Overview of Opportunities

Opportunities allow organizations to support the full sales process, from leads, to opportunities, to sales, to follow-up analytics.

Within opportunities, sales organizations can capture a wide variety of information related to an opportunity, such as customer (account) and the products to be sold. They can use the supplied sales methods and sales stages to step the opportunity to its eventual conclusion.

In addition, account intelligence, sales actions, and historical sales analysis further enable salespeople to increase their win rates by offering data-driven pipeline management and recommendations for the next best sales action. For example, setting win probability variance thresholds and providing multiple recommendations per opportunity enables sales representatives to optimize their sales opportunities.

This table lists opportunity features.

Feature	Details
Support the sales life cycle	Create, manage, and close opportunities, supporting the entire sales life cycle. By integrating with leads, you can convert leads to opportunities. Post-sale, take advantage of supplied business intelligence reports related to sales.
Maintain opportunity information	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 the 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: A Budgeted indicator lets you display whether the opportunity revenue amount has been budgeted by the customer, as well as the date that the budget was made available. Competitors and partners: You can associate partners and competitors with opportunities, both at the opportunity and revenue line levels. Marketing data: The Source field allows the association of campaigns with an opportunity. Mass update opportunities: Allow sales personnel to update several opportunity attributes at once on multiple opportunities.
Employ sales methodology	Your company can employ its own sales methodology by using the supplied sales methods and stages. For each sales stage, administrators can create action items (process steps), task templates, recommended documents, assessment templates, and fields that are required for use in opportunities. In addition, administrators can specify a different default win probability percentage for each sales stage.
Use Sales Coach for guided selling	Sales Coach, part of sales methods, guides salespeople through each step of the sales cycle with an organization's own sales methodology and best practices. The action items (process steps), task templates, recommended documents, assessment templates, and mandatory fields set up by your administrator in each of the sales stages translate into guided notes and appropriate opportunity UI interactions.
Leverage the product revenue model	Opportunities support a product revenue model that features revenue-based forecasting, products and product groups, recurring revenue, and revenue data captured at the line level, such as win probability, close date, include in forecast, and status.
Support recommended actions	Prompts salespeople to respond to the next best set of recommended actions for customer engagement, drive pipeline and determine how often to reach out to customers post sales. Here are some of the benefits of the next best sales action feature: Support multiple recommendations per opportunity. Enables smarter sales experiences and optimizes the selling process. Provides a percentage win probability in comparison to other opportunities from your sales organization or a prediction about the close date of the opportunity. For example, based on historical data, the likelihood to close an opportunity is less than 40%. Supports user feedback per opportunity. Enables administrative and supervisory controls. For example, manage the win probability variance thresholds for opportunities and define user actions to suit the organization's requirements. As salespeople update the opportunity information, win likelihood and recommended actions are regenerated.
Assign sales team	Opportunities align with territories and the assignment engine for rule-based or territory-based autoassignment of salespeople to opportunities. In the team pages, you also can manually add sales team members to an opportunity.
Allocate sales credit	By allocating sales credit to salespeople on product lines, you can capture the amount of credit salespeople receive for the sale. You can track direct, channel, and overlay resources and their contributions using revenue and nonrevenue credit splits.
Use forecast territories on product lines	By integrating with forecasting, you can use forecast criteria to automatically include product-line revenue in the forecast. You can leave the default forecast territory on the product lines or assign another forecast territory. The forecast is refreshed in real-time from revenue when an opportunity is created or updated.
Assess opportunities and their products, contacts, and competitors	You can use assessments to evaluate the health of an opportunity or an opportunity product, contact, or competitor. After setup by the administrator, assessments are available to salespeople in the Assessments tab.
View business intelligence reports	Several supplied business intelligence reports give you views into sales metrics, from lists of opportunities and accounts, to pipeline data, sales team performance, and other revenue metrics.