinity, and influence level on an opportunity. A single contact can be marked as primary.

• Currency: The application supports multiple currencies at both the opportunity header and revenue-line levels.

• Budget: Indicates whether the opportunity revenue amount has been budgeted by the customer, as well as the date that the budget was made available.

• Revenue: You can add products or product groups and amounts to an opportunity, if your administrator has enabled the sales catalog.

• Competitors and partners: You can associate partners and competitors with opportunities.

When salespeople access opportunities, they can quickly view the sales pipeline at a glance from the UI. They can also view Deal Registrations associated with their opportunities by simply entering the smart action Show Deal Registrations from the Action Bar from the Opportunity page.

See the Overview of Opportunity Sales Methods and Stages topic in the Implementation Reference guide for information about sales methods and stages.