Overview of Opportunity Sales Methods and Stages

A company's sales methodology is a formalized approach toward achieving a sale. In opportunities, you can employ your company's sales methodology using a sales method that's automatically associated with the opportunity when it's created.

The sales method contains several sales stages that salespeople progress as the opportunity matures. Several sales methods and stages are predefined. You can use the predefined ones, modify them to suit your business needs, or create your own ones.

You can specify the default sales method using the profile option, Sales Method Default. Setting the profile option is described in the topic, Set Default Sales Method Profile Option.

Note: Sales Coach, which is a teaching tool and method to push best practice information to salespeople in the opportunities UI, is also set up in the sales methods pages, using the sales stages. Assessments also can be associated with sales stages.